Tena koutou katoa
Ko Takarunga te maunga ahau
Ko Waitemata te moana ahau
Ko Pakiri te awa ahau
Ko Oriana te waka ahau
Ko Oruamo te kainga ahau
Ko Ngati Pakeha te iwi ahau
Ko Gray te hapu ahau
Ko Fran Francis ahau
Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa
Greetings to you all
Takarunga is the mountain that is special to me
The harbour of “Sparkling Waters” is the sea that surrounds me
The Pakiri river is a source of life to me
Oriana is the vessel which brought me here
Oruamo/Beach Haven is where I live
I am from the tribe of Europeans
My people are the Gray family
I am Fran Francis
Greetings to you all, three times over.
Introductions in Aotearoa New Zealand if you are of Maori (indigenous) ancestry follow this distinct pattern, and I should emphasize, are much more nuanced, complex and beautiful than I can manage. I confess to being horribly jealous of those Maori adults and children who can recite their “whakapapa” or genealogical story back to the ocean-going canoe(waka) in which their ancestors arrived. These are people with a strong sense of what John O’Donoghue called “whereness.”
Whereness aligns harmoniously with the Maori perspective of land as ancestor rather than ancestral, with its overtones of ownership. In the Maori worldview, there is no ownership of the land. One does not own the land any more than a foetus owns its placenta. This results in the individual, in an introduction, being last to name themselves. Why? Because they are giving you the context for their existence; which mountain, river, harbour or ocean has defined them and given them life; which canoe and crew member they can claim relationship to; which tribal group and marae (ancestral meeting place and home of the tribe or sub-tribe), which family group they are from and lastly their own name.
It’s a hermeneutic of being. The land is not merely where they are from but a being with whom they are in relationship. Whereness includes who-ness. Just yesterday, as I SUPed (yes, it’s the height of summer here in the South Pacific and stand-up paddleboarding is totally happening!) on the Pakiri river, a local Maori woman was fishing from her kayak for sprats for her cat. I asked her about the name of the awa (river) to see if we Pakeha settlers had dumped a name on it that wasn’t right and she said, “Yes, it’s Pakiri” but then, as she paddled gently ahead of me, she began telling a deeper story. “Awa was a lady...”(What? The river is a lady...my Western worldview has to shift gears here). ”She swam out to Little Barrier Island; followed the current all the way there. Her husband, Rahuikiri was there.” “Why did she swim there?” “He was sick.” “So, she did it for aroha? For love?” “Yeah, she did it a few times. To get him medicine – plants that weren’t available on the island. Swimming.” “Wow. That’s amazing. Like Hinemoa and Tutanekai! (A favorite and tragic Maori love story where the young woman, Hinemoa follows the sound of her lover’s flute and swims to him on an island in the middle of Lake Rotorua). “But Hinemoa used her calabash as a float! Awa did it all herself”. My storyteller chuckles appreciatively. “Yeah.”
Somewhere in that conversation the awa (river) I was paddling on became Awa; a wife, a lover, a courageous ancestress trying to save the life of her husband and risking her own to do so. Or was that just how early Maori accounted for how the current from the river flows out to sea and towards that island in a useful manner? Who cares?! The awa has a story. She serves the land with her estuary and regular, life-giving flow. I feel more connected to the river as her than “it”.
Back to O’Donoghue for a moment. His Celtic insights of landscape having memory, of the self-hood of landscape, call us to look again at all that is around us, beneath us and beside us. He speaks of the generosity of landscape, its presence and even its vulnerability in that it can’t run away from us. Oh boy. No, it can’t.
O’Donoghue says landscape is the “firstborn” of creation. Without it there is no where for us to be. We skitter increasingly crazily across its surface, and the scale of destruction we have caused in the past two to four hundred years beggars belief. “Stone”, he says, “is the tabernacle of memory”. I love that. I am a mere flicker on the surface of the abiotic forms upon which I tread and whose forms dominate my horizon (56 volcanoes define the landscape of my city) but that does not diminish me. Instead I am more aware of the landscape itself as “remembering” things, storing them in layers for those “who have eyes to see”, who are gifted to notice and interpret their meaning for the rest of us. The geologists, paleaontologists, geographers and ancestral storytellers. Re-membering. The memory of earth and stone helps us (or should) to put things back together, to follow the thread of the story of us.
New Zealand theologian and Mercy Sister, Professor Elaine Wainwright has, with others, championed a new perspective in Bible reading centred in ecological justice. She says, ‘The “land” that God is giving/has given to the human community is Earth itself and its inhabitant community has an obligation to care for it. Current science has, however, revealed the depth of damage that has been done to Earth over more than a century or two, and asks if it is indeed irreparable.’ [1] She invites/challenges us to read our sacred texts and notice the “other than human” in the story. What is happening for the non-human in the reading? What voice could be given to that presence whether it is biotic or abiotic? What does justice look like for this lifeform? Who is God for this lifeform? What changes for me as I read the text with this framework?
An ecologically just reading of the Bible challenges our anthropocentric worldview and invites instead, interpathy with our fellow creatures; our “siblings” as St Francis called them. So, the question at the heart of it all is, what is it like for me not to see the human, myself, as the pinnacle of creation, but to notice the “firstborn” without which I have no “where” to be?
[1]https://hail.to/tui-motu-interislands-magazine/publication/430InQe/article/AgsSAL0
Comments