It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas with.

—Marilyn Strathern[1]

Bewilderment and excitement is what I felt reading in The Guardian, in March 2017, that the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand had been granted legal standing, personhood rights. What did it mean? What might the political impact of such legal status be to our current ecological crisis? Could this halt the course of capitalist encroachment of nature and its resources? And how would Te Ao Māori (Māori world view) contribute to Western post-human debates? I felt hope. First and foremost, for the resilient struggles of Māori, and for the government attempts to amend the wrongdoings of the past and start honouring the promises made by the Treaty of Waitangi, the country’s constitutional document signed by the British Crown and Māori chiefs in 1840.[2] A hope, indeed, as Paulo Freire championed, “however timid, on the street corners, a hope in each and everyone of us”. Hope, he claimed, is “an ontological need”.[3]

I would like to state that in this paper I don’t speak for indigenous, or for Māori to be more specific, or even from the vantage point of someone with great knowledge of, rather I speak from the relative knowledge I gained in living in Aotearoa New Zealand for eight years. This paper is therefore a contribution as an outsider, from a position of affinity. This outsider position is, however, one I wear by now with familiarity, after living among different cultures and languages in other countries for much longer than my own. This is not a defense, but a statement of my awareness of stepping into someone else’s territory, with a willingness to learn with and alongside, not about, but from difference.

Well aware that not only “it matters what ideas one uses to think other ideas (with)” but that thinking comes with response-ability. Also in the hope that this thinking may foster transcultural exchanges and alliances as citizens, using Melissa Williams’s notion of “citizenship as shared fate”, that is, rejecting the notion of a singular citizen identity, for a citizenship that recognises difference among cultural groups bound by a shared fate.[4] Further, I would extend this alliance to Donna Haraway’s notion of kinning, one that is non genealogical but based too on responsibility and becoming-with: a way of making persons (not just humans) beyond the Anthropos and sustainable forms of living with each other, of “getting on together”, in a practice of relationality.[5] Bruno Latour also endorses this sharing destiny: in living in the epoch of Anthropocene, “all agents share the same shape-changing-destiny”.[6]

With this in mind, I would like to introduce this talk with a poem by Karlo Mila entitled “For the Commonwealth” (2018). Mila is a New Zealand poet of Tongan, Palangi and Samoan heritage. The Pacific Ocean is of utmost importance to Māori as their Polynesian ancestors arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand around 1300, travelling across the vastness of the ocean. The Pacific is their/our “common wealth”, “our shared fate”.[7] So returning to the Whanganui River, and Marilyn Strathern’s claim that “it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas with”, I would like to propose this one from the Whanganui River: “Ko au te awa, Ko te awa ko au (I am the River and the River is Me)”.

In 2017, the Whanganui River became the first river in the world bestowed with personhood rights, in recognition of the Whanganui Māori tribal kinship with the river, which is seen as an ancestor they connect and are part of. Rivers, mountains, the sky and the sea are of spiritual importance for Māori and considered taonga (special treasure). The Te Awa Tupua Bill reflects the Māori world view where the river is seen as an entity, “as a living whole that stretches from the mountains to the sea, including its physical and metaphysical elements”.[8] It acknowledges that rivers and lakes “can be or represent […] the embodiment of or creation of ancestors” and “possessors of mauri, the life force or essence that binds the physical and spiritual elements of all things together”.[9] This alignment of Indigenous and legal realms shifts Western anthropocentric legislation based on human sovereignty over nature to one assuming a biocentric integration of humans with their environment. This law not only redresses Māori sovereignty and protects the river, but it identifies for the first time, legally, an epistemic order that extends the social contract that had excluded nature, establishing, in Michel Serres’s terms, a “natural contract”.[10]

The legal personhood of the Whanganui River was instituted as part of the Treaty of Waitangi settlement, one of the longest litigation cases of nearly 150 years. This remarkable achievement is the culmination of a longstanding history of Māori political struggles that blossomed with intensifying political consciousness and resistance in the 1970s, during what became to be known as the “Māori Renaissance”. This movement sought indigenous self-determination, standing against colonialism and its enclosures of Māori land. It led to the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal in 1975, a permanent commission for land claims regarding legislation, policies, actions or omissions of the Crown that are alleged to breach the promises made by the Treaty.[11]

Other rights of nature in the world had been established—such as the Constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia in 2008 and 2009 respectively—and other rivers and lakes have subsequently attained parallel rights—including the rivers Ganges and Yamuna in India and Atrato in Colombia, and Lake Erie in North America. Early on in my research I examined the legal ground of Indigenous land rights and rights of nature in the light of Naomi Klein’s argument, that “these rights represent the last line of defence in our environmental crisis” and “some of the most robust tools available to prevent the ecological crisis”.[12] To Klein, this could “actually change everything”, suggesting not just an environmental but a system change.

I would like to explore here the notion of personhood as is understood in Te Ao Māori, in relationship to Māori concepts whakapapa (genealogy), taonga (treasure) and mauri (life force). In Te Ao Māori, rivers are taonga and “possessors of mauri, the life force or essence that binds the physical and spiritual elements of all things together.” I will also examine how Te Ao Māori might inflect current Western notions around material vitality introduced by new materialisms and post-human debates. I will reflect on these notions through artistic practices by Māori contemporary artists Nova Paul and Natalie Robertson, who have engaged with their respective tribal rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Many Māori artists today situate themselves in binding relation to their indigenous communities. Their artistic practices are anchored in their connections to their ancestral place, underpin kaupapa— working through and from the position of Māori customary practices, principles and ideologies—and adopt tikanga (Māori ethical protocols). The ancestral and metaphysical connection and preeminence of place to Māori is based on whakapapa. Whakapapa means the genealogical lines that underpin the relationships between all living things, of the seen and unseen world, and since the beginnings of the universe.[13] It is the backbone of Māori epistemology and shapes Māori world view. In his essay “The Thing’s Revelation” Tuhourangi and Ngāti Whanaunga theorist Carl Mika explains that the term whakapapa—whaka means “to become” and papa “earth mother”— is “immediately and inextricably enmeshed with the notion of ‘earth mother’ (Papa)”.[14]

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Nova Paul, Ko te ripo (2018)

In her film Ko te ripo (2018), Nova Paul draws from her tribal place: her film-making is negotiated with and finds guidance from her whanaunga (family members). A single frontal middle shot frames her cousin, oral historian Dinah Paul, reading extracts of the document she gave as evidence for their hapū (subtribe) Treaty of Waitangi claims, while seated on a rock at the foot of Whatitiri maunga (mountain) overlooking thousands of acres of the hapū land confiscated by the Crown. She describes the loss of her hapū land under the jurisdiction of colonial law and the impact this has had on Māori. Dinah’s kōrero draws and weaves in her whakapapa connections.

Presented alongside Ko te ripo is the film Ko ahau te wai, ko te wai ko ahau (I am the water, the water is me, 2018). Following Dinah’s cues to walk down the waterways of the Waipao puna (stream) in her ancestral water, the Waipao stream was filmed while walking and wading the stream. In this intimate sensory immersion, capturing in film the sounds of birdsong and burbling flowing water through rocks and branches, the stream manifests itself as a holistic entity. Dinah notes that in walking the stream from the puna, microcosms and our part within it come to light. The film’s embodied experience renders an instantiation of the river—it is an “evidence” of another kind. As Stephen Turner writes, “Land and water elements make present a holistic and non-legalisible being, which insists, irrespective of dispute, on its own passageway, and, in the time of its movement, on the right-of-way, as [Barry] Barclay would say, of kaitiaki [guardianship for the sky, the sea and the land].”[15]

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Nova Paul, Ko ahau te wai, ko te wai ko ahau (2018)

Nova’s films reassert her Ngāpuhi hapū identity and the connections her people have with the Waipao puna and its waterways. It does so in two ways: by discursive means through the kōrero, and by the film embodying—“filming through my feet”—as a metaphysical extension of her body to the river, the whakapapa between Nova and her stream, “the relationships between all living things, of the seen and unseen world.” Nova describes her intention behind these films as “entering into wānanga (a place of learning and putting time into space).” Assisted by Dinah Paul, it is “through wānanga around rongoā (healing) and wā (time)”, that Nova seeks to find a healing image for her whanau (family), who had been engaged with this specific claim for over a decade by the Treaty claims. Nova concludes: “through this inter-relationship with the entire environment the potential of opening up wā into rongo may occur.”[16]

Mika acknowledges the presence of “things”, which Māori might call “whanaunga” (relations), even though these have been deemed inanimate by Western science. He argues that “things are not just passive… they are instead animate and creative, having a much greater impact on the self than would be credited in dominant rational discourse.”[17] Further, he notes that things are “capable of provocation; they can ‘call forth’… something in us through their own language of expression.”[18] This is why Dinah sends Nova to walk down the Waipao stream, for the stream “calls forth” Nova through its own manifestations and guides her (and her filming) in her immersive taonga experience.

In her essay “Te Tuna-Whiri: The Knot of Eels” (2017) Ngāti Raukawa writer Cassandra Barnett describes the Māori concept of taonga as follows:

Loosely translatable as valuables or treasure things, taonga can be considered animate and alive because they instantiate ancestral hau (life breath), mauri (life force) and mana (spiritual power) in the present. Hau, mauri and mana, and hence taonga, have enduring force and efficacy—they may amend the course of things here and now in unpredictable ways.[19]

According to Barnett, the term taonga can be applied to Māori material objects passed down from ancestors (such as tools, weapons, adornments), to tribal resources and territories (such as gathering areas, fisheries, flora and fauna)—thus, the Whanganui River and the Waipao stream being considered taonga—and to cultural things such as waiata (songs), purakau (legends) and whakapapa (the recitation and naming of genealogies). Some contemporary artworks could according to Barnett be referred to as taonga “through their animations and activations of taonga processes”, and therefore the notion of taonga may be found traversing contemporary art practice and discourse. It is not restricted to customary objects from the pre-colonial past.[20] Following this, the Waipao stream finds its expression in Paul’s Ko ahau te wai, ko te wai ko ahau, and as a result it is “through the animations and activations of taonga processes” that the film itself is taonga.

In her essay “Taonga Māori: Encompassing Rights and Property in New Zealand” pākeha New Zealand social anthropologist Amiria Henare [Salmond] stresses that taonga, “more than simply ‘representing’, ‘signifying’ or ‘embodying’ ancestral efficacy and power, are it in specific form.”[21] Therefore, she claims “[t]here is a precise identity… between thing and spirit.”[22] Hau (life breath) is the agent or source by and from which mauri (life principle) is transferred into objects. Following Henare’s argument, Barnett concludes that “taonga, like people, as people, are the living presence of ancestral lines of descent and relation’ and that ‘the ancestorhood or personhood that Henare [Salmond] highlights, via a focus on hau, is key to the relational function of taonga in Māori social life.”[23]

Further, Henare [Salmond] acknowledges that the objecthood of taonga is one that “does not necessarily invoke a subject”, indeed, in Māori there is no “ontological apartheid between persons and things”.[24] Similarly, Mika argues that “the thing in its most basic sense is like the self: it is immediately connected to everything else” and “the self can be thought of as amongst those things whilst being constituted by them”.[25] Therefore, in Māori world view there is an understanding that all things proceed from a common primal source: see, “I am the river, the river is me.”

Following Henare [Salmond] and Mika, Barnett de-emphasises “the agency of a human ‘subject’” and emphasises instead “the agency of these ‘objects’ that do not need subjects to think them (but may call forth or produce selves —and thought).” She concludes, “As subjectless objects that call for conscious engagement, taonga both perform and are performed.”[26] Among the performances Barnett lists are activities such as hongi (crying over) and, more importantly, kōrero (talk)—the narrating of a taonga’s whakapapa, of people, places, events. Ngāti Whakaue and Ngāti Raukawa academic Paul Tapsell reiterates the importance of kōrero for it activates the taonga processes: “Without kōrero, the taonga ceases to communicate, loses context, and fails to link a kin group’s identity to specific ancestral landscapes.”[27] In Nova Paul’s Ko te ripo, we see how the kōrero of tupuna narrates the whakapapa or genealogical stories bound to their native land and passed on orally through time.

Ngāti Porou photographer Natalie Robertson reflects on the role of photography in supporting oral Māori cultural knowledge that keeps alive connections between all things including those from the past that live on as ancestors. She argues that photographs may be considered taonga and the living embodiments of tupuna (ancestors): “as the living face of the sleeping ancestor, the ancestral portrait is treated reverentially, as if alive, as Māori understandings of whakapapa command respect for the powerful forces at play between worlds.”[28] She writes:

In Te Reo Māori (the Māori language), the word for photograph is whakaahau. Whaka activates āhua. Whaka calls the word that comes after it into becoming, or being. The activity inherent in the term āhua [appearance], and expressively whakaahua, asserts from a Māori perspective, that photographs are not dead or lifeless objects but are constantly in a process of becoming form as things with their own agency and interconnected relations in the phenomenological world. […] [K]ōrero maintains tribal records of history, including whakapapa. Photography has brought another dimension to how whakapapa is maintained and orated.[29]

In a performative and oral culture, Robertson highlights the role that photography plays in cultural history. Photography, Robertson quoting Māori language activist Huirangi Waikerepuru “is like writing stories, recording stories, recording history.” Waikerepuru sees photography as “a contemporary expression of mana rangatiratanga (roughly translated as authority, trusteeship and self-determination)”, whereby rangatiranga is understood as a “dynamic non-static concept emphasizing the reciprocity between human, material and non-material worlds.”[30] Robertson remarks how entering in contact with a photograph, all kinds of “interconnecting relational networks” manifest, “uniting the viewer with tīpuna, places and stories in a time-space collapse” and this is where kōrero is pivotal “in maintaining tribal narratives vital to cultural survival”.[31] The material and immaterial vitality of photographs are activated by kōrero, which calls into being their mana, wairua (spirit or soul) and mauri (life force or essence), the spiritual values in photographs of people, things and places important to Māori.[32] Robertson describes Māori protocols around photographs as “hongi (sharing breath), touching, kissing and speaking with the photographs all express connections with the incarnate ancestral presence in the image.”[33]

Much of Robertson’s recent photographic and moving image practice is strongly based on her Ngāti Porou tribal homeland, Te Tai Rāwhiti, in the North Island’s East Cape. Being a trustee of the land, her lens has focused on her ancestral Waiapu River watershed and coastal foreshore, capturing visual evidence of the impact that deforestation and agriculture has had on the river since 1890. She describes her photographic activity as responding to the colonial eco-crises: “Visualizing the slow catastrophe (Rob Nixon 2013) seems such a slight gesture towards healing the mauri of the river, a place that has had its entire ecosystem massively disrupted.”[34] In 2014, the Ngāti Porou tribe signed the Waiapu River Accord and they are working towards a one hundred-year revitalisation project of the river.

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Natalie Robertson, Rangitukia Hikoi 0–14 (2016–17)

Adopting different documentary techniques, Robertson has recorded the living state of the river. In Takutai Moana—Rangitukia Hikoi 0–14 (2016-2017) she pegged out 21 markers at five-metre intervals along 100 metres of the Rangitukia beach, photographing daily over a week the changing environment. The increasing driftwood caused by the deforestation of native bush and sand in coastal accretion, as sediment flows out of the river mouth, has been widening the river and shifting its direction. For Robertson, this immersive document of takutai moana (the marine and coastal area) is both forensic evidence of the material state of the landscape and heritage, “a visual repository to be handed on to tribal descendants, so we have a record of the river for the future.”[35]

Her images engage also with the non-material, spiritual forces of the river and find guidance from the elders of her hapu. She writes:

The feminine taniwha (water spirit) of the river is O Hine Waiapu. Her response is quiet, but without resistance. The outpouring of unexpected tears is my small koha (offering). Kōkā Keri Kaa advises me to collect water from the river, to take to Pāpā Morehu Boycie Te Maro for blessing. “Be careful where you walk,” she says. “Use the water for your photographic equipment.” Pāpā Boycie tells me many stories about the river, eels and land that has gone, consumed by the waters. Pāpā John Manuel, Pāpā Wiremu and Kōkā Jossie Kaa all remind me not to go near Te Ana-a-Mataura where Taho the chiefly taniwha lives, to respect the taniwha and other beings who dwell in the river’s perilous places. When I review my photographs and video footage, I scan for hints of their presence. Each elder gently instills in me Tikanga Waiapu—a series of protocols and practices specific to Waiapu, to be aware of when photographing, and that images produced must also be treated respectfully. Made in a precarious environment replete with taniwha and other beings of the unseen realms, the images may hold a spiritual “something” that the elders allude to in their guidance. Just as the mucus that falls to the ground is a cord that completes a circuit, it could be that there are other cords that create or complete pathways between the visible and invisible worlds in the photographic image. What I have proposed is not offered with any certainty that the mysteriousness of cords, circuits and energies can, or should, be apprehended.[36]

Robertson draws on her tribal lore from historical archives and oral customs. In her 2017 exhibition He wai mou! He wai mau! — roughly translated as ‘Water for you, Papatuanuku, water for us, humankind!’— is a video shot by a drone, Waiapu River Confluence to Sea 22 Kilometers, 2017 (25:40 minutes). Robertson follows a journey through the river, inspired by He Tangi Mo Pahoe—a mōteatea (lament), which forms the sound track, sung by Rhonda Tibble. It tells the story of Pahoe, the younger brother of Te Arakirangi and son of Tanehuruao, a chief of the Whanau-a-Hinetapora tribe, who went to the Waiapu river after flooding, despite warnings, and drowned. His body was cast ashore at the river mouth entangled in driftwood. For Robertson this mōteatea activates the taonga; it is an invitation to act as “a search party following Pahoe, looking for him, and noting the environmental changes that occur as we do so.”[37] Through the mōteatea, like kōrero, the tribal narrative of the past traverses the work, breathing ancestral hau into the present.

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Natalie Robertson, Waiapu River Confluence to Sea 22 Kilometers (2017)

Barnett claims that in Te Ao Māori, Taonga as being animate and alive because they instantiate ancestral hau (life breath) and mauri (life force) into the present, and mauri as the life force that travels between people, people and things, are not perceived as animism. Terms such “animism” and “spirit”, Barnett notes, invoke metaphysical dualisms that do not pertain to Te Ao Māori, and even in non-dualist contexts, they hold meanings not fitting to Māori cosmology.[38] Further, she writes,

Such proximities and interleavings afford closer enquiry into where recent Western animisms (as enabled by new materialisms and philosophies of the posthuman and anthropocene) and indigenous world views meet—and where they part ways. Like Māori taonga, contemporary art can invoke a cosmic vibrant materialism, an interconnectedness of all things, and a concern for the role/responsibility of the human within this. But somewhere around the assigning of “anthropomorphic” personalities and behaviors (and even names) to things, the Western philosophies still tend to become troubled. Taonga Māori land us in a place where “animism” has profound efficacies, yet does not exist as a critique-able term or concept.[39]

Holding on to their differences, certain new animisms conceived by new materialisms may meet in some ways with Māori world views, which could offer potential new ways for understanding Western constructs.

British anthropologist Edward B. Tylor coined the term animism to designate a “belief in spirits” in Primitive Culture (1871). He claimed that animism was the universal origin of religion and that every religion stemmed from the attribution of life, soul or spirit to inanimate objects. He argued that so-called primitive cultures were incapable of assessing the material world and that Europeans had advanced from animism, via polytheism, to monotheism, and from science to civilisation, while indigenous peoples were left behind during this evolutionary process. Modern civilisation had to suppress animism in order to become civilised and modern. This “spiritual animism” stood against the objectification methods and Western epistemologies which rely on stable identities. Tylor argued that primitive cultures believed that the soul could leave the body and survive after death as spirits belonging to all things, including “rivers, stones, trees, weapons”, which “are treated as living intelligent beings, talked to, propitiated, punished for the harm they do.”[40] This dualism between subjective and objective reality is at odds with Te Ao Māori, since mauri, a life force and ethos are attributed to all living beings. Māori Mardsen states that “all the created order partook of mauri (life force and ethos) by which all things cohere in nature” and “in human beings this essence was of a higher order and was called mauriora (life principle).”[41]

Current Western scholarship has abandoned Tylor’s modernist evolutionary notion and eschews the animating forces of spirit or soul (see Jane Bennett’s “vibrant matter”[42]) or the question of whether things possess anima, subjectivity or life (Anselm Franke). In Bennett’s “vibrant materialism”, all materiality is inherently lively, exerting agency regardless of human alliance or intention, and the locus of agency is always a human-non-human collective. Therefore, her understanding challenges the notion that only humans are active and things are passive, as “inanimate objects” that are merely the background to our actions. She also points out that by “parsing the world into passive matter (its) and vibrant life (us), we are limiting what we are actually able to sense.”[43] This leads to a dis-anthropocentric ecology, in which matter cannot be reduced to a resource.

Similarly Franke, in his revision of animism, highlights a world defined by its agency and relational character. For him, animism is “not a belief in inert objects ‘having’ a soul, it is a way of knowing by way of subjectivation—a practice that accounts for the primacy of communication and relationality, and the designs that things have on us.”[44] Further, he writes:

“Animism” designates a cosmos in which theoretically everything is alive and communicating, and potentially possesses the qualities of being “a person” or, at the very least, an agent of some kind. It describes a world in which all social and ontological boundaries are porous and can be crossed under specific circumstances, a world of becomings and metamorphoses, in which no entity precedes the sets of relations that bring it into being.[45]

The resurgence of the notion of animism that is not based on the fundament of identity and being, but rather on becoming, echoes an alternative strand of Western philosophy by authors such as Viveiros de Castro. This resurgence of animism as “relational ontology” is symptomatic of the crisis of Western objectivism and reflects the imperative to rethink the border between humans and their others. Franke also points out that “primitive” animism has colonial implications. He writes: it is about all “what is permitted into the social collective, with full status and rights, and what gains only minor or subjugeted status or is completely excluded. […] for the border between a plant and a human to be crossed, an entire cosmology and its order of elements would need to be upset.”[46]

As Christopher Braddock points out, Barnett avoids using the term “belief”, favouring instead the word “efficacies” of hau and mauri, thus avoiding a “one-truth” epistemology. While Barnett sympathises with Franke’s relationality and Bennett’s “material vibrancy” intrinsic to things, she draws from her Māori term taonga, considered “animate and alive because they instantiate ancestral hau (life breath) and mauri (life force) and mana (spiritual power) in the present.”. Braddock concludes that pivotal in Te Ao Māori is the existence of an affectual potential “force” (mauri) that “precedes the oppositional structures of people and things, life and death, presence and absence”, and that “infiltrates all materiality beyond reason”, regardless of whether this could, or should, be contextualised through Western analysis.[47]

  1. Strathern, Marilyn. Quoted in Haraway, Donna J.. Staying with the Trouble : Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. p. 34. ↑
  2. See https://teara.govt.nz/en/treaty-of-waitangi/page-1 (accessed 2020-10-20). ↑
  3. Freire, Paolo. Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London and New York, NY: Continuum. 1994 [1992]. p. 2. ↑
  4. Williams, Melissa S. “Citizenship as Identity, Citizenship as Share Fate, and the Functions of Multicultural Education”. In Citizenship and Education in Liberal-Democratic Societies: Teaching for Cosmopolitan Values and Collective Identities. Edited by Kevin McDonough and Walter Feinberg. Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2005. ↑
  5. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. ↑
  6. Latour, Bruno. “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene”. New Literary History. Vol. 45. No. 1. p. 17. ↑
  7. Mila, Karlo. “For the Commonwealth”. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hJh9rNIfBY&ab_channel=350Aotearoa (accessed 2020-10-13). ↑
  8. See http://www.legislation.govt.nz/bill/government/2016/0129/6.0/d56e2.html (accessed 2020-04-12). ↑
  9. According to the New Zealand government: “The Crown acknowledges that rivers and lakes have great significance for Māori. The Crown also acknowledges that, while the common law originating in England has different rules on ownership for the bed, banks and water, Māori have traditionally viewed a river or lake as a single entity. From Waitangi Tribunal reports, other publications and negotiations to date, the Crown understands that to a claimant group rivers and lakes can be or represent any or all of the following: the embodiment of or creation of ancestors; a key aspect of tribal and personal identity; the location of wāhi tapu; sources of water, food and other resources such as hāngi stones and pounamu; part of traditional travel routes and trading networks; boundary markers and part of traditional tribal defences; and possessors of mauri, the life force or essence that binds the physical and spiritual elements of all things together. These complex and significant associations underpin Māori claims to ownership and other redress over rivers and lakes.” The Office of Treaty Settlements. “Healing the Past Building the Future, A Guide to Treaty of Waitangi Claims and Negotiations with the Crown”. June 2018. p.106. Further, under the claims for Aims of Cultural Redress, the Crown acknowledges: the “protection of wāhi tapu (sites of spiritual significance) and wāhi whakahirahira (other sites of significance) possibly through tribal ownership or guardianship’ and the ‘recognition of their special and traditional relationships with the natural environment, especially rivers, lakes, mountains, forests and wetlands.” Ibid., p. 94. Available at https://www.govt.nz/organisations/te-kahui-whakatau-treaty-settlements/ (accessed 2020-04-12). ↑
  10. Serres, Michel. The Natural Contract. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. 1995. ↑
  11. Te Tiriti o Waitangi was written in Te Reo Māori (the Māori language) with an English translated version, and was signed by Māori ragatira (chiefs) and representatives of the British Crown in 1840. Te Tiriti stated the continuity of Te Tino Rangatiratanga, Māori independence and sovereignty, while in the English version there is a transfer of Māori sovereignty. Some Māori chiefs signed the Māori document while not signing the English version. See https://waitangitribunal.govt.nz/about-waitangi-tribunal/ (accessed 2020-03-12]. ↑
  12. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything. London: Penguin Random House. 2014. p. 380. ↑
  13. See https://teara.govt.nz/en/whakapapa-genealogy (accessed 2020-04-12). ↑
  14. Mika, Carl. “The thing’s revelation: Some thoughts on Māori philosophical research”. Kaupapa Rangahau: A Reader A collection of readings from the Kaupapa Māori Research workshop series. Edited by L. Pihama, K. Southey, & S.-J. Tiakiwai. Second edition. Hamilton, New Zealand: The University of Waikato. 2015. p. 58. ↑
  15. See https://www.circuit.org.nz/blog/walking-the-shore-from-the-shore-te-uru-waitakere-contemporary-gallery-1-sept-4-nov-2018 (accessed 2020-04-07). ↑
  16. Paul, Nova. “Kaitiakitanga, Manaakitanga and A Packet of Biscuits: Document Research Group & Dr. Erika Balsom in Conversation”. In The Time of the Now. Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland: Circuit. 2018. p. 16. ↑
  17. Mika, “The thing’s revelation”, p. 57. ↑
  18. Ibid., p. 58. ↑
  19. Barnett, Cassandra. “Te Tuna-Whiri: The Knot of Eels”. In Animism in Art and Performance. Edited by Christopher Braddock. London and New York, NY: Palgrave McMillan, 2017. p. 24. ↑
  20. Ibid., p. 24. ↑
  21. Henare [Salmond], Amiria. “Taonga Māori: Encompassing Rights and Property in New Zealand”. In Thinking Through Things: Theorizing Artefacts Ethnographically. Edited by Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell. London: Routledge. 2007. p. 56. Quoted in Barnett, “Te Tuna-Whiri: The Knot of Eels”, p. 29. ↑
  22. Ibid., p. 48. Quoted in Barnett, “Te Tuna-Whiri: The Knot of Eels”, p. 29. ↑
  23. Barnett, “Te Tuna-Whiri: The Knot of Eels”, p. 29. ↑
  24. Henare, “Taonga Māori”, p. 61, p. 63. Quoted in Barnett, “Te Tuna-Whiri: The Knot of Eels”, p. 30. ↑
  25. Barnett, “Te Tuna-Whiri: The Knot of Eels”, p. 30. ↑
  26. Ibid. ↑
  27. Tapsell, Paul. “The Flight of Pareraututu: An Investigation of Taonga from a Tribal Perspective”. The Journal of the Polynesian Society. Vol. 106. No. 4. 1997. p. 332. Quoted in Barnett, “Te Tuna-Whiri: The Knot of Eels”, p. 30. ↑
  28. Robertson, Natalie. “Activating Photographic Mana Rangatiratanga Through Kōrero”. In Animism in Art and Performance. p. 47. ↑
  29. Ibid. ↑
  30. Ibid. ↑
  31. Ibid., p. 48. ↑
  32. Ibid. ↑
  33. Ibid. ↑
  34. Ibid., p. 60. ↑
  35. Ibid. ↑
  36. Ibid., pp. 60-61. ↑
  37. Robertson, Natalie. See https://natalierobertson.weebly.com/news.html (accessed 2020-04-12). ↑
  38. Barnett, “Te Tuna-Whiri: The Knot of Eels”, footnote 2, p. 41. ↑
  39. Ibid., p. 25-26. ↑
  40. Tylor, Edward B. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom. Vol. 1. London: John Murray, 1920 [1871]. p. 426, p. 457, p. 477. Quoted in Braddock, Christopher. “Introduction: Animism and Animacies”. In Animism in Art and Performance, pp. 3-4. ↑
  41. Marsden, Māori. “God, Man and Universe: A Maori View”. In Te Ao Hurihuri—Aspects of Maoritanga. Edited by Michael King. Auckland: Reed. 1992. p. 121. ↑
  42. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2010. ↑
  43. Bennett, Jane. “Vibrant Matter”. In Posthuman Glossary. Edited by Rosi Bradiotti and Maria Hlavajova. London and New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing. 2018. p. 448. ↑
  44. Franke, Anselm and Folie, Sabine (eds.). Animism: Modernity Through the Looking Glass. Cologne: Walther König. 2012. p. 172. ↑
  45. Franke, Anselm. “Animism”. In Posthuman Glossary. p. 39. ↑
  46. Ibid. ↑
  47. Braddock, “Introduction: Animism and Animacies”, p. 6. ↑