Ko Talau te maunga
Ko ’Ano te roto
Ko Vava’u te motu
Ko tāngata Tiriti tōku iwi
Ko Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa tōku marae
Ko Tangaroa tōku whānau
Ko Fehoko Lolo tōku whaea
Ko Mikaere tōku ingoa
Whakapapa is often described as uniquely Māori — the architecture of the universe as it expresses through people, plants, animals, waters, winds, even rocks. It’s powerful, and for a long time I wondered why there wasn’t an obvious equivalent across wider Polynesia. In that search, I kept running into aka. Literally, aka is a vine, often the kudzu or arrowroot vine (Pueraria lobata), reconstructed all the way back to Proto‑Oceanic as Raka. But metaphorically, across [...]
There is a relational field living beneath our feet. And it seems Māori knew about this long before Western science had the instruments to detect it. I remember attending a two‑day workshop on te ao Māori run by someone from MPI. He spoke about a river and the interconnectedness of the people, the rocks, the water, the plants, the fish — not as metaphor, but as reality. A single living system. A single whakapapa. When [...]