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
The Polynesian word for love tells a very different story from English In English, love is reconstructed from Proto‑Germanic *lubo, ultimately from the Proto‑Indo‑European root *leubh‑, meaning to care, desire, love. Desire sits at the centre of the concept. Polynesian languages tell a very different story. Across the Pacific you’ll recognise a family of words — aloha, alofa, talofa, aroha — all descending from a single ancestral source. Their lineage traces back to the Formosan [...]
When Māori arrived in Aotearoa, they faced a profound challenge: their familiar pharmacopeia was gone. Coconut, turmeric, ginger, kava, etc. None would grow here. They had to rebuild from the ground up: • identifying new species • testing medicinal properties • determining toxicity • mapping ecological relationships Yet Māori weren’t starting from nothing. They carried with them a 5,000‑year Austronesian medical epistemology, coherent, relational, ecological, spiritual. Western taxonomy asks, “What is this thing?” Māori taxonomy [...]