Utu in the Anthropocene
Landscape Architecture and Decolonization
Rod Barnett
Skeptical
A skeptic — apparently, and I have to say I’m skeptical about this — is someone who suspends
judgment in order to continue their inquiry. [1] My inquiry centers on the question: How are colonial
landscapes to be redesigned? I’m suspending judgment about the answer to this question, so I guess
I’m a skeptic. But I can’t be a skeptic forever, otherwise I will have no basis for action. It’s hard to act
on irresolution, as we are finding out on a global scale. So I’ll suspend judgment for the duration of
writing this essay, and then try to come up with a resolution. My skepticism begins with a problem
about knowledges; specifically, scientific knowledge and traditional ecological knowledge. It’s my
sense that landscape architecture does not need science knowledge in order to generate landscapes
in nation-states founded within the colonial project. Science is part of the colonial project. But since
colonized landscapes are my subject, I want to know how Indigenous epistemologies can reprogram
a design discipline whose knowledge base was forged in the modern, scientific era. While I’m
suspending judgment on the validity of this question, I do want to practice landscape architecture —
even if I’m still skeptical about the foundations of that practice in knowledge of the natural world.
And skeptical about what I’m trying to do: avoid the master’s tools.
The colonial project is the ongoing strategic occupation and exploitation of Indigenous lands for the
purposes of the colonizers. [2] Africa, Australia, the Americas, Southeast Asia, and New Zealand are
the Indigenous lands to which I refer. As part of the imperial project, these continents and countries
were respatialized. [3] Entire landscapes were re-ordered to fragment, disorient, and ultimately
destroy the social ecologies of the peoples who inhabited them. Now the question is unignorable:
How, in the umbra of decolonization, should these landscapes be redesigned? How can
environmental designers participate in the struggle of peoples who have lived through a brazen
confiscation of their precolonial spatialities in order to reimagine the way they live together, within
the vast re-ordering of planet earth that is the Anthropocene? Is this not itself, after all, the hugest of
all hyperobjects. the most ambitious and most thorough colonization of the globe by a hegemonic
mentalité to date? Demanding nothing less than the co-option of all peoples to a planetary master
narrative that is by its very nature out of control?
I’m hardly the only landscape architect currently mobilizing concepts from theories and practices of
decolonization (or decol). [4] But since I’ve recently relocated to my homeland Aotearoa New
Zealand, in this essay I’m using Aotearoa as my example. Therefore Māori, the Indigenous people of
Aotearoa, are central to my inquiry. As a hybrid — part Anglo, part Maori — my use of personal
pronouns such as I, we, they, their, etc., is unreliable at best. My experience as a “Pākehā with a
whakapapa” has meant that I slip in and out of speech acts, and my western academic preferences for
abstract nouns and distancing phraseology undermines what I’m trying to say. [5] Speaking as a fulltime
member of the colonizing settler society and a part-time member of a Māori community, I find I
have issues.
Reciprocity
On March 20, 2017, the Whanganui, the third longest river in New Zealand, officially became a
person. The Whanganui River Claims Settlement Bill was reported globally for its innovative act of
conferring legal personhood — legal rights and responsibilities — on a natural watercourse. [6] The
bill enabled the many Māori tribes that live along the river to re-establish the principle of reciprocity
that had for centuries before European settlement governed relationships throughout the
archipelago. The reciprocal nature of all interactions with other peoples and other beings is
fundamental to the Māori worldview. In the Māori language, the principle of reciprocity is known as
utu. A handy translation is tit for tat. But the meaning is profoundly interpersonal. As New Zealand
anthropologist Anne Salmond writes: “Utu … drives the exchanges between individuals and groups
and all other life forms, past and present, working towards (an always fragile) equilibrium.” [7] Utu is
the foundation for the valuation of lives; it accords all beings the same ontological status; it is openended.
No wonder scientists like to translate contemporary ideas about ecological equilibrium into
the network of concepts that utu courses through, including ideas about resilience and partnership.
To be sure, the principle of reciprocity has been around in Eurocultures for some time. We find it, for
instance, in the old and new testaments of the Bible and in much western philosophy. [8] It resonates
in concepts such as Mauss’s theory of the gift; in the concept of affect developed by Spinoza and
popularized by Deleuze; in Kant’s categorical imperative; and in the influential actor-network theory
espoused by Bruno Latour and his colleagues. The idea of reciprocity features prominently in a
genealogy of discourses that has profoundly informed the study of non-European societies and the
rise of anthropology as an academic discipline. Indeed, by the late 20th century, anthropology had
become tainted as a “handmaiden of empire” [9] for treating non-western peoples as “objects” of
study. But now, like so much else that has fallen, it is resurgent. Note that in order to resurge, it had
to become decentered; again like so much else. Perhaps this is how you do it.
There is a particular thread in these discourses that I want to acknowledge, though, because it
weaves through early 20th-century studies of premodern cosmologies that are not primarily
anthropological but metaphysical. I discovered it in the 1970s and it made my blood rush. The
fascinating wife and husband team Jettie and Hans Frankfort were archaeologists in the mid-20th
century, working in Egypt, Iran, and Iraq. Their celebrated text, The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient
Man, published in 1946, advanced a theory of ancient Near East societies in which the phenomenal
world was animate — a “thou,” not an “it.” The “thou,” whether an animal or a river, is a fellowcreature
which, as the Frankforts argue, a person can understand in ways that are direct, emotional,
and “inarticulate.” It is not intellectual understanding; it is more spiritual. To what the Frankforts call
ancient man, “thou” is a live presence, [10] ontologically equivalent to “I” (yes, it’s deeply subjectobject).
For Māori, the bestowing of personhood on the Whanganui River of New Zealand is, then, a reenactment
of a relationship they already had with the waterway. In this case it required two
centuries of physical and legal struggle by the Whanganui tribes against colonial control of the river,
culminating in their cri de coeur “I am the river, and the river is me.” [11] For landscape architects,
there is an aspect of this reciprocal relationship that is, as it were, shovel-ready: the concept of
ecological equilibrium. LAs know that equilibrium is not the default position of ecosystems; that
these interactive webs of mineral and biotic conditions actually flourish best when they are far-from-
equilibrium. Instability is the key to life. [12] This insight is critical because human ecologies are
similarly energized by instability and contingency; this is a fact that designers in disciplines such as
architecture and urban design fail to recognize when they call for a social realm characterized by
harmony and balance. Colonizer and colonized can never achieve such an equilibrious condition. At
best, an agonistic relationship, ambivalent and provisional, can be negotiated. [13] Just as the
Whanganui River inundates, withdraws, muddies up, and continually adjusts its course, those who
live on its banks do much the same.
The idea of personhood is a necessary component of the idea of reciprocity. It illuminates the still
radical but rapidly normalizing claim that humans and nonhuman environments live in a condition of
substantial reciprocity. Among recent western philosophies, it is only the actor-network theory folk
who, by calling all beings “actants” rather than “actors,” denote their ontological equivalence. All
actants, including inanimate ones, are on the same footing, constructed through networks and
alliances. The important difference between a bird and a brain surgeon, for actor-network theory, is
not what they are but what they do — and who they do it with. To achieve this degree of social and
ecological equity requires a community that shares common purposes. The Frankforts’ formulation
places utu within a shared set of expectations based on a networked group who are always in
dialogue with each other, and with the world of more-than-human beings, and with the ancestors.
The Whanganui River is a live ancestor of the Whanganui tribes. For Māori, whakapapa, or genealogy,
defines an origin point but not a future termination. That is one way that utu is without bounds. All
beings are embedded in landscapes that are constantly interacting with each other and highly
susceptible to transformation, changing and evolving according to information continually being
received from an environment that includes itself. Such a material being can never achieve any final
condition. It is nonfinito, as I like to say, borrowing a term from the visual arts which refers to an
unfinished sculpture. [14] Extending the nonfinito to all of art, Robert Morris in 1969 wrote: “The
notion that a work is an irreversible process ending in a static icon-like object no longer has much
relevance.” [15] It is my sense that the open-ended, propulsive nature of utu can operate only within
a field in which there is no closure, no end to the negotiations between actants, in which feedback is
critical, and in which there is a constant disequilibrium that provides the framework for a dynamic
system of spatial justice. While the concept of utu includes kind deeds as well as revenge, its core is
perhaps the evolutionary momentum that compels a wrongdoing to be redeemed or redressed
within an order in which redemption ultimately is not possible. Here is anthropologist Stephen
Turner, getting to the heart of it: “With respect to Indigenous peoples there is no liberation, no ‘after
colonialism.’” [16] The operation of environmental reciprocity requires all entities to be ontologically
equivalent, to have personhood. Like you, no doubt, I harbor some skepticism about this
requirement. In leading me to the possibility that personhood is the basis of reciprocity, however, my
skeptical inquiry has convinced me that reciprocity is the basis of sustainable resource planning,
management, and — of course — design. What I need to figure out now is how this might help me to
develop an approach to the respatialization of settler colonial landscapes.
Intervolvement
Wherever we are in the world, Indigenous peoples experience social realms in which it is impossible
to achieve the self-determination and relative autonomy that non-natives take for granted. Not only
in the western and northern hemispheres, but in the east and south too, the social fields in which we
operate are determined largely by commercial and political forces beyond the control of Indigenes.
[17] And these fields include the landscapes with which we have co-evolved. Still, we are actors, or
actants; and within the meshwork of political forces that in many places is becoming ever more
loosely tangled, opportunities for action are emerging. Decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo locates
Indigenous “thinking and understanding” in “the interstices of the entanglement” that happen at
borders; in parentheses. But if it feels true that thinking can occur in parentheses, I’m less sure about
action. [18] Inhabiting the borderland while trying to develop new epistemologies can, let’s face it,
become hermetic and parochial. [19] But I am skeptical of this: it may be that my charge of
hermeticism and parochialism is itself a gesture of continuing coloniality. It may be my Pākehā
shame talking.
It’s probably undecidable. After all, to be in parentheses is to be both outside and inside the text, to
be bracketed off as not quite acceptable in the main discussion, or transgressive, as Derrida would
have it, a “parasite of context.” [20] I’m parasitizing myself, then. The textual metaphor whispers that
spatial issues are social issues. Biopolitical issues are territorial issues. And all these issues are about
what has come to be called “civic space,” a rule-bound realm where humans exercise their freedom of
association, of expression, of assembly. Traditionally, nonhumans are not part of this formulation.
But neither are Indigenes. To be Māori in Aotearoa is to exist in parenthesis. If we further define civic
space as physical public space, which is where much of the action and inaction relating to Indigeneity
occurs, we can begin to imagine how reciprocity can transform the creation of shared landscapes in
21st-century societies.
It is in these physical public spaces that Indigenous peoples are leading the way with the
redescription of relationships between humans and natural resources. In India, as in Aotearoa New
Zealand, rivers are public space. After the Whanganui law, the Ganges and the Yamuna were granted
“all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities of a living person.” [21] Recently, in the United States,
several towns and communities have granted rights to rivers and other natural systems. Ecuador,
Bolivia, and Colombia have undertaken similar conversions of the subject-object tyranny of the
world. In declaring the rights of the Atrato River, the Colombian court stated:
It is the human populations that are interdependent of the natural world —
and not the opposite — and they must assume the consequences of their
actions and omissions with the nature. It is a question of understanding this
new sociopolitical reality with the aim of achieving a respectful
transformation with the natural world and its environment, as has
happened before with civil and political rights. [22]
Once this respectful transformation has occurred, a relationship of reciprocity ensues. When this
happens between humans and more-than-human entities, a new “socio-political reality,” as the
Colombian decision calls it, is upon us. Public space is reframed, and the distinction between natural
systems and social systems is removed. For how could we distinguish between these conditions
when all actants’ rights are at stake? Where does a natural system end and a non-natural system
begin? Would the Mississippi River be a person in this new socio-political accord? Or only when it
flows through a national park? Through state parks? Would the principle of reciprocity operate only
in so-called natural areas, never in cities? Surely, since we are all urban now, it makes sense for utu to
be an urban idea. What if Canfield Drive were a living entity in which humans and nonhumans had
equal rights of personhood?
Canfield Drive is the specific street in Ferguson, Missouri, where a specific eighteen-year-old, Michael
Brown, was gunned down by a specific 28-year-old police officer, Darren Wilson. When I think of
Michael Brown and Darren Wilson, and all the bloody murders that have followed, I begin to
understand the diverse ways in which public space is biopolitical space. Space where persons —
bodies — interact and with which they co-evolve; space where identity is developed. Where, for
instance, to be black is to be considered bad. Personhood is developed through an intervolvement
with the social and ecological environment in which persons are immersed. [23] In order to exercise
the right to self-determination, it is necessary that the physical public realm be a shared condition —
a space constructed collectively. But to call it “space” is to inhibit and delimit the condition, for it is
not only spatially but also materially and socially productive, compulsive, and interactive. It affects
bodies and bodies affect it. It is a kind of landschaft, a working landscape in which humans are
engaged individually and socially in the development of their own empowerment. Thus comes the
call for spaces that articulate native identities, as seen in initiatives ranging from Maya Lin’s recent
collaborations with the Columbia River tribes of the American Northwest to the publication of Kia
Whakanuia Te Whenua, To Celebrate the Land, produced by New Zealand’s Landscape Foundation.
[24]
If the world in which Indigenes live is largely dominated by inimical political forces beyond their
control, how should we approach the construction of sites where collective and personal
empowerment may occur? In their struggle to gain environmental autonomy, Indigenes cannot be
represented by others (such as I am doing now). Let’s instead envision a world where uncolonial
peoples — Borinqueño, Oglala, Yupiit, Samoan, Mayan, for instance — are living in and with political
ecologies that are the result of co-evolution, networked sites of power, self-organizing to a certain
extent, unpredictable, always open, never finished. Economies, if you like, of tradition and custom,
ritual and order, as well as of radical perturbability. These ecologies and economies are vulnerable to
disruption, but also resilient and adaptive. In a word, reciprocal. Then how, as designers, do we
establish the conditions in which an ever provisional and contingent public realm (speaking spatially
now) can evolve to become — and here we bring in the challenge of difference — heterogenous, a
political ecology of relatively autonomous traditions of co-construction, of human and nonhuman
intervolvement, an expanded field of empowerment? What you could call a site of power for all.
How to establish the conditions? It’s the question Pierre Bélanger and his collaborators ask in their
essay from 2020, “No Design on Stolen Land,” and answer with their concept of “unbuilding,” an
“unmasking and unmaking of settler urbanism” through an operation of “de-presentation” that
includes decoupage, démontage, and décolletage. [25] The authors do not explain these terms in their
fiery text, but de-presentation sounds right. It describes the rewriting of the settler-colonial code, a
breaking of the old laws. Then some kind of communitarian space is necessary, where the
individual’s responsibility to the community is enacted (rather than vice versa). Many Indigenous
societies already have collectively created terrains, incredibly diminished though they may be. Many
are re-making them. I’m thinking of Puerto Rico where communidad especiales are developing ecoagricultural
farms based on shared ecological wealth in the form of soils and crops outside
commercial structures of control. I’m thinking of the people of Tonga, Solomon Islands, and Samoa,
who have established extremely low-key ecotourist ventures within their tiny tribal-based coastal
villages (pre-Covid, sadly), and the Indigenous Gardens Network of southern Oregon, where “first
foods” are cultivated by and for the Siletz and Grande Ronde Indians. The struggle to establish these
smallish collective autonomous zones has already shown that they can’t stand alone. They must be
articulated through a shared, large-scale geography with which they interact, a national network of
self-determined Indigenous political ecologies. After all, they are redesigning the settler geography.
It’s hard. Why would Indigenous people get involved in this political struggle if the politics is merely
an ongoing invitation to renegotiate public space in favor of the colonizer? For Māori this is definitely
not the goal. No, Indigenes will bring themselves to power through the process of making terrain
Indigenous.
Respatialization
About a thousand years ago, humans moved to Aotearoa and evolved new assemblages, discovering
along the way the advantages and disadvantages of being insular, of being bounded. Tribes and subtribes
became associated with particular places, specific geographical locations and attendant
conditions which they rigorously defended. The sub-tribes are extended families, independent and
autonomous, yet also interdependent. [26] A system of material and social exchange developed
across mountains and rivers, through forests and along coastlines. The family groups, known as hapū,
developed intimate relationships with the organisms around them, and with their reciprocities. The
system has continued to flourish, especially as Māori have become urban. Relationality remains the
basis of Māori existence, with the world and with each other. To be Māori is to be a property of a pantribal
complex system.
In precolonial Aotearoa there were songs, sayings, made objects and rituals of observance and
seasonality; lives lived within a gradient field of more or less useful productivity based on natural
resources, yielding rope, garden equipment, mats, netting, clothing, building materials, cooking
utensils, water-carriers, birds, eels, fish, berries, crops, barks, tinctures, ornaments, ointments,
delicacies, tradeable goods. The blending of these actants occurred vertically, horizontally, diagonally
and whichever way, across landscapes and through biotic and abiotic zones, in and out of plant
communities from subtropical forest to tussock grasslands, through thermal areas and vast cave
networks and over rivers and harbors, across estuaries and mudflats with their succulent benthic
species, their bivalves, crabs, sharks, whitebait, gulls, and terns. Still does. If there is a basic condition
of landedness, this is it. The interweaving terrains of towns and villages, of gardens, sacred sites,
hunting grounds — these imbricated features resemble those I learned about while trying to
understand Creek Indian societies in Alabama when I lived and worked in the landscapes of that
state. Like Māori, Creeks hunted and gardened and traded with other tribal groups in landscapes that
provided so much more than “resources.”
Mahinga kai is the name Māori give to these landscapes that provide physical and spiritual
sustenance. The root of mahinga kai is mahi. Mahi means to make, to do, to perform the practice of
production. Most of all it means to work. [27] It folds into its meanings the basic role of human labor
in the production of exchangeable goods and services for nonhumans and humans. It is the root
system of the social ecology of Māori, of the tentacular web of tasks still carried out in cities (singing,
gathering, planting, cooking, grieving, sewing, gutting, drying, carving, weaving), of the knowledge
and custom that comprise what the anarchist-philosopher Peter Kropotkin called “mutual aid.” [28]
The point of land-based reciprocity is not material increase; it is simple osmosis. Exchange. It’s
developed in the company of others who are not others, dependent to a certain extent on non-others,
as they are on other non-others. Persons. Interactions between plants, soil microbes, invertebrates,
mollusks, fishes, and seabirds determined the diversity and productivity of harbor-based plant and
animal communities in pre-contact Aotearoa. Hapū trenched, ditched, levelled, terraced, inundated,
channeled and otherwise rearranged soils and water for agricultural production. They hunted and
fished in the harbors and the rivers that fed them, whose cycles and rhythms enriched the landscapes
on which they depended for life.
In his novel Tides of Kawhia, set in pre-contact Aotearoa, Tom O’Connor describes a Maori banquet:
“A dozen waka [canoes] full of calabashes containing thousands of potted duck, pigeon, weka,
pukeko and kaka, each lavishly decorated with feathers of the birds within, were drawn up on the
beach ready to be launched.” [29] Imagine the mahi which produced that feast on the shore of
Kāwhia Harbor. How deeply embedded it is in the harbor system with its towns and villages; with
its customs based on the exercise of environmental guardianship, on concepts of tapu (sacred) and
mana (honor) and utu, all connected within a social ecology that enabled self-determination
through intimacy with natural systems. This was the autopoietic structure that was in place when
Europeans arrived and their goods and values started flowing into the Māori geographies,
expanding and in the process warping them.
Starting in mid-19th century, the first European settlers built their homes among established Māori
dwellings. Māori believed they could co-exist with the Pākehā (literally: strangers) as they had done
with other tribes for hundreds of years. But soon their means of production were replaced by new
tools, new crops, new animals and technologies that called for different relationships with the
familiar landscapes. The introduction of new technologies — from firearms to horses, from counting
and census-taking to trading exchanges and currency — created massive shifts in Indigenous spatial
networks. [30] The landscapes themselves were changed. The Māori resource base slid away. And
even as Māori perceived mutual advantage in sharing and trading resources with the foreigners, the
Pākehā were shaped by an altogether different mentality. They enacted a takeover of the Māori
production regime, the national mahinga kai, by a wholesale conversion of the country’s biodiverse
landscapes into an economic resource. Based on money. The Europeans who settled New Zealand
were driven by a political economy that had developed over thousands of years of competition for
prestige, status, morality, religion, labor, exchange value. The contact zone into which both parties
were thrust by colonization was bound to be agonistic, but the Europeans with their subject-object
world view and their property-based system of environmental management (the so-called primary
industries) swept away all they encountered.
The Anglo-European conversion of Indigenous social ecologies devastated Aotearoa. Māori spatial
networks were displaced by the settler and military invasion of communities. And as physically
destructive as the military wars were, they were ultimately not as annihilating as the absorption of
what geographer Adam J. Barker calls the “intensely corporeal geographies” of Māori into the
abstract structures of colonial nation-building. [31] Spaces of interaction and reciprocity were
transformed into capitalist territory represented by the maps and plans pouring out of the Lands and
Survey Office that was set up in 1852 to design towns and “rural allotments” (i.e. everything else) for
the incoming settlers. Ancient spatial relations survived — in tatters — only by accommodation and
commodification. The appropriations went both ways, of course, and sometimes the victor was
captured by the victims; but Indigenous value systems are altered not only because the colonizers
break them deliberately but merely because they are there. Late 19th-century photographs of Māori
settlements reveal that the arrangement of community space was already informed by Pākeha
presence. To the Europeans, whose comments on Māori settlements have survived (e.g., “haphazard,”
“random” [32]), what was at work was a reciprocal system they simply could not comprehend. In
1901, a watercolor was presented to the New Zealand Government Surveyor-General Stephenson
Percy Smith on the occasion of his retirement. [33] In the first scene, the surveyor, a “true pioneer,” is
camped in the forest; in the second, road-making is labelled “the first attack”; and the third, labeled
“Victory,” depicts the landscape thoroughly transformed from its original state. [34]
Many environmental historians discern a strategic intentionality. [35] The goal of settler colonialism
in the Americas, the Pacific, Africa and Southeast Asia, they argue, was to detach native peoples from
their spatial networks and place-based relationships specifically to establish colonial spatialities. As a
hallmark of successful imperialism, this is, indeed, our/our problem. [36] But if a common trope at
the turn of the 19th-century was that Māori were “a dying race,” it was precisely from this Jim Crowstyle
relegation that the compelling vision of social, cultural, and political renaissance has emerged.
Resurgence
In 1840 Māori outnumbered European settlers, 80,000 to 2,000. This figure reversed in the next two
decades. As Māori lost control over their mahinga kai (but held fast to their cosmography), the settler
economy correspondingly strengthened in a story familiar from other non-European social ecologies.
Māori did not willingly give up their homes and lands. They resisted, politically, physically, culturally.
[37] Many individuals and groups challenged colonial power; peaceful resistance groups formed as
well. But these groups eventually (actually quite swiftly) were brutalized: killed, imprisoned,
pauperized, separated from their families and lands. With no viable economy, limited political power,
a foreign education system, poor health care, and discriminatory law and justice, the consequent
degradation of Māori language and customs was inevitable. [38]
Destined to survive in an alien society as an unwelcome, disadvantaged minority, Māori received the
final kick in the guts with the Land Wars of 1863–64. An early “dirty little war,” these were a series of
military engagements whose sole aim was to separate tribes and sub-tribes from their land. More
than four million acres were confiscated by the Crown from the tangata whenua, people of the land,
and redistributed to settlers through various techniques of land alienation. Māori ownership of land
was extinguished through Crown purchases such as Kemp’s Deed, through the Native Land Court,
and through the New Zealand Settlements Act of 1863. Instruments, institutions, and policy were
used to confiscate land from any North Island tribe “rebelling” against the Crown. A further eight
million acres passed to European ownership between 1865 and 1890. [39] Successive legislation
such as the Town and Country Planning Act of 1953 and the Māori Affairs Amendment Act of 1967
enabled the colonial government to convert “uneconomic” Māori land into general land to enable
non-Māori to gain ownership. By the 1970s, the flourishing multi-dimensional Māori society that
settlers encountered when they arrived existed only as hollowed-out, impoverished remnants in
rural pockets. In the cities, where the majority now lived, they struggled to maintain connections
with their tribal way of life. [40] Tribal leader Te Maire Tau recently said: “You can talk about people
selling land, you can talk about urbanization, but fundamentally the reason why this village was
destroyed was because Māori weren’t allowed to live here.” [41] (Echoes of Native Americans being
forcibly evicted from reservation, but in Aotearoa “we don’t see it because it happened slowly, over
decades.”) The legendary Māori immersion in nature and the concomitant belief system became a
façade. Māori culture was retained (by settler society) only for its myths and legends, war dance
entertainment and museum relics. [42] Yet from that 20th-century banishment, Māori society has
returned.
The narrative of exile and return is a powerful trope of western humanism and of settler colonialism.
A crucial element in this narrative is that the recovery be performed against all odds, which means, in
the case of Indigenous peoples, against the wishes of the dominant society but within the power
structure of that dominance. Another element of the narrative is the conviction that not all those who
are exiled should return, and that those who do return are animated by an inner belief, inner
strength, inner purpose. The story of the Israelites and the Promised Land is now a cliché in this
regard. It has informed Rastafarian theology, inspired Black civil resistance, and moved through the
arts and literature of many subaltern formations. It is the basis, for instance, of a sculpture by New
Zealand artist Michael Parekowhai. The Indefinite Article (1990) consists of the letters I.A.M.H.E.
constructed of white-painted plywood. The Māori word he means a in English. The five letters form
an anagram of Parekowhai’s Christian name, but leave out the two letters M and L which are not
found in the Māori alphabet, as if he has dropped the Anglo aspect of his name. This is an especially
resonant reference. Moses beseeched God: When they ask what is your name, what shall I tell them?
He said: I AM THAT I AM. This is my name forever. When Māori returned to consciousness in Aotearoa,
it was not as native Pākehā, but as who they are. The myth of Māori return is important to Pākehā, as
it marks a generous reconfiguration of the unwritten laws regarding who can speak. But Māori never
went away. They just became mute, invisible.
The Māori population increased twelve-fold in the 20th century, and Māori are now about 15 percent
of the population (over-represented, of course, in all the statistics of incarceration, poor health, and
impoverishment). Starting in the late 1960s, a series of extraordinary events — including resistance
activism, often led by charismatic women (Titiwhai Harawira, Te Pueia Hērangi, Whina Cooper, Tania
Newton); the formation and persistence of Māori-centric government parties; the recovery of the
Māori language through education legislation; and the establishment of a tribunal to settle tribal land
claims — have all contributed to the development of a new framework for Māori-Pākehā relations.
After the turbulent protests of the 1970s, New Zealand made a steadily stronger commitment to
biculturalism through policy changes in government departments, and through increasing and
sympathetic media coverage. Since the 1980s, Māori are not only visible; we are everywhere. Two
political victories in particular have produced the resurgence: the right to speak, teach, and learn te
reo Māori, the language, everywhere; and the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal as a vehicle for
the transfer of alienated land back into Māori ownership.
There are still huge challenges. Neoliberal discourse tends to think “the job is done” when Indigenous
peoples have been afforded the same social and political rights (in theory) as the settler community.
And western ways of being human remain the standard, the norm. This is not simply a historical
condition. It informs the contemporary social, economic, and political infrastructure within which the
empowerment of Māori is happening. The colonial invasion of native communities is not “over.” We
are not — anywhere — decolonized. Now, however, after a prolonged treaty settlement process,
Māori tribes have been able to finance muscular corporations that — yes, we too — can exploit the
landscape. Let’s call it mahinga kai. Tainui Group Holdings, for instance, has assets of $1.2 billion, and
in 2020 made a net profit of $83.3 million. [43] Investments in land, energy, and transportation
logistics have catapulted this tribal enterprise, which formed in 1998, right into the middle of the
climate crisis. The renaissance of the Indigenous is central to the redesign of the Anthropocene. But
the settler community of New Zealand continues to regard its political ecologies as the standard
against which Indigenous rights and welfare should be measured. There is no standard, however.
Māori forget this sometimes too. And so we come to the heart of my inquiry.
Science
Despite the evolution of an active environmental movement in New Zealand since at least the 1950s
(but starting earlier), a recent report on the country’s environment “painted a bleak picture” of
catastrophic biodiversity loss, polluted waterways, destructive primary production, and urban
sprawl. [44] The culprits are widely regarded to be extraction resource industries: farming, forestry,
and mining, all of which are abetted, of course, by rapid urbanization and tourism. Dairy products,
red meat, and forestry are the top three “export earners,” and all contribute to the degradation of
New Zealand’s natural systems. In late 2019, as a response to the climate emergency, the Labour
Government passed multi-partisan legislation that set a target of net zero CO2 emissions by 2050 and
established an independent expert body, the Climate Change Commission, to chart a path to get there.
Earlier this year, in January, the commission released its draft report, which warned that without
“strong and decisive action now,” the country will miss its emissions targets. Climate science, carbon
reduction technologies, new transport energies, regenerative farming supply lines, carbon
sequestration techniques — all will have to be intensified. Most of these initiatives will affect
environmental systems, and many will require the planning and design of new ones. So far so good.
Let’s just do it.
But landscape settler-colonialism complicates the project. For sure, environmental designers will be
collaborating with scientists. Yet there are too few Māori scientists — less than five percent of faculty
in university science departments [45] — and these too few scientists are incredibly busy. Everybody
wants one. Not only that, however; they are also perhaps just a bit kūpapa. This is the term for Māori
who during the colonial period sided with Pākehā imperialists or the colonial government. For
instance, after the British won the wars, when the New Zealand Armed Constabulary was established
to mop up lingering Māori resistance, many individual Māori enlisted and fought against “rebellious”
tribes. Described on Land War monuments as “friendly Māori,” a term despised by contemporary
actants, kūpapa has overtones of treachery, of Māori fighting Māori. And complicity is hardly limited
to military adventures. The very term “research,” as Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues in her classic
Decolonizing Methodologies, “is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism. The
word itself … is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary.” [46] Tough
for young Māori scientists.
The 21st century has seen the rapid development of mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) [47] in
social knowledge construction, knowledge application, and professional practices. New collaborative
projects combine mātauranga and Pākehā planning protocols. As a result, some big things come
together. The pandemic, the climate emergency, decol. And, not least, the infiltration of somehow
unproblematic research into Māori epistemologies, and into what has become known as “traditional
ecological knowledge,” or TEK. It would seem that part of decol is to do this work. Mātauranga Māori
now has enormous social capital in Aotearoa. But how and where should this capital be invested? By
whom and for whom? At university, Māori are being trained in western science and in TEK. Māori
law professor Jacinta Ruru envisages a welcoming future where young Māori academics are
encouraged to dream and to enrich universities with their indigenous knowledge systems. “We can
have both,” she says. “We can have learning of Western knowledge alongside our indigenous
knowledge.” [48]
Sounds good? I’m skeptical. As a landscape architect, I wonder if this entanglement is either possible
or desirable. Part of the metaphysical, environmental, and social value of indigenous knowledge to
western systems is its incompatibility with those systems. Its incompossibility, if you like.
Incommensurability. The much-lauded convergence of Western science and Indigenous science does
not really, when you look at it, seem a convergence at all. Moreover, convergence is a Western
science narrative. Professor Ruru, interviewed in a daily news journal, was probably simply being
nice. For any rapprochement should involve an investigation into the doing of western science itself,
by Māori tohunga, shamans — not Anglo-European scientists, not settler scientists. Not even
scientists. Because western science — its associations and allies, its funding chains and social
purposes — is inimical to mātauranga Māori. Deep down Pākehā scientists know this, which is partly
why, contra convergence, Māori knowledge is not much welcome in the academy. And why Māori
academics are lonely, isolated, and struggling to be heard, and why many find their way back to
Māori Studies departments. Which means that other disciplines lack mātauranga Māori. [49]
And more: it’s not just that Indigenous knowledges are disregarded but that they are actually
undermined by the ongoing effects of colonialism in the business of doing science. As the Māori
design academic Rebecca Kiddle writes, “Its effects are bad for all.” She cites a senior Pākehā
academic who said he “would always send good masters students overseas for doctoral study.” When
challenged that Māori students may wish to develop Māori knowledge in their graduate projects and
that overseas study may not support this, his response was telling: “No, but I’m talking about
students doing science” — the implication being, Kiddle says, “that Māori knowledge was not real
science.” [50] Western science is, then, another form of assimilation. Māori do not need to do science
to understand how the world works. Nor do they need scientists to tell them. But scientists want to
conscript Māori knowledge into the scholarly-professional system of western science. For the
purposes of legitimation and expediency, of course, but also because it’s clear that Indigenous
peoples have known something important for a long time that Western science simply cannot know.
And so we get to the problem of partnership. (I’m talking about how we care for the environment
now.) We get to the co-option of Indigenous researchers into environmental projects that are
fabricated, legitimized, funded, evaluated, and transferred through western market systems of
knowledge supply and demand. New Zealand’s own Green New Deal, we are told, is being addressed
through “restoration partnerships” between tribes and funding organizations, tribes and local
government agencies, and tribes and central government agencies [51], as well as through the
application of Māori environmental values in projects that include resource management protocols,
such as highway building, housing developments, and oyster farms. It’s a problematic, retrograde
process, because ultimately it supports the kind of development that works against mahinga kai. The
whole exercise is generated by research partnerships between Māori and university scientists. It
requires young Māori with PhDs in geology, biology, ecology, geomorphology, the earth sciences in
general, to move into academic (and corporate) departments that profess these disciplines; into
universities that promote and fund research that “explores, engages and exemplifies” Māori
environmental epistemologies. The University of Victoria, in Wellington, for instance, has developed
a strategic initiative to develop capacity in mātauranga Māori research, and to strengthen researchbased
relationships with Māori communities (research, research, research…). [52] Māori concepts
are employed throughout these projects and, where possible, Māori communities are involved.
Scientific articles include glossaries which “explain” these concepts. For instance:
manaakitanga / reciprocity of actions to the environment
kaitiakitanga / sustainable resource management
whakatipu rawa / retention and growth of Māori-owned resources [53]
It reminds me of philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine’s concept of translation indeterminacy. He
described a field linguist standing on the African veldt with a “native informer.” A rabbit runs past.
“Gavigai,” says the native. On his clipboard, the anthropologist writes “gavigai = rabbit.” Māori seem
to be giving their knowledge systems to Western science in the 21st century much as they ceded
their land to the settler economy in the 19th century. The thing is: Māori seem to want this too. The
whole project of scientific assimilation is presented to government agencies as a useful resource
management and design framework where western science is a conduit for Māori “cultural values” to
be extended across “the whole ecosystems services framework” to achieve “multidimensional
aspirational goals and desired Indigenous outcomes.” [54] Luckily, as the gavigai example shows,
Western science cannot actually assimilate Indigenous knowledge-creation. The two systems of
knowledge are based on radically different perspectives about how humans are in the world.
Recently, for instance, a Working Group on Constitutional Transformation recognized in its report
the need to place Papatūānuku at the center of all political and personal relationships in a revised
Aotearoa Constitution. Papatūānuku is the earth mother. This is a bid by Māori, for Māori, for
constitutional change in Aotearoa New Zealand’s fundamental social and political structure, actually
based on Māori values, customs, traditions, and knowledges. The report argues that the Westminster
constitutional model set in place by the imperial system should not assimilate the treaty rights of
Māori but instead be based upon them. [55] To do this is to accept concepts that are alien to Anglo-
European epistemologies. To accept, for instance, that a taniwha (monster) lives in the bend of the
Whanganui River and influences the river’s actions in ways that are for humans both problematic
and beneficial: the river swells, floods, drains away, land is lost and then regained, and lost again. It’s
difficult to escape the conclusion — even after the outing of anthropology — that western sciences
still parse this as an Indigenous articulation of natural forces that Māori cannot know; and that the
true path to useful knowledge of the natural world is to be found along the corridors of the physics
department. But how do scientists know what monsters do and why? Will they give up their power
and privilege to find out? (Yeats’ sonnet Leda and the Swan, composed in 1923, is a staggering image
of imperial transfer).
Conversely, what if the rise of mātauranga Māori in academic narratives of knowledge-production,
knowledge application, and professional practices is actually a devilish form of utu? What if it is a
means of translating western science doctrine into Māori language-concepts, which Māori then gift
back as a token of our absorption into settler society narratives of social progress? What if Māori
environmental practices were being determined by the dominant discourse rather than the other
way round? What if the development of TEK planning protocols neatly arranges Indigenous concepts
into the service of settler society environmental goals? Tit for tat?
As Anne Salmond has argued, Māori/European does not work. Tradition, she says, is articulated
according to the context in which the articulation is occurring. Māori often strategically interweave
propositions from different “worlds” to make their case, for instance, to the Waitangi Tribunal. “This
idea of weaving an argument from diverse strands echoes the way in which ancestral Māori and
modernist ideas entangle in debates about fresh water in New Zealand. They do not exist in
immutable, binary boxes — far from it.” [56] Can we move landscape architecture beyond either/or,
science/indigenous, beyond even objects, beyond strategic thingification, beyond the discourses of
modernity that render relations between the human and more-than-human political and ideological
always? In landscape architecture, this means practicing beyond landscape. But how do we do this? I
personally find it impossible to step outside the design language into which I was trained from birth.
Sometimes I catch glimpses of other ways, but my cognitive framework and my emotions and
passions, my selective perspectives, my formal and graphic preferences and prejudices — all these
and so much else mitigate against the possibility of an alternative environmental reality for me and
my collective. Yet this moment which has arrived, borne on critiques of modernity, on the long, slow
advance of climate change, the sudden idea of the Anthropocene, and the revelation of Indigeneity,
this moment that cross-fertilizes political ecology, decolonial critique, and the new materialism —
this moment is generating such skepticism about western knowledge systems even within those
systems themselves, that the longing for an alternative is becoming painful. Working in the
ambivalent, open, intertidal zone, in the interstices of the entanglement, in parentheses, requires an
engagement with procedures that are outside the typical territories of environmental research and
with design research outside the territories of design. [57]
Design
Some things to consider. Nothing can be explained in terms of something else. Nature cannot be
explained by scientists. The continuing strangeness of the world cannot be penetrated by the coded
language of the west. Māori cannot be explained by Europeans. Practices of making based solely
upon observation and measurement are inadequate to the work of respatializing Aotearoa New
Zealand. Whether you are preparing fish for guests or attending a town hall meeting, planting a forest
or cultivating a professional culture — such as landscape architecture — you are going beyond
measurement. Practices of making operate in the realm of the sensible and the sensitive, and they
work together to generate an order; but it’s a squishy, frangible order, an unreliable order full of
imprecise, barely discernible things.
One of these things is the increasing concern that Māoridom has been bought and sold. That
democratic fundamentalism has streamlined its appropriation of Indigenous cultural materials to the
point that even the Māori language has been sucked in. Thousands of Pākehā are now learning the
language of the colonized. To do this, no matter how well-intentioned, is to stake a claim to it and coopt
it. [58] There is no escape from this process. And it gets worse: cultural space has been
territorialized to the point where the elemental Māori cosmology is presented as an import from
without. [59] We’re up against it: land itself has been internalized by the dominant society. The
Department of Conservation, Crown Research Institutes, the Ministries for Culture and Heritage,
Primary Industries, the Environment, local, regional and central government authorities — all
institutions which design and manage the land — are legislating, mandating, and funding the
development of this colonial landscape. They all have Māori names, and mandates to comply with
Treaty of Waitangi obligations. Extremely determined, long-haul political machinators have honed
the instruments of landscape transformation. Stockbrokers, farmers, tourism operators,
corporations, digger operators, ecology professors, medical consultants — all contribute to this
ongoing transformation. The political ecology outcome is pretty clear: if you are to be a citizen in
Aotearoa, it is imperative that you relate to civil society in the same way as everybody else. [60]
In Aotearoa, there is only one way to escape the impasse of kūpapa science-led, one-way
environmental design: Māori must rescript the social ecology of Aotearoa themselves. Transgression
is critical. An eruption is necessary. Pākehā have nothing to offer Māori except what they cannot give
them; an environment designed and made by Māori. An Indigenous intervention in contemporary
public space that articulates reciprocity — that opens up the Indigenous environmental cosmology
— would amount to a rent or tear in the space-time colonial-terrain continuum. It would be
unrecognizable to the settler community whose lifeways it has disrupted. If it were recognizable, it
would not be real. The norms and protocols of western planning and design could not shape such a
project or determine what it does. For this would immediately render the project non-Indigenous. So
as you can see, there is a double bind. Co-production is not possible. Complete submission is
necessary. The very thing that the landscape architect can never do is what must be done. Landscape
transformation must be determined by the oppressed themselves. Here’s where my skepticism kicks
in, again. Can Māori (western-educated, aspirational, angry, committed) still do it?
All right, then what spaces can be constituted within the multimodal theater of decolonization? What
alternative socio-spatial arrangements — free from domination and open to collective selfdetermination
— can become the stage for people-empowerment? In western landscape
architecture, I find it difficult to think of any (what you might call) dissensus landscapes. If we could
point to an example, it would not be what we are talking about. Therefore there are no western
examples. But when we go looking for an example in the realm of Māori, we can actually come up
with a template. Let’s agree we’re seeking an approach to the design of civic open space in which
people may gather with their freedoms, with their fellow humans, with the critters for whom they
speak. Not so much a structure but a simple expanse, with no visible boundaries, because ultimately
there are no boundaries. We’re looking for a terrain that enables the undulations of use through
assembly and ceremony, and through receiving and entertaining those who come from elsewhere, a
terrain that is engendered by community conversation. It should be the realization of a communal
collective, a space of shared social engagement, a co-authoring, participatory social body: an engine
of reciprocity.
This would be a marae.
Today there are 773 marae in Aotearoa New Zealand. They are the collective hearth of Māori society.
Every sub-tribe has one (if it has the land to make it on). A typical marae is a stretch of open space
with a meeting house on one side and an entrance on the other, through which all must come. Marae
are autonomous zones that fibrillate along the margins of the dominant political framework imposed
by central government. They are loci of political agency; as such it is from these spaces that a
redescription of New Zealand can evolve. The marae is a nexus of reciprocity. It is truly Māori space:
spiritual, mental, social, emotional. It is where the flat ontology of Māori socialism is visibly
performed. And it is constructed within the practice of utu. Being endogenous to Māori and
collectively self-willed, it operates outside Anglo-European practices of spacemaking and
placemaking (in fact critiques ideas of space and place) and colonial geographic processes. It is all
those good things: experimental, contingent, adaptive; and it enhances all forms of life, especially
those that live according to critter logic. It goes beyond landscape. We can see that making something
that looks like something else is not going beyond landscape. A sculpture that looks like a native
canoe, paving that reproduces the pattern on a tunic, mounded landforms — all such things miss the
point. Even “a tapestry of blak art woven through city streets” misses the point. [61] The template is
spatial, and it necessarily includes the warmth of the collective for whom it is their place to stand.
I did not know at the beginning of my inquiry that I would end up suggesting the marae as a fluid
diagram of respatialization. But I did suspect that I would put the design of the national landscape in
the hands of the colonized people. In 2018, together with colleagues, I entered a competition for the
redesign of New York’s Central Park. Our project envisaged the return of Central Park to its original
inhabitants, the Lenape people of Mannahatta. The Deed of Gift from the Governor of New York State
states:
At the recommendation of the Mannahatta Tribunal, this Bill approves and
ratifies an agreement between the Governor of the State of New York and
the Delaware peoples and their affiliated tribes. The agreement
extinguishes the claim made by the Delaware tribes for compensation from
the State of New York for the confiscation of territories now known as
Manhattan by returning to them unconditionally and without prejudice the
land legally identified as Central Park. Since the Bill approves an
unconditional settlement of ownership upon the Delaware tribes, there are
no legal, environmental, or ethical criteria that must be met by that
confederation in execution of their rights as owners of the land, apart from
those constitutional obligations that must be met by all landowners.
I realize now that the logistics — the arguments, if you like — lead to these inevitable conclusions.
Personhood is the basis of reciprocity; reciprocity is the basis of environmental stewardship.
Indigeneity is the basis of stewardship. Being true to who you are is not about assimilation to the
colonizing power. It finds auto-empowerment through the design of its own collective environment.
Design based on science cannot do this. Indigenous design is thus the key to the future of settler
nation landscapes in the Anthropocene. The answer to my question How are colonial landscapes to be
redesigned? is: not by the colonists. Of this, I have to say, I am not skeptical. But can Indigenous
epistemologies reprogram a design discipline whose knowledge base was forged in the modern,
scientific era? Of this I am very skeptical. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
Notes
1. The Greek adjective skeptikos comes from skepthesthai, to “look into” or “inquire. According to
Pyrrhus, it denotes an “open-minded inquirer.” See Lives of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes
Laertes for the canonical account of the Skeptic philosophers of antiquity.
2. Irene Watson, “First Nations and the Colonial Project,” Inter Gentes: The McGill Journal of
International Law and Legal Pluralism. 2016 (1)1: 30–39.
3. For a thorough analysis of colonial respatialization, see Adam J. Barker, (Re-) Ordering the New
World: Settler Colonialism, Space and Identity. PhD Thesis, Department of Geography, University of
Leicester, 2012.
4. Other landscape architects now focusing on decolonization include Alexander Arroyo, Pierre
Bélanger, Tiffany Kaewen Dang, Lance M. Foster, Bella Hinemoa Grimsdale, William Hatton, Hannah
Hopewell, Bruno Marques, Diane Menzies, Jacqueline Paul, and Simon Swale.
5. In the Māori language, Māori refers to the Indigenous peoples of Aotearoa, and Pākehā refers to the
Anglo-European settler community. One’s whakapapa is one’s family tree, the genealogy that gives
people their very being, their place in the world. Pākehā with a whakapapa is a rather demeaning
term for a fellow-traveling non-Indigenous person.
6. The Whanganui River was not the first natural entity to gain personhood in Aotearoa (that
distinction belongs to Urewera National Park), and it quickly led to rivers in other countries
achieving the same status, including the Ohio and Klamath Rivers in the United States, and all the
rivers of Bangladesh. See Jeremy Lurgio, “Saving the Whanganui: can personhood rescue a river?”
The Guardian, November 29, 2019. [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/30/saving-the-whanganui-canpersonhood-
rescue-a-river]
7. Anne Salmond, Tears of Rangi: Experiments Across Worlds (Auckland: Auckland University Press,
2017), 15.
8. Such as that of Spinoza, Kant, Derrida, Deleuze, Latour, and even Mellaissoux, not to mention the
numerous anthropology theorists influenced by these writers.
9. The phrase is attributed to Raymond Firth in the 1970s by James Clifford in James Clifford, Returns:
Becoming Indigenous in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 2.
10. Henri and Henriette Frankfort, John A. Wilson, Thorkild Jacobsen, William A. Irwin, The
Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946). The Frankforts
adapted the I-Thou formulation from existential philosopher-theologian Martin Buber’s influential
1923 book I and Thou, in which he postulated a relationship “without bounds.” See Science and
Philosophy [https://sciphilos.info/docs_pages/docs_Frankfort_IThou_css.html]
11. Dan Cheater “I Am the River and the River is Me: Legal Personhood and the Emerging Rights of
Nature” in West Coast Environmental Law, March 22, 2018
[https://www.wcel.org/blog/i-am-river-and-river-me-legal-personhood-and-emerging-rights-nature]
12. As attested in many texts from Prigogine’s Order Out of Chaos (1984), through Capra’s The Web of
Life (1996), to my own Emergence in Landscape Architecture (2013).
13. As defined by Chantal Mouffe, an agonistic relationship (not antagonistic) is irresolvable, always
in negotiation. See Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London and New York:
Verso, 2012).
20
14. See Unfinished, the wonderful catalogue from the exhibition of the same name that ran at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2016. Elsa Urbanelli, ed., Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible. (New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016).
15. Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 4,” Artforum, April 1969; also available here.
[https://theoria.art-zoo.com/notes-on-sculpture-4-beyond-objects-robert-morris/]
16. Stephen Turner, “Sovereignty or the Art of Being Native” in Cultural Critique, Spring 2002: 74-
100. 10.1353/cul.2002.0023
17. A conflicted term, Indigeneity is an aspiration at once supported by international institutions and
NGOs, and increasingly rejected by those to whom the term, with its origins in western
anthropological distancing, is supposed to refer.
18. Mignolo’s project is an ongoing investigation of this question. Betweenness and hybridity have
long been tropes in what was once called postcolonial studies. The parenthesis metaphor comes from
his foreword to Bernd Reiter’s Constructing the Pluriverse: The Geopolitics of Knowledge (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2018), but for a more thoroughgoing tracking of his project see
Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concept, Analytics, Praxis (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2018).
19.. Karsten Schulz, a postdoctoral researcher in the Governance and Sustainability Lab at the
University of Trier, also advocates “border thinking, as a way of practicing “epistemic disobedience”
and “delinking from modern and postmodern epistemologies.” Karsten A. Schulz, “Decolonizing
Political Ecology: Ontology, Technology and ‘Critical’ Enchantment,” Journal of Political Ecology (24)
2017, 133.
20. Like the footnote, a refuge of the minor and the marginal. See Anthony Grafton’s The Footnote: A
Curious History (1999).
21. The ruling, made by the High Court in Uttarakhand state (2017) to increase protection for the
heavily polluted waterways, was quickly overruled by India’s Supreme Court which declared that the
rivers could not be viewed as living entities.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-40537701
22. Press Release, “Colombia Constitutional Court Finds Atrato River Possesses Rights,” May 2017.
[https://celdf.org/2017/05/press-release-colombia-constitutional-court-finds-atrato-river-possesses-rights/]
23. “Intervolvement” is Alfred North Whitehead’s word, introduced in Process and Reality (1929), for
the mutual involvement between entities that are continually coming into being and passing way.
Literally, to roll up within one another. [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/intervolve]
24. See Confluence. [https://www.confluenceproject.org/about-confluence/ ]
Carolyn Hill, ed., with a foreword by Anne Salmond, Kia Whakanuia te Whenua: People Place
Landscape (Mary Egan Publishing, March 2021).
[http://www.maryegan.co.nz/blog/2021/3/3/kia-whakanuia-te-whenua-people-place-landscap]
25. Pierre Bélanger Ghazal Jafari, Pablo Escudero, Hernán Bianchi-Benguria, Tiffany Kaewen, and
Alexander S. Arroyo, “No Design on Stolen Land: Dismantling Design’s Dehumanizing White
Supremacy” in Architectural Design, January 2020 [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ad.2535]
26. Moana Jackson, “Where to Next? Decolonisation and the Stories in the Land” in Bianca Elkington
et al (Eds.) Imagining Decolonisation (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2020).
21
27. H. W Williams, A Dictionary of the Māori Language (Wellington: A. R. Shearer, Government
Printer, 1975).
28. Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902).
[http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/mutaidcontents.html]
29. Tom O’Connor, Tides of Kawhia (Reed Publishing: Auckland, 2004), 35.
30. Adam J. Barker (2012), 122.
31. Ibid.
32. Anne Salmon (2017).
33. The artist was George Neville Sturtevant (1858–1937).
34. Vincent O’Sullivan, The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800–2000 (Wellington: Bridget
Williams Books).
35. Though of course this is debated. The pioneering ecological historian Alfred W. Crosby has been
criticized for the determinism apparent in his account of the “demographic triumph of Europeans in
the temperate colonies.” See the editors’ Introduction in J. R. McNeill and Alan Roe, Global
Environmental History: An Introductory Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2013).
36. Cory Ross, Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
37. Mike Ross, “The Throat of Parata” in Elkington et al (Eds) Imagining Decolonisation (Wellington:
Bridget Williams Books), 26.
38. Ibid: 31
39. https://nzhistory.govt.nz/politics/treaty/treaty-timeline/treaty-events-1850-99
40. Currently six percent of Aotearoa New Zealand is Māori-owned.
41. Te Maire Tau, head of Canterbury tribe Ngāi Tūāhuriri, interviewed in the Waikato Times. Jody
Callaghan “A Place to Stand,” Waikato Times, February 6, 2021.
42. See Rod Barnett, “The Landscape of Simulation: Whakarewarewa Thermal Reserve” in Kerb
Journal of Landscape Architecture (Melbourne: RMIT School of Architecture and Design, 1999) and
Rod Barnett and Jacqueline Margetts, “Cross-cultural Place: Maori Influences in the Public
Landscapes of Ted Smyth,” Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural
Historians of Australia and New Zealand, SAHANZ, Auckland, 2009.
43 . Tainui Group Holdings, Annual Report2. [https://www.tgh.co.nz/en/delivering-waikato-tainui/#annualresults]
44. Environment Aotearoa (2019) published by the Ministry for the Environment (Manatū mō te
Taiao).
45. Te Aniwa Hurihanganui, “Māori, Pasifika scientists under-represented in NZ universities,” RNZ,
August 2020.
[https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/422698/maori-pasifika-scientists-under-represented-in-nz-universities]
46. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 1999), 1.
22
47. Māori knowledge encompasses traditional concepts of knowledge and knowing, especially those
that predate the European invasion.
48. Jody O’Callaghan “Māori academics are ‘lonely, isolated and struggling to be heard,’” Stuff:
Poutiaki, Feb 14, 2021.
[https://www.stuff.co.nz/pou-tiaki/124197796/mori-academics-are-lonely-isolated-and-struggling-to-be-heard]
49. Ibid.
50. Rebecca Kiddle 2021 “Colonisation Sucks for Everyone” in Elkington et al Imagining
Decolonisation (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books). 105.
51. These are, of course, well-meaning and concerned, and in the U.S. they have become particularly
forceful:. “We encourage federal land managers to consider national-scale incorporation of TEK into
land management decisions …” James Aronson, Neva Goodwin, Laura Orlando, Cristina Eisenberg,
Adam T. Cross, “A world of possibilities: six restoration strategies to support the United Nations
Decade on Ecosystem Restoration,” Restoration Ecology, March 27, 2020.
[https://doi.org/10.1111/rec.13170]
52. Mātauranga Māori Research Fund Guidelines for Applicants 2019: 2.
[https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/research/support/research-office]
53. Shaun Awatere and Nikki Harcourt, “Whakarite Whakaaro, Whanake Whenua: Kaupapa Māori
Decision-Making Frameworks for Alternative Land Use Assessments” in Carolyn Hill (Ed.) Kia
Whakanuia Te Whenua: People, Place, Landscape (Wellington: Mary Egan Publishing, 2021).
54. G. R. Harmsworth and Shaun Awatere, “Indigenous Māori Knowledge and Perspectives of
Ecosystems” in J. R. Dymond (Ed.) Ecosystem Services in New Zealand: Conditions and Trends (Lincoln,
New Zealand: Manāki Whenua Press, 2013), 274.
55 The Independent Working Group on Constitutional Transformation, Matike Māori Report (2017)
[https://nwo.org.nz/resources/report-of-matike-mai-aotearoa-the-independent-working-group-on-constitutionaltransformation/]
Last accessed 05/05/2021
56. Anne Salmond, Tears of Rangi (2017), 308.
57. Hannah Hopeworth and Rod Barnett, “Beyond Landscape” in Federico Fresci, Nazier Farieda and
Jane Venis (eds.), The Politics of Design: Privilege and Prejudice in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia,
Canada and South Africa (Dunedin: Otago Polytechnic Press, 2021).
58. Māori journalist Leonie Hayden writes in The Spinoff of the shame and embarrassment of being a
Māori learner of the Māori language in a class full of well-off, well-trained, and aspirational Pākehā
students. [https://thespinoff.co.nz/atea/17-02-2021/some-thoughts-about-pakeha-learning-and-speaking-te-reo-maori/]
59. See Frank Ginn “Extension, Subversion, Containment: Eco-Nationalism and (Post) Colonial Nature
in Aotearoa New Zealand” in Transactions of British Geographers 33(3): 335-
353. http://doi.org/1111/j.1475-5661.2008.00307.x
60. Ibid.
61. Timmah Ball, “Can Design Decolonize Cities?” Art Guide Australia June 29, 2018
[https://artguide.com.au/art-plus/can-design-decolonise-cities/]