And yet,
drowned
out.

These lines are from ‘Poem for the Commonwealth’ by Karlo Mila, a Rotorua-born poet of Tongan, Palagi and Samoan descent. They get at an intractable truth for Indigenous Pacific Islanders: that those at the frontline of the climate emergency – who are also those with long-sustainable relationships to the land (‘a wealth of knowledge, / intergenerational meditations / on what it means to be alive, / what it means to survive / in a certain set of conditions / specific parameters of earth and sea and sky’, Mila continues) – are also those whose voices are routinely excluded from the conversation and from policymaking.

Over the coming weeks, PEN Transmissions is publishing personal essays by writers from across the Pacific, including a piece by Mila at the end of the month. These essays explore climate and land, but also a wealth of intersecting ideas – language, family, identity, sovereignty, politics. They have been commissioned with a particular index of free expression in mind: a writer’s freedom to write on what they want, in their own words, irrespective of what audiences (or editors) might presuppose to be ‘important’ to writers from particular communities.

Nadine Ann Hura (Ngāti Hine, Ngāpuhi), whose piece opens this focus, challenges the very terms of a series like this:

I don’t have time to write an essay on the ‘broad thematic thread of climate and the environment from a Pacific perspective’, because I should be spending time with my 16-year-old son.

[…]

If there’s one thing I’ve learned since getting on the road to visit communities affected by climate change up-close, it’s that there’s never enough time. Sifting through priorities, and knowing where to focus your energy, is an exercise in both strategy and stamina. Everything is urgent; everything needs to be done now.

[…]

I keep asking myself: what is the point of the refrain ‘amplify Indigenous voices’ if the people who need to hear aren’t listening?

The pieces in this series are rich and urgent. They house copious ideas, experiences, imperatives and feelings; they say loudly what needs to be heard by those who need to hear. We hope you will read, and listen, and enjoy.

–Will Forrester & Nadia Saeed.

The post Pasifika Voices: Introduction appeared first on English PEN.

Dunya Mikhail argues: ‘Poetry is not medicine; it’s an X-ray’. Mikhail points to what lies beneath, to the insides of what people can see and so often accept as the origin story. As in, this is where the problem starts. Or, this is where we begin. But what about the bones?

In ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, bones are expressed by the word iwi. In addition to the term Kanaka Maoli, Native Hawaiians also identify as ʻŌiwi. Unsurprisingly, both names emphasise the genealogical relationship we have to our lands and waters.

E ōla nā iwi.

Long live the bones.

Our bones matter.

As an ʻŌiwi poet and educator in Hawaiʻi nei, I am often faced with the question of poetry’s value. This spring, I monitored the number of Covid-19 cases alongside the growing number of tourists flocking to our island nation. What had been an opportunity for ʻŌiwi to regenerate and enjoy our cherished lands and waters, without the excess of extractive capitalism, was slowly relapsing into Pay-to-Play Paradise. I was teaching two poetry courses at the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa. Like many educators, I wanted to use my classroom as a safe and brave place to activate conversations that mattered to my students, beyond academia.

During the spring semester, I tested Mikhail’s argument with 25 undergraduate students, who, faced with Covid-19 and the shift to online learning with its despairing isolation, decided to enroll in a creative writing course. During our unit on ecopoetry, we explored how poems can help us as individuals and writing communities to speak back to global crises like climate change. I was especially attentive to the ways in which my ʻŌiwi students used blackout poetry to channel their frustration for a tourism economy that peddles our ʻāina (land) as a playground, even during a pandemic. I designed the Waikīkī Blackout Poetry Project, a short unit that combined ecopoetry, erasure poetry, and spoken word.

Erasure poetry proved to be spectacularly propulsive – especially for my creative writing students who wanted to enter conversations about climate change, but did not know where or how to begin. First, students were assigned Mindy Pennybacker’s article on the effect of rising seas on Waikīkī’s shoreline, ‘As rising seas invade Waikiki resorts, state proposes adding more groins’, which was published on the front page of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser on 8 March 2021 and continued on pages A6 and A7. My blackout poem of the article’s first page served as a mentor text. The students were asked to compose original blackout poems of Pennybacker’s article and to practice reciting their poems for a collective reading in class. To maintain dialogue with both the Star-Advertiser article and my blackout poem, each of us used the article’s jumpline as our title: ‘EROSION, A6’.

On 14 April, we performed our collective reading in class. Students shared their screens on Zoom to present their poems, and recited their work in turns. One student commented that the repetition of the title was not unlike the repetition of waves along a shore. Erosion, they also remarked, was performed not only by the refrain of ‘EROSION, A6’, but also by the blackout process itself.

With blackout poetry, writers can enter civic discourse by taking a text – a newspaper article, a testimony, some draft legislation – and mapping it anew. What different perspective can you offer? How do your ideas relate to the arguments originally established in the pre-exisiting text? Are you amplifying a well-rehearsed narrative or giving voice to an unheard or lesser known story? Those were the key questions for the writing process.

Some students used the blackout poem to focus on the relationship between global and local. Some investigated the idea of the Bottom Line, and how this could relate to their approaches to the poetic line or the frontlines of activism. One used the blackout poem to explore the word ‘erosion’, specifically the erosion of human dignity. While most used black-tip pens or Sharpies to compose their work, one student experimented with colour, signifying different interests – Kanaka Maoli, corporations, tourists.

In the Waikīkī Blackout Poetry Project, many students used Pennybacker’s article as a first step toward understanding mass corporate tourism in Hawaiʻi. Mar Aiu, for example, was concerned with the absence of healing in conversations about economic recovery in Waikīkī. Others, like Kamryn Curammeng, centred Indigenous resistance and the dignity of lands, waters, and animals as living entities with agency. In her blackout poem, Kamryn drew a set of humpback whales in varying stages of desiccation. Humpback whales are already an endangered species, and with rising sea levels and the rapid warming of the planet, climate change is expected to be a leading cause of their extinction.

Of course, with environmental degradation comes spirtual trauma. Another ʻŌiwi student, Isabella Pasa, used her blackout poem as a kāhea, or call to action, describing the refrain ‘EROSION, A6’ as a calling out to ʻŌiwi and malihini alike to care for Waikīkī and other sacred places in Hawaiʻi. Marley Perreira wanted to center the theme of hope. In her reflection post, she wrote: ‘We should all know that the ocean and her creatures will not back down’.

I agree, we will not back down. Our lands and waters are ancestors. E ola nā iwi.

Noʻu Revilla is a queer ʻŌiwi poet, educator & aloha ʻāina. Born and raised in Waiʻehu on the island of Maui, Noʻu currently lives and loves in in Pālolo valley on the island of Oʻahu. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at UH-Mānoa. Her poetry has been featured in Poetry,Lit Hub, ANMLY, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and most recently the Library of Congress. Her second chapbook Permission to Make Digging Sounds was published in Effigies III in 2019, and she has performed throughout Hawaiʻi as well as Canada, Papua New Guinea, and the United Nations. In the summer 2019, she taught poetry at Puʻuhuluhulu University while standing to protect Maunakea with her lāhui.

The post EROSION, A6: Notes on the Waikīkī Blackout Poetry Project appeared first on English PEN.

Kāinga, aiga, ‘aina –
I can find myself foreign in these words.
So often, I don’t know the meaning of the words.
So many of us don’t know the meaning of the words.
We don’t know the words for home.
And we don’t know home in the words.
We are so far from home, and we don’t know home in the words.

In many ways, these words of mine form a short diasporic lament for my community – Pacific islands peoples who live in Aotearoa, New Zealand.  Only half of my generation can speak our native tongues. Kāinga, aiga, ‘aina – in 27 of our Pacific languages this means ‘home’ or ‘homelands’.  In a further ten, it refers to family, relatives and kin. The source word, ‘kainga’, is categorised by linguists as proto-Polynesian in origin.

We have lived in the South Pacific for over three thousand years.  Our languages moved from island to island, but the foundational commonalities still echo in our sentences. In a contemporary context of colonisation, migration and globalisation, retrieving and remembering what it is to be ‘ocean people’, and living what that means, is what’s on my mind seven days a week. It’s my job, my passion, my purpose.

My main job – aside from being a poet and mother – is to run a leadership programme called Mana Moana. Moana is an indigenous term for the Pacific Ocean that can be found in 35 contemporary Pacific languages. Mana is an Oceanic word that can be found in 26 Pacific languages.  Mana refers to power and authority – the ability to harness the energy of the intangible realm so that it is recognised and impactful in the tangible world. Mana Moana, then, references the power, energy, and vitality of the indigenous ways of knowing and being – belonging to the Moana. The aim of Mana Moana is to activate the wisdom of indigenous knowledge of the South Pacific in service of the world in which we live. Why?

I have studied all English has to tell me
all of my life.
With its centre of the universe-verse,
It’s reductive science,
It’s extractive nature,
It’s soulless systems,
It’s secular reality.
It’s positivist positive
that it knows
all it needs to know.

There is so much
that cannot be said in English.
cannot be seen in English
cannot be heard in English
cannot be mastered by English.

It is a whole shimmering universe.
And it is
Alive.

Under the noise
of this one.

This world –
we are witnessing its
self-destructive end.

Changing the climate itself.
It is out of time.
It is out of ideas.

I have learned it all.

And I find myself dumb.

So much information,
and on the brink of collapse.

Mana Moana is one of many movements of indigenous renaissance. At the core of this work is collective soul retrieval. How do we see the world when we look through the octo-scopic visioning ancestral eyes?  To be matavalu, makawalu is to have eight-eyes – a multi-dimensional perspective when it comes to viewing things. How do we harness ancestral knowing when seeking solutions to contemporary global problems, and even ordinary, everyday ones? How can we be guided by our ancestors when we’ve lost our languages and connection with culture, when we’re far from our islands of origin?

With everything English and education had gifted me, I hunted, knowing that, in many ways, what I had learned within the Western body of knowledge was my prey. Foucault cleverly observed that knowledge makes you its subject, because you must know ‘through it’. I felt  this while I was exploring,  knowing that I could only know through this heavy-weight paradigm, which had already set limits about reality, and which through its language had delimited the parameters of what could be said, recorded and known.

I did the library legwork to find the stories, the ‘myths’, the books that were stuck in ‘stack’. I opened their dusty, stale covers and searched for remnants of our rich genius. I searched among missionary accounts, sifting through unbridled racism and contempt, reading anthropological texts that were odes to self rather than neutral observations, finding stories recounted in English by travellers and beachcombers. I read the speeches of great leaders from our region. I sought the scholarship of our indigenous historians, linguists, sociologists, writers, poets, storytellers.

As fragments were gathered, bits of logic were pieced together and patterns found. Digging work became jigsaw work. Bits of worldview, philosophy, language, narrative, cosmogony, proverbs, art, rituals, customs, practices, symbols and history were fitted together in a search for wholeness.  Re-searching. There were some pieces that survived fully intact; the task was to fit them against what had been demonised and lost. Recreating a coherence with what had been shamed and deemed uncivilised, unscientific and un-Christian.

Perhaps it is no surprise that, after five years of continuous research, the framework I chose was one that simply focused on words. ‘Power’ words, which Gregory Cajete describes as ‘having intrinsic meaning to a people’.  In order to open the portals to the past, the bricks and mortar of worldview were our words.

For we have
different
things
to say
about being here,
and being human.
mauri, mauli, mana, tapu,
fonua, fanua, ‘enua, fenua, whenua.
mauri, mauli, mana, tapu.

Without these words,
a world is lost to us.

I was after archetypal concepts that were shared in many, many of our Pacific languages, that we used collectively to make sense of what we saw in similar ways. Many of these words language the quantum – like vā / wā – which is effortlessly translated into the quantum field. I sought proverbs and sayings in Tongan, Hawaiian, Samoan, Niuean, Tokelau, Cook Islands Māori, Aotearoa New Zealand Māori that swirled around these power words, chanting them into context. Teu le vā, one Samoan proverb says – make the energy between you beautiful.  Tauhi vā, says a Tongan phrase – tend to, nurture, take care of the relational space between you and others. These were words to live by, for millennia. I imagine these utterances falling from one mouth to another, generation after generation.

It is in Oceania’s library that I sought answers – and questions – about climate change. I find the overarching framework for understanding climate crisis within our cosmogonies.  This is the story of all stories.  Every cosmogony stories a deeply related and connected universe, whereby through the reproductive energy of attraction an evolutionary family of things is born. In this genealogically ordered universe, where everything is procreated through relationships of attraction, we find ourselves the younger sibling of all that precedes us: plants, rocks, skies, and sea. As younger siblings, our role is clear:  to serve and protect our elders. There are ancestral codes of behaviour – tapu – that dictate ‘right relationships’ in the spaces between all creation – the vā – which in turn creates a harmonic system.

A return to ourselves includes finding our ancient stories that once guided and informed human life. There is a story of Rata or Lata – island depending, but the story is the same. He is the spoiled son of a great chief raised by his grandmother. Set apart as special, after a series of self-centred, undisciplined and ego-driven actions, he is determined unfit for leadership. After an incident involving the killing other village boys, his grandmother, in desperation, hands him an enchanted axe and tells him the gruesome truth of his parent’s violent deaths, as well as who killed them. Fuelled with rage, shame and failure, he flees his village to avenge their deaths. Rushing into the forest, he finds the largest tree fit for building a voyaging canoe and hacks it in fury and frustration. Exhausted, he sleeps. When he wakes, the tree is standing again. Three times this scenario repeats. Finally, he pretends to sleep and watches in wonder as the spirits of the forest rebuild the tree through chant and song. He jumps up and yells out, confrontational and angry.

The spirits are solemn and sure. He has breached a code of respect, has not acknowledged that the tree has a valuable life and a wish to be appreciated. He has violated the relationship by forgetting the rituals and prayers that must be uttered. He has not acknowledged the life-force and divinity in all creation. He has forgotten that the tree is his relative.

Embarrassed, aware, humbled, he admits his fault. He atones. He carries out the rituals with sincerity.  He makes peace with the spirits of the forest. The tree is respectfully cut down. It lives on  as one of the most famous war canoes ever made. He avenges his father. He becomes a great chief.

This is a story about the danger of anthropocentrism, the belief that human beings are the most important entity in the universe. It is a reminder about our place in the family of things – that all the co-created have a wish to be appreciated. It includes guide-signs about the ways we must relate if we are to be in right relationship. How to nurture the vā, the relationship or the space between us and the co-created.

Our knowledge tells us that climate crisis is fundamentally a crisis of relationship. A breached relationship requires an examination of our conduct. It requires atonement and a return to right relationship.  It requires us attuning ourselves to the divine life-spark and essential energy state with all things – the mauri, the mauli.

Somewhat unbelievably, in my library search I find the original words to the chant the spirits sang to Rata. I share them now, reminding us all how connected we are. It speaks to me, of what we need most: a remembering, that we too are the trees, and that we need all the help we can get.

Rere mai, Rere mai
Te vai toto o ta’u ra’au
Homai heti, homai heta
Piripiri tapau tu
Tu e ra’au, tu e

Fly together, fly together,
the blood water of my tree
Come gently, come angry,
Join together green sap and strong gum
Make my tree upstanding again.

It is in
our mother tongues,
almost lost to us,
we will find our way back
to the future.

It is in our languages,
word by word,
rock by rock,
leaf by leaf,
brick by brick,
we find the building blocks of
another reality,
another possibility,
another way of being.

Word by word,
stone by stone,
leaf by leaf,
we return to talking trees,
a forest of upright
ancestors
speaking stories
with terrestrial tongues
holding up the sky.

Let our languages
give us ears,
so we may hear;
eyes, so we may see;
hearts, so that
so we can translate
the thudding rhythm
of all the
co-created.

Let us listen beyond sound,
reach back,
to before we had words.
Return to the earth’s most profound language –
seek the bright secrets in the light of the stars,
follow the signals in the moon’s movement,
understand the tongue of the tides,
listen to the enduring knowing of the stones,
feel the cleansing of water
that can still heal
everything it touches.

Let us attune to
mauri, mauli.
That unseen feeling-being-living-essence
of the earth itself.
That which connects us
to the mystery we are.

Let us call on our family of relatives to help us heal.

Kāinga, aiga, ‘aina,
Let the morning mist,
remind us,
with its cold fresh breath
that we are alive.

Dr Karlo Mila (MNZM) is a writer, researcher, poet, seeker, mother and the creator of Mana Moana.  Of Tongan, Samoan and Pākehā descent, her lifes work has been centred around the lived experiences of Pacific peoples.

Initially, this focused on contemporary life: generating academic, creative and political writing, as well as developing policy, strategy and ethics texts.  Her postdoctoral research sought solutions to contemporary problems by exploring the three thousand year-old knowledge resources of the ancestral Ocean peoples of the Moana.

She currently runs a leadership program that takes a year-long deep dive into the shared language, epistemology and ancestral wisdom of the Moana, prototyping these in practical ways in professional and personal contexts.  This is a journey of re-turn, re-cognition, re-membering and reawakening. It is a call to intergenerational leadership and deeply reconnecting to all that we are inter-dependent upon.

Mana Moana is one of many movements of indigenous renaissance.  At the core of this work is collective soul retrieval – culturally, spiritually, and environmentally – in a time of climate crisis, covid-19 and late capitalism.  It is her passion and purpose to better understand the octo-scopic visioning (matavalu, makawalu) of ancestral eyes – in order to see what they see – when seeking solutions to contemporary global problems.

Karlo writes, speaks publicly, performs poetry, teaches workshops and continues to explore Oceania’s library – the lab of the largest ocean in the world – seeking A.I. – ancestral intelligence.  She has won awards for her poetry, as well as national acknowledgement for her service to the Pacific community.  Her latest poetry book “Goddess Muscle” was published by Huia in 2020.  She lives in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, New Zealand, with her three sons.

The post We Too Are the Trees appeared first on English PEN.

When the wheels lock up beneath me, the van lifts and drifts towards the ditch. Instinct and 30 years of driving experience help me to stay calm. I let the van coast. The spray from the truck in front hits the windshield and temporarily blinds me. My 14-year-old daughter sits beside me in the front seat. I remember thinking: If we flip, she will bear the impact first.

When the wheels regain traction the road bites hard and sends the van planing towards the centre line. Cars thunder past me in the opposite direction.

Again, I hold on. I hold on and hold on as the seconds split into thousands, waiting to concertina. What else can I do but hold on?

When I was 15 and learning to drive, I lost control of the car on the motorway and we fishtailed across three lanes. It was rush hour and just crazy luck that no one else was around us. The car swung right and I pulled hard to the left while braking. Frantically, I overcorrected, but the steering wheel seemed to be completely detached from the vehicle. If it hadn’t been for my stepfather, who took over and held the wheel steady, I wouldn’t be around today to tell the story.

This time, there’s nobody else to take control of the wheel. On this day it’s just me, my daughter, and a pair of worn-out tyres I should have replaced months ago.

Somehow, we’re alright. The van doesn’t leave the road.

My brother smiles back at me from his photo on the dash. Awesome sis, his expression says.

And then: Concentrate, eh. 

Half an hour later we pull into Beurepairs in Taupō. The bill for two fresh tyres is $600, but they chuck in the wheel alignment for free. While we’re sitting on the curb waiting, my Dad rings, and I lie and say we’re fine, no issues.

Why worry him? He was up at 5am to see us off. He stood on the footpath in the dark and waved, even though he can’t see or hear anything these days, having lost his hearing aids while waiting for his publicly funded surgery to treat cataracts.

He’s happy I’m able to visit more often, but he’d be happier if I was sitting behind a computer instead of the wheel. Then again, he’s not one to talk. He’d be back on his digger shifting dirt in two seconds flat if he could see. At 73, he endures retirement like a teenager who’s been grounded.

He’s the reason I’m writing this story instead of getting some rest after finally making it back to Wellington, thirteen hours after we set off. I don’t have time, but, somehow, I need to make time. Or steal it.

I don’t have time to write an essay on the ‘broad thematic thread of climate and the environment from a Pacific perspective’, because I should be spending time with my 16-year-old son who’s been at home alone for the past ten days. Or at the very least I should unpack and put on the washing so that I can get up early tomorrow and familiarise myself with the paperwork in preparation for a board meeting in two days.

Besides, what can I possibly ‘transmit’ about this subject in a few thousand words that will convey the seriousness of all that needs to be said? How to compress this story, and at the same time expand it so it has meaning and depth?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned since getting on the road to visit communities affected by climate change up-close, it’s that there’s never enough time. Sifting through priorities, and knowing where to focus your energy, is an exercise in both strategy and stamina. Everything is urgent; everything needs to be done now.

My cousin, Nisha, says she’s sick and tired of being praised for her community’s resilience. ‘How long do we have to be resilient before someone actually does something?’ The floods in the valley where my father grew up, and where Nisha still lives, are every year worse and increasing in frequency. My Uncle Chocky, who’s in his sixties, gets flooded-in several times a year. He considers himself one of the lucky ones because his house is high enough to avoid inundation, but his driveway is repeatedly washed away, each time leaving him disconnected and cut off for days. Periodically, he fashions a bridge out of fallen logs so at least his moko can get across, but the Waiōmio swells and rises and follows her own sweet path.

Nisha’s been attending meetings of the Far North Flooding Committee for the past two years. As I write this, she’s collecting letters of support to win a position on that same committee, so that she can actually speak at the meetings.

It’s a theme I’ve heard over and over again as I’ve inched my way around the country. Local councils make rules and dish out resources and choose who they will listen to and when. Permits continue to be issued for all kinds of economic ventures and extractions, including mines, dumps, quarries, ‘acceptable’ levels of pollution, water bottling plants, roads, the live export of endangered species for five star restaurants overseas, and more. Opposition by Māori is ignored, while consents and resources are denied and withheld from whānau whose only objective is to be self-sufficient on their own land.

Consultation on critical environmental decisions routinely comes late, and often disingenuously –  which is to say, with a kind of placating tolerance of the pleas of those most affected and most invested. You have to wonder if it’s deliberate, when people like Nisha are forced to drop whatever they’re doing, forego income, find childcare, take leave, pay for petrol, and drive hundreds of kilometres in the dark and the rain in order to have any chance of being within earshot of those who operate the levers of power.

I keep asking myself: what is the point of the refrain ‘amplify Indigenous voices’ if the people who need to hear aren’t listening?

There’s both irony and arrogance sitting at the core of it. When it suits, indigenous knowledge is actively sought, tokenised, trivialised, pressed onto the pages of policy documents and government strategies under a brand that looks green and sounds culturally evolved. In a crisis, or following a natural disaster, iwi are always there to clean up and look after the people, not just practically but spiritually. Yet, away from the cameras and the rhetoric, the reality stinks: more than half our rivers are polluted. We have one of the worst rates of extinction in the world. Millions of dollars are invested in sea walls to protect the properties of the wealthy, while whole families are forced to live in cars and one-bedroom motels.

I know it’s problematic to amass such a complex set of environmental, economic, social, and political issues and proclaim they’re one and the same, but I’m a poet not a scientist. Besides, it feels like stupidity – or at least wilful ignorance – to speak as though they aren’t. Indigenous people have always known – and cautioned – about the interconnectedness of all things.

My daughter, riding shotgun through acres upon acres of farmland that was once native forest, will challenge me if she thinks I’m oversimplifying things by blaming all the problems of the world on colonisation. But the distance between this country’s soaring carbon emissions and the landmarks commemorating the battle sites where Māori fought to protect their land from invasion by the British Crown is but a breath.

For iwi Māori, this crisis began a long time ago. The day is new, but this road is old. What the modern world calls a climate crisis is nothing more than colonisation dressed up in drag. It began with the brutal dispossession of our land and intensified with the stripping of our language and the destruction of our land’s native biodiversity. Colonisation has been pursued overtly and by stealth, in legislation that undermined and disrupted our traditional social and economic way of life – sending people like my Dad to build the roads to pave the way for someone else’s prosperity at the expense of his own health.

The climate crisis is the housing crisis is the mental health crisis. We are unwell because Papatūānuku is unwell. What’s coming is worse. How can we talk about solving this sickness if we don’t acknowledge its fundamental causes? Greed, waste, the accumulation of individual wealth, an arrogant belief in the superiority of ‘man’ over every other living organism, and the perception of land as a resource to be wrung out like a dirty cloth and then discarded.

The solutions are local and specific. But what does that look like in practice? So many Māori would go home if we could. Some are already on the move, even if it means living in makeshift houses off the grid and bringing in water by hand to keep the kai in the māra flourishing.

Sovereignty and self-sufficiency are ancient forms of wealth, but many don’t have the option because the land their ancestors fought to protect can’t be wrenched out of private ownership, or because house prices are completely unaffordable, or because a highway has been carved straight through the heart of it, or because the land has been, for years, ill-treated and abused.

Then there are those who don’t want to go home because it hurts. My Dad prefers to talk about home rather than go there. His memories are kinder than the reality. In his memories, the eels still run and the rorowai are fat. The homestead stands upright instead of leaning sideways. The garden is abundant with sweet kūmara rather than choking with gorse.

And then there are those, like my brother, who die because they cannot not find their way home. My brother died during the second Covid lockdown from exhaustion and depletion of spirit, because his life had lost all sense of meaning and purpose. The official documents declare he died by his own hand, as though ‘loss of faith’ is not a valid cause of death. Has anyone measured the correlation between the rising tide and our rate of suicide?

As Māori, we are often praised for our adaptability and resilience. And it’s true. I’ve seen it, in community after community. I am in awe of the ways in which our people are holding on and holding on, steady hands at the wheel in uncertain conditions. This is work we know how to do. We have hundreds of years of experience mobilising during crisis.

We know our lands better than anyone, not just because we’ve been here for centuries, but because observation – or, ‘science’ – is ingrained in Mātauranga Māori. We do our research and invest in and adopt new technologies when their benefit is clear. We protest and object government decisions when the evidence warns us that the outcomes will be harmful.

We do the miles to be present in the rooms where decisions are made with or without us, and if we don’t have time, we steal it – from sleep, if necessary. Always, the work is done with the wellbeing of future and past generations in mind – those riding shotgun, who will bear the impact first if we don’t stay focused, or, worse, allow ourselves to panic.

The struggle, as much as anything, is planning for the future while also trying to fix and recover from past environmental trauma, at the same time as fighting to oppose further, compounding poor and inequitable decisions – all within a system that, by design, was never set up to listen to us. It’s like being in a car with a teenager at the wheel who has no lived experience driving defensively and, worse, who thinks they know everything because they’ve studied the road code.

It can be frustrating, but when I think of people like my Uncle Chocky, I can’t stay mad for long. Like me, he suffered loss during lockdown last year – his wife of 38 years, the love of his life. At my brother’s graveside he sang for me the song he sang for her, Elvis Presley’s Make the World Go Away. Some days, that’s exactly where it feels we are heading.

In his letter of support for Nisha, which Uncle Chocky asked me to type up on the computer, he signed off with a Dad joke – because the English language is nothing if not good at puns, and because not losing faith is crucial, and because, perhaps, in the end, the best way to make people listen is to make them laugh.

Nadine Anne Hura is a creative non-fiction writer and poet of Ngāti Hine, Ngāpuhi, and Pākehā whakapapa. Her essays explore themes of language, biculturalism, identity, and belonging and have appeared in e-Tangata, The Spinoff, and Te Whē. She is a member of the board of Te Hā o Ngā Pou Kaituhi Māori and is a passionate advocate for new and emerging Māori writers.

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