KARANGA MAI TE PŌ
JUNE 2024 by TEAH CARLSON, RACHEL JANE LIEBERT & TIA REIHANA
Following is an extract from an academic article written by the co-leads of The Tīpuna Project after conversations with and makings by the other Māori and Pākehā co-researchers. The article is part of a special issue in Compass on freedom struggles within the academy, edited by Puleng Segalo and Michelle Fine.
In Aotearoa, ordinary talk of tīpuna is not of genealogy or lineage but of whakapapa – both a noun and a verb of, once again, never ending beginnings. Whakapapa encompasses not only the beginnings of passed (not past) generations of humans and non-humans but also the ‘dark interstices’ in-between (Mika, 2015; Paraha, 2020). These spaces of in-between are the third, the vā, where connections, relationships, stories are. It is this tangling fibrous weave, not ‘individual’ people nor even ‘lines’ of blood, that weave, that whakapapa.
In The Tīpuna Project, then, as all our eyes and I’s get tugged and pulled by the colonial episteme, we call on darkness and te pō to help us be in the cracks of not just coloniality but also of whakapapa. Those in-between ‘borderland’ spaces of radical potential (Anzaldúa, 1987), where what matters is our becoming together, our ‘poetics of relation (Glissant, 1990), our ‘entanglement’ (Akomolafe & Ladha, 2017) - all called upon as tactics for decolonisation.
However these cracks are also reminding us, that, in the words of Puerto-Rican activist-scholar Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2016), there is no ‘place for laziness’ in this work – there is colonial in the anti-colonial and anti-colonial in the colonial. Darkness and te pō protect us from these and other binaries and colonial leanings toward categorisation and reductionism (Glissant, 1990). They blur the edges of things, merge things together, foreground&background, individual&context, now&then, me&you. The eye and the I are lost. Things shift shape, shapeshift, allowing contradictions to cohabitate, sheltering the plural and the more-than-human (Mika, 2020; Stengers, 2012).
The desire.
The rua.
The mana, the mama.
The worms.
The whispers.
The witches.
The queers.
The prayers.
Darkness invites a world of lively forces that question, tease, disrupt, animate and crack our work together, tricksters that refuse to be caught (dead) in a think-net.
In turn, we move slowly, tentatively and carefully, with uncertainty, not seeing where we are going so much as sensing the way, expecting only that we will bump into things, including each other, and that we will likely stumble if not fall. Any lurking colonial goal of mastery, of solution in the ‘tidy activist sense’ (Akomolafe & Ladha, 2017), continually displaced by a non-linear, loopy path of mistakes and failures and trying again. An onto-epistemology, a praxis of not doing Knowing, having Knowledge, being Knower, where we do not (cannot) seek to simply move forward – or even backward – so much as awkward (Akomolafe, 2024).
In turn(ing), we feel awkward. We feel lost. We feel dark.
And
we
s
p s
i
pr l p
a
i s
pr l
a i
i s r
pr l s l
a i
i spa s a
pr lrp
a
i ai l
r r s
a
As we spiral, we spin, sometimes we realise we are dancing.
Sometimes we realise we are writhing.
And that we need to sit.
Talk, whisper, cry (sometimes with laughter).
Together: If there were one prescribed method that we are employing, it is whitiwhiti kōrero, spiral dialogue, developed by Māori researchers to actively take the dynamic of control away from the researcher. Instead, through constant reflection and negotiation with others, meaning is woven in the collective (Bishop & Glynn, 1999).
But to call on darkness is not to declare a methodology so much as move to the cracks – to seek entanglement, not (just) Enlightenment – senses heightened, (more) protected from binaries, urgency, mastery so we can try and be (with) our shimmering otherworldly guides, our ancestors, our tīpuna, both because of and in spite of the colonial episteme.
And it is to move to the caves,
Hine-nui-te-pō,
the slowing of time, a retreat, to rest,
a cool shelter,
to preserve the paintings on the wall.
As we have listened to the echo………
Tangata Whenua lets rest, karanga mai te pō.
Tangata whenua spend so much of our time/labour/attention doing partnership work, decolonising at every hui, every sentence, every research activity, having to give, highlight, spotlight, paint banners, protest, challenge, be challenged, to be the lone Māori voice – to explain the ordinary. We are trying to rest, sneak in a daydream, but we are exhausted, numb, hurt, overwhelmed, underwhelmed.
Māori methodologies aren't separate from our everyday lives of relationality. It's not an extractive, step by step process; it's a return to Tāne, to push up against the sky and the earth to honour in the between. When we travel from universities into community we don't arrive as institutions, we arrive in service. To learn from communities. They are expert. We are translators, from western worlds, with agendas in (re)indigenisation. So when we lean on PAR as a means to describe a process knowing its limitations. In this weaving we act then give ourselves/each other permission – to rest, unravel, sigh, swear, laugh, cry and bleed in the cave…
As the thighs of Hine-nui-te-pō squeezed the life from Māui-tikitiki-a-taranga, the shapeshifter/trickster, we have realised we are PAR and more, our lives are legacies of action and participation – we are power, mana wāhine, and we need more of us.
Karanga mai is more than calling on the darkness, it means to invoke and embrace our natural cycles.
(We) have been violently placed out of sync with the environment for the benefit of a capitalist agenda – facing the commercialisation of education/knowledge and we are overdue to rebalance.
Our atua rae, atua wāhine, tīpuna whaea are this rhythm.
Hine-Ti-Tama is the dawn, their call is seen as the glow before the sunrise, an affirmation of aroha. Their karanga is heard in the song of the manu. As the sun rises Hine-Ti-Tama evolves into Hine-Ata, Hine, of the reborn morning. Their dominion is the creation of the new day. The day continues to grow as they reach full flourishment. They become Hine-Ranui. Hine of the great Sun. This is their zenith of power. They change again and become Hine-Ahiahi. Hine of the burning fires. They bring comfort, warmth and coming together. Day continues and they change again to Hine-nui-te-Po. The Great Hine of Night. Now they are our Great Hine of Death. They welcome us with a different karanga. Te Karanga o te Mate. The call of death. This continues until the next dawn when the cycle starts again. (Nā Timoti Pahi).
Te pō is us. It is deeper, richer and more fibrous than night, darkness, nocturnal – it is breath.
In the words of Pāpā Hohepa Delamare: The mystery of all creation is the goddess breath. She takes a piece of earth & blows it into space. Her life force creates the universe. The human mind, with many illusions, thinks it is important. If we could understand her neutrality, we would know that we are nothing but potential that came from the exhale of a wondrous god.
As descendants (also) of Hineamaru and wayfarer of the physical body, the relationship to whenua and Moana nui a Kiwa is paramount. They create danced narratives that reflect currents of waterways as a conscious and tangible reality... as it flows under skin... as salt in my/our tears... in the maramataka and internal experiences that work alongside rhythms of the moon; in reflection to the migration of my tūpuna on waka; and .... in the pūrākau (cultural stories) of ātua (our spiritual beings and deities and the ‘original activists’). For their stories are activisms, or – as Samoan artist and general bloody trouble-maker, shaker and breaker Rosanna Raymond (2021) advances in her work around Oceanic methodological engagements – Te Vā ‘Activāations’ (the intrinsic relationships and in-between spaces coded with potentiality), offering culturally relevant pathways to remember, re-imagine and revitalise.
And so, as we sit, writhe, dance in the cave, we gently shovel place and space as means to
recentre.
And to re-centre asks for us to re-focus and even re-prioritise an already heavy bureaucratic collage of what we (including the ‘we’ of this piece) think we may need to be socially cohesive and politically astute. Graham Hingangaroa Smith’s (2015) articulation of ‘conscientisation’, and the revitalization and rejuvenation of a Māori imagination, challenges us to move beyond the engrossing politics of distraction that place colonisation at the centre of argument, not the needs of Indigenous peoples…
References
Akomolafe, B. (2024). We will dance with mountains. https://www.dancingwithmountains.com. Last accessed April 2024.
Akomolafe, B., & Ladha, A. (2017). Perverse particles, entangled monsters and psychedelic pilgrimages: Emergence as an onto-epistemology of not-knowing. ephemera: theory & politics in organization, 17(4)
Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera. Aunt Lute Press.
Bishop, R., & Glynn, T. (1999). Researching in Maori contexts: An interpretation of participatory consciousness. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 20(2), 167-182.
Glissant, É. (1970). Poetics of relation. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.
Hingangaroa Smith, G. (2015). The dialectic relation of theory and practice in the development of Kaupapa Maori Praxis. Kaupapa rangahau: A reader, 17.
Maldonado-Torres, N. (2016). Outline of ten theses on coloniality and decoloniality.
Mika, C. (2015). Counter-colonial and philosophical claims: An indigenous observation of Western philosophy. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 47(11), 1136-1142.
Mika, C. (2021). Subjecting ourselves to madness: A Maori approach to unseen instruction. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 53(7), 719-727. Conversations in Kaupapa Maori, 97.
Paraha, T. (2020). A choreopoetics of Te Pō. Ka Mate Ka Ora: A New Zealand Jounral of Poetry and Poetics, 18, 29-41.
Raymond, R. (2021). Conser.VĀ.tion|Acti.VĀ.tion Museums, the Body and Indigneous Moana Art Practice. https://openrepository.aut.ac.nz/items/54fb9b6f-b123-4ada-aacc-74d8ba83b35f. Last accessed, April 2024.
Stengers, I. (2012). Reclaiming animism. E-flux., 36. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61245/reclaiming-animism/. Last accessed, April 2024.
