Home: Here to Stay

By Huia Publishers

This is a collection of twelve academic essays that consider understandings of home and the impact of dominant societies on indigenous societies and their homes. The book covers home and language preservation, homelessness, retention of land, tobacco use in the home, loss of home through trauma and natural disaster, ageing and health, and the meaning of home. This is the third book in the Nga Pae o te Maramatanga Edited Collections series. Previous titles include vol. 1 Maori and Social Issues and vol. 2 The Value of the Maori Language.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Huia Publishers
• Release date: Dec 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781775502722

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Zealandia to Aotearoa: How Permanent is Home?

Lead author: Daniel Hikuroa, Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, New Zealand’s Māori Centre of Research Excellence hosted by the University of Auckland

Abstract

How permanent is home? When referring to home from overseas Māori mean the landmass of Aotearoa New Zealand. In that context we have notions of permanence, of stability, of tūrangawaewae, of groundedness, of place, of belonging, of connection. But how real are those notions and through what ways of knowing are they understood? In human timeframes they are more or less true, but have been seriously challenged by the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes in Ōtautahi. Furthermore, in addition to the meso-scale immediate ongoing landslides, volcanoes and earthquakes reconfiguring Aotearoa in human memory, in geological time Aotearoa has also been extremely mobile. Up until 450 million years ago Aotearoa lay in the northern hemisphere, and about 30 million years ago Aotearoa very nearly drowned altogether. The context of the permanence of home provides the basis for an account of the geological history of home starting with the concept of Zealandia, a chunk of continental crust upon which Aotearoa sits, and relating its dynamic nature in geological time to concepts of permanence in human timeframes. Mātauranga Māori reveals insights into alternative ways of knowing and conceptualising home, the permanence of home, and the immense timeframes associated with the creation of land.

Keywords: transient; Zealandia; permanence; geological time; home; dynamic

Introduction

Home is an emotive word that evokes many different themes simultaneously, themes that often include place, connection and scale – home is Aotearoa, home is a region, a city, a town, a house. Home can be plural. How one defines home at any given time is often based upon relativity – home from overseas is Aotearoa, home when considered from within Aotearoa might be a whare (house) or a marae (meeting area of a Māori kinship group, including buildings and courtyard). Regardless of our multiple definitions of home, we have coincident concepts of home as permanent, as stable, as tūrangawaewae (a place to stand, where one has right to residence), as grounded, as place, as belonging, as connection. The permanence of home is inextricably linked to the land, spanning the physical connection of the foundations of a house on the land through to the spiritual connection based on whakapapa (genealogy) and our kinship-based relationship with Papatūānuku (Earth Mother and wife of Ranginui – all living things originate from them). If home is one of the manifestations of the relationship people have with the land, and vice versa, let us consider the following whakatauākī (proverb) as a framework for exploring the multiplicities and nuances of that relationship:

Toitū he whenua, whatungarongaro he tangata.

Land is permanent, people disappear

In the chapter, I will explore this whakatauākī through geological, societal and cultural lenses. The whakatauākī provides the framework for my analysis of the concepts of home being linked with land, the permanence of land, and the non-permanence of people. When thinking about home from an individual or whānau perspective, we think about it in the context of a human lifetime, or perhaps two or three generations. In that timeframe home has a permanence. But if we consider home in terms of hapū (kinship group, sub-tribe), iwi (nation, tribe), tipuna (ancestor) or even Hawai‘iki (traditional Māori place of origin) the notion of home begins to encompass longer timeframes, more akin to geological timeframes, and our assumption of permanence comes into question.

Aotearoa is my home. I will present first a scientific understanding of Aotearoa New Zealand, starting at the beginning of time, through to the formation of a planet called Earth and a precis of the geological history of Aotearoa with a brief summary on the permanence, or otherwise, of Aotearoa as a physical landmass. Second I will provide an exploration of parallel ideas of time, creation and landscape found in mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge). An investigation into the basis of many of the Māori words associated with home will be presented before a synthesis of the ideas and concepts covered in this chapter is discussed.

Scientific theory

Universe and Earth Creation

The universe is all of spacetime and everything that exists therein, including all planets, stars, galaxies, the contents of intergalactic space, the smallest subatomic particles, and all matter and energy. The Big Bang Theory is the prevailing cosmological model that describes the formation and early development of the universe. It’s one of several scientific models that attempts to explain why the universe is the way it is. The theory makes several predictions, many of which have been proven through observational data. As a result, it’s the most popular and accepted theory regarding our universe’s development. It is the explanation most consistent with observations and offers a comprehensive explanation for a broad range of phenomena, within an empirical paradigm. The most important concept to understand about the Big Bang is expansion. Many people think that the Big Bang is about a moment in which all the matter and energy in the universe was concentrated in a tiny point. Then this point exploded, shooting matter across space, and the universe was born. In fact, the Big Bang explains the expansion of space itself, which in turn means everything contained within space is spreading apart from everything else. At the earliest moments of the Big Bang, all of the matter, energy and space was compressed to an area of zero volume and infinite density. Cosmologists call this a singularity. Importantly a common misperception about the theory is that it describes the origin of the universe. That’s not quite right. The Big Bang is an attempt to explain how the universe developed from a very tiny, dense state into what it is today. It doesn’t attempt to explain what initiated the creation of the universe, or what came before the Big Bang or even what lies outside the universe. To confuse things more, the concept of ‘multiverses’ – a hypothetical set of infinite or finite possible universes and an old idea first postulated by William James in 1895 ( James 1895) – has gained traction in recent times. Multiverses have also been referred to as alternate or quantum universes, parallel worlds or dimensions and alternative realities or timelines.

The Big Bang occurred about 14 billion years ago and from nothing it began to expand rapidly and continues to expand today (Cooper 2008). Giant clouds of primordial elements (hydrogen, helium, lithium) coalesced through gravity to form galaxies and stars. Around five billion years ago an interstellar cloud of gas and dust began to collapse, probably under the force of its own gravity. As it shrank it began to spin, which caused the cloud to flatten into a disc shape and form spiral patterns. Eventually, the compression accompanying the collapse created high temperatures and pressures in the centre of the cloud sufficient to initiate nuclear reactions, ultimately forming the sun and planets (Pipkin et al. 2005) of the solar system in which earth is found. The largest known objects in the universe are galaxies. Our solar system of planets revolves around the sun in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way Galaxy, about 30,000 light years from its centre.

Cosmic time refers to all the time from the formation of the universe – around 14 billion years ago, and geological time refers to the time from when planet Earth formed about 4.6 billion years ago (Cooper 2008). The sheer immensity of geological time is a difficult concept to convey. An analogy with the twenty-four hour clock – with 24 hours representing all of geological time – is useful to gain a perspective of the vast scales of time. New Zealand’s oldest rocks, which formed 510 million years ago, appeared just two and a half hours ago, the asteroid impact that led to the ultimate demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago occurred about 23 minutes ago (Cooper 2008), and the Polynesian peopling of the Pacific from ~3500 years, occured less than half a second ago.

However, the postulations for what existed before the Big Bang is a little more theoretical, as we have nothing that we can observe to base our hypotheses on. The simplest explanation comes from Einstein’s theory of relativity. A planet’s hefty mass warps time, making time run a tiny bit slower for a human on Earth’s surface than a satellite in orbit. The difference is too small to notice, but time runs even more slowly for someone standing next to a large boulder than it does for a person standing alone in a field. The pre-Big Bang singularity possessed all the mass in the universe, effectively bringing time to a standstill. Following this line of logic, time only came into being as that primordial singularity expanded toward its current size and shape (Lamb 2013). Thus, before the Big Bang the current thinking believes the universe was timeless, dimensionless, nothingness and had infinite potential.

Earth

At the beginning, the Earth was simply a ball of material and through time this has become differentiated into a concentrically layered, spherical structure (Pipkin et al. 2005). Earth’s main features – its continents and ocean floors – are not static. The earth’s surface is divided into about fifteen major segments, or tectonic plates, that move slowly about on the soft, plastic rock of the underlying mantle. At mid-ocean ridges, molten material wells up to the surface and cools. This creates a new sea floor that slowly moves away from the ridges a few centimetres per year. Where two plates meet and collide, old parts of the ocean floor sink back down. Embedded in the moving plates, the continents constantly drift together or split apart – endlessly changing the continental configuration of the planet (Pipkin et al. 2005).

Zealandia

Exploration of the sea floor has revealed that the land we now call Aotearoa was once more extensive than it is today. The long, narrow, mountainous landmass of Aotearoa is merely the highlands of a submerged continent called Zealandia. Extending to the northwest of the country are large, shallow continental shelf areas – the Challenger Plateau and Lord Howe Rise and to the southeast are the Chatham Rise and Campbell Plateau (Wright & Wood 2008). The land that now forms the islands we call Aotearoa are the topographically highest points of a nearly 6 million square kilometre continent called Zealandia, composed of suites of temporally and spatially distinct rock brought together through time via geological processes (Wright & Wood 2008). Aotearoa represents slightly less than 5 percent of the total area of Zealandia. The submarine landmass is almost half the size of Australia and some twenty times larger than the emergent land of Aotearoa (Wright & Wood 2008).

Gondwana

From about 510–120 million years ago, rocks that now make up the basement of Aotearoa were being formed on the eastern edge of the supercontinent Gondwana (Mortimer et al. 2008). Over millions of years, rivers carried sediments to the sea, and onshore and offshore volcanoes deposited ash on the sea floor. Terrestrial and marine flora and fauna were buried within the sediment and ash and hardened into the rocks now forming most of the basement of Aotearoa. For almost 400 million years Gondwana was a permanent landmass.

Types of Rock

Much of Te Wai Pounamu (South Island, New Zealand – literally greenstone waters) is made up of a rock known as greywacke (Mortimer et al. 2008). In the west and south of Te Wai Pounamu, the rocks have been transformed by heat and pressure into a rock called schist. Offshore drilling shows that the same rock type that makes up much of the Southern Alps underlies the continental shelves as well. Greywacke also forms much of Te Ika-a-Māui (North Island, New Zealand – literally the fish of Māui), although large areas are covered by layers of newer rock, such as volcanic rock in the Taupō and Waiariki areas (central North Island and Rotorua Lakes district). Another type of rock called limestone covers significant parts of the remainder of Te Wai Pounamu and Te Ika-a-Māui (Campbell & Hutching 2007). Both greywacke and limestone contain marine fossils that show that the land was once under the sea. If one knows the language, these rocks read like the diary of Aotearoa’s ancient past.

Breaking Away

About 150 million years ago hot rock began to well up beneath Gondwana. This caused volcanic eruptions, large cracks (rift valleys) opened up and Zealandia began to break away from the Gondwana supercontinent. By 85 million years ago new ocean floor was being formed between Zealandia and Gondwana, and Zealandia moved into the Pacific Ocean. As Zealandia moved away it cooled down and began to gradually submerge, much of it sinking beneath the sea, and by 25 million years ago less than 20 percent of the present-day landmass was emergent (Campbell & Landis 2008).

A New Land

About 25 million years ago Zealandia began to split apart. Still mostly under the sea, it now lay at the junction of the Australian and Pacific plates. Close to the plate boundary, part of the sunken continent was pushed up, ultimately creating the land area of Aotearoa. For the past 5 million years a huge tearing motion in Te Wai Pounamu has separated once continuous rocks by around 460 kilometres – strata in the Catlins (on the southeast coast of Te Wai Pounamu) can be matched with their once contiguous counterparts in northwest Nelson (Cooper & Norris 2008). Zealandia lies across two moving tectonic plates, the Pacific and Australian plates – segments of the earth’s crust. As these plates collide, rocks are being compressed and pushed up, creating the hills and mountains of the Southern Alps in Te Wai Pounamu and the Raukūmara, Ruahine, Kaweka, Kaimanawa and Tararua Ranges in Te Ika-a-Māui.

In the last 1.8 million years, huge changes have created the landscape of today. The Southern Alps have risen thousands of metres and volcanoes have violently erupted. In the ice ages, glaciers moved rock and carved out lake basins and valleys. During the ice ages so much seawater was locked up in the polar ice caps and on continental masses, the sea level dropped by as much as 100 metres below the present-day level. The landmass of Aotearoa was significantly different during such cold periods – comprising more or less one long island stretching north and east of, but not including, Manawatāwhi (Three Kings Islands) in the north to about 50 kilometres beyond Rakiura (Stewart Island) in the south. At that time it would have been possible to walk from north of Te Rerenga Wairua (Cape Reinga – literally leaping place of the spirits) to south of Rakiura. Rēkohu (Chatham Islands) remained stoic and isolated to the east.

Māori people who settled Aotearoa New Zealand came to a dramatic and restless land, with rugged mountains, active volcanoes and frequent earthquakes. It is a country with a complex geological history. Its bedrock is a geological jigsaw puzzle. A geological understanding of New Zealand’s past and its lively geological activity has come only in recent decades, as scientists have developed a theory of the global workings of the earth’s crust – a concept called plate tectonics.

New Zealand – A Collision Zone

In Te Ika-a-Māui, the boundary between the plates lies off the East Coast marked by the Hikurangi Trough at the edge of the continental shelf. In the Marlborough region, the boundary cuts diagonally across Te Wai Pounamu to the West Coast. It then continues southwestward along the Alpine Fault, and runs back out to sea near Milford Sound. The two moving plates are colliding at a glancing angle. In the process, the sunken continent Zealandia is crumpling to form the land that now projects above the sea. In the north, the ocean floor at the surface of the Pacific Plate to the east plunges beneath the continental shelf off the eastern Te-Ika-a Māui. As it does so, it pushes up the overlying rocks and sediments, creating the hilly terrain of the eastern Te-Ika-a-Māui. In Te Wai Pounamu, the two plates are directly colliding along the Alpine Fault. This causes a much greater uplift, forming the Southern Alps. At the same time, the country is being wrenched apart. Along the Alpine Fault in Te Wai Pounamu, the West Coast region west of the plate boundary is moving northeast at 2–3 metres per century, relative to the Southern Alps on the eastern side (Berryman et al. 2008). As this movement continues in the future, Te Wai Pounamu will become more elongated and may even tear in two.

So in brief summary, Aotearoa’s geology records the story of the country’s origin, birth, constant change and ongoing growth. The immensity of time represented by the geology, which is part of a planet, in a solar system, in the universe, is difficult to convey. Aotearoa the landmass, upon which we superimpose our ideas of, and construct both dwellings on and narratives of, home, is both ancient and dynamic, yet simultaneously young, with new land forming, and permanent. In the following section we explore Māori ways of knowing and relating with the land and consider them within a context of the whakatauākī:

Toitū he whenua, whatungarongaro he tangata.

Land is permanent, people disappear.

Mātauranga Māori

Mātauranga Māori, according to the online Māori Dictionary, is the body of knowledge originating from Māori ancestors, including the worldview and perspectives, Māori creativity and cultural practices. A scientific approach to understanding uses the scientific method, is generally reductionist and strives for accuracy, absolutes or reducing uncertainty. Kuhn (1962) posits that scientists work within and against the background of an unquestioned theory or set of beliefs – a paradigm. A Māori approach to understanding employs certain methodologies, within a Māori worldview. The Rev. Māori Marsden (2003: 56) provides a definition of worldview:

Cultures pattern perceptions of reality into conceptualisations of what they perceive reality to be: of what is to be regarded as actual, probable, possible or impossible. These conceptualisations form what is termed the worldview of a culture. The worldview is the central systematisation of conceptions of reality to which members of its culture assent and from which stems their value system. The worldview lies at the very heart of the culture, touching, interacting with and strongly influencing every aspect of the culture.

Marsden (2003) further states that knowledge represents a doorway through which humans apprehend their reality and make sense of it. In this section we will explore mātauranga Māori concepts pertaining to creation and the understanding of landscapes and the processes that form them – concepts that in part parallel the scientific explanations of the creation of the universe and geological understandings. First, concepts of the immensity of time and the beginnings of the universe will be discussed. Then an exploration of kōrero pertaining to Ngatoro-i-rangi and Rūaumoko will be undertaken through a geological lens. An investigation of words associated with home will follow and the conclusion of this section will present some examples of when the land did not behave in a permanent fashion.

Io, Te Kore, Te Po, Te Ao Mārama

A Māori explanation of creation will be presented, as it is from this basis that ultimately the multiple concepts of home exist. A Māori epistemology of creation – Io, i Te Kore, te pō, te ao mārama – was of course developed both independently of and using empirical techniques but nevertheless has some parallels and commonalities with the ideas and explanations that science uses to describe the creation of the universe and earth, as discussed earlier. What is described as ‘the universe’ in scientific theory is conceptualised in mātauranga Māori as ‘process’ and constructed around a whakapapa framework. Marsden (2003: 16) states,

In the beginning Io existed in the realm of Te Korekore, in his passive state as Io-matamoe, Io-mata-ane, Io-kore-tē-whiwhia (Io of the slumbering coutenance, Io of the calm and tranquil countenance, Io the unchanging and unadulterated in whom there is no confusion and inconsistency). Nothing existed before Io, for he alone was pre-existent as Io-matua-kore, ‘the parentless’, as Io-matua, ‘the first parent’, as Io-mau, ‘the Io precursor’, as Io-pūkenga, ‘the first cause’, as Io-taketake, ‘the foundation of all things’.

Io existed in Te Korekore, the first state of existence and the realm of non-being and being – the realm of potential being, the infinite realm (Marsden 2003). Nothing was created from nothingness. In the state of Te Korekore there existed the endless potential for being but there was no organised form. From Te Kore all things were developed or created. Io shaped every living thing from the elements in Te Korekore according to a pattern (Marsden 2003). Te Po (at