Maori Philosophy

Indigenous Thinking from Aotearoa

Georgina Stewart

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350101685
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Covering the symbolic systems and worldviews of the Indigenous peoples of Aotearoa, New Zealand, this book is a concise introduction to Maori philosophy. It addresses core philosophical issues including Maori notions of the self, the world, epistemology, the form in which Maori philosophy is conveyed, and whether or not Maori philosophy has a teleological agenda. Introducing students to key texts, thinkers and themes, the book includes: - A Maori-to-English glossary and an index
- Accessible interpretations of primary source material
- Teaching notes, and reflections on how the studied material engages with contemporary debates
- End-of-chapter discussion questions that can be used in teaching
- Comprehensive bibliographies and guided suggestions for further reading. Maori Philosophy is an ideal text for students studying World Philosophies, or anyone who wishes to use Indigenous philosophies or methodologies in their own research and scholarship.

1

Finding Māori philosophy

Chapter outline

Defining Māori philosophy

Māori philosophy and World Philosophies: Writing this book

My right to write about Māori philosophy

Sources and links to social and intellectual history

Te reo Māori: The Māori language in this book

The slippery path between imperialism and romanticism

Synopsis of chapters

Questions for discussion or research

The term ‘Māori philosophy’ provokes the meaning of ‘philosophy’ just as the phrase ‘Māori science’ – regarded by scientists as a ‘contradiction in terms’ – problematises the definition of ‘science’. I began to think about the potential of Māori philosophy during my doctoral studies of Māori science curriculum (Stewart, 2007), since many accounts of ‘Indigenous science’ (also known as, for example, native science) seemed better suited to being described as philosophy, rather than science: frequently they exhibited apparent confusion between the ‘facts’ of science and the ‘values’ of Indigenous knowledge. I became interested in the idea that every form of knowledge, whether science, Indigenous knowledge, education, or whatever, has a theoretical base serving as its ‘philosophy of knowledge’ or epistemology, and the implications of this idea for investigating Māori knowledge. Almost every comparison between science and Indigenous or Māori knowledge I read seemed to miss this point: I found models with intersecting circle (Venn) diagrams and/or two-column lists of attributes, but very few comparisons between the philosophy of science and the philosophy of Indigenous knowledge. Attributes are surface features, but philosophy concerns the essence or nature of a body or form of knowledge – it is the ground on which that knowledge is built. To seek to understand the philosophy of any form of knowledge is to explore the boundaries between different forms of knowledge. This book contains an account of what I have found out by investigating these questions in relation to Māori philosophy, in and for education, broadly conceived.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a brief introduction to the ideas that are central to this book. The section below gives a high-level conceptual definition of Māori philosophy. The following sections of the chapter explain aspects of the approach used in writing this book: its position in a book series on World Philosophies; the links between Māori philosophy and other intellectual traditions and fields of practice; a personal introduction focusing on my position in relation to Māori philosophy; the importance of te reo Māori (the Māori language) in this work; and a discussion of what I call the ‘slippery path’ between imperialism and romanticism. The chapter ends with a brief precis of the remaining six chapters.

Defining Māori philosophy

Māori philosophy is found in Māori discourses about the relationships between people, things, the environment and the world. Takirirangi Smith (2000) re-phrases the term ‘Māori philosophy’ as ‘tangata whenua philosophy’ and clarifies that by ‘Māori’ he means someone who can identify as tangata whenua through ‘whakapapa kōrero’. Māori philosophy is therefore a central plank of identity for Māori people. Writing and reading about Māori philosophy are therefore politically significant activities. According to Smith, tangata whenua philosophy is made up of ‘whakapapa kōrero’ which are

• important narratives of identity;

• a knowledge base for the survival and welfare of the group;

• linked to major tribal artworks such as meeting houses;

• philosophical narratives invoked on important occasions to uphold the mana of the group; and

• discourses that rationalise existence through interconnectedness and identification of relationships between things that exist. (T. Smith, 2000)

Māori philosophy belongs to a different spatial and temporal reality from that of European philosophy. Time and space in Māori philosophy are unified: in the Māori language, separate words for space and time do not exist. Therefore, past events do not lose their significance, and ancestors can collapse the space-time continuum to be co-present with their descendants. The texts of pre-colonial Māori philosophy were found in the natural phenomena of ‘place’ as in ancestral localities of tribal occupation, interpreted through the senses, and recorded in human-made artefacts and taonga. Knowledge in Māori terms is not restricted to the physical senses, but includes knowledge obtained through intuition and dreams (C. W. Smith, 2000). This ‘other’ Māori reality has been marginalised and attenuated over time, but has never been fully stamped out. Being tangata whenua has meaning for a Māori person today, and one way of expressing that meaning is through Māori philosophy, as I will attempt to show through the chapters of this book.

Māori philosophy and World Philosophies: Writing this book

I understand ‘World philosophies’ as a descriptor or umbrella term for ways of thinking that arise from the cultures of the world’s many Indigenous peoples, including Māori philosophy as a theorisation of Māori language and culture. World philosophies are inherently diverse; unified mainly by differentiation from global philosophy, which I understand as a term for the hegemonic Euro-American, or Western, modern, scientific underpinnings of knowledge. The tendency for terminology to keep changing makes it important to clearly define the meaning of these two important terms, and the difference between them, as I will be using them in this book. Particular care is needed to differentiate these terms for speakers of languages other than English (including the Māori language), in which the important nuances between the English pair ‘world’ and ‘global’ and between ‘philosophy’ and ‘philosophies’ may not carry over.

Global philosophy is singular, and the word ‘global’ is most strongly identified with globalisation, which is an inherently imperialist concept. The content of that which is described as ‘Western’ – whether in relation to philosophy, technology, culture or language – owes much of its meaning to the development of modern science, beginning in the era of the Enlightenment in Western Europe, whence the adjective ‘Western’ derives. In the twentieth century the centre of gravity of ‘Western’ culture shifted to the United States; today, in the twenty-first century, the power of wealth resides in multinational corporations, privately owned by uber-wealthy individuals. These individuals could be called ‘global owners’ with interests in all parts of the globe, including Aotearoa New Zealand, which has achieved some popularity in those elite echelons as a safe bolthole in the event of calamity in world centres. So the term ‘Western’ is no longer an accurate descriptor, and ‘Euro-American’ also has problems. The alternative modifier ‘global’ is more accurate; less tied to origins. The term ‘global philosophy’ then refers to ways of thinking that underpin contemporary ‘global culture’. Nevertheless, the term ‘Western’ is widely used as the binary opposite of ‘Indigenous’ in relation to thinking, values, cultural preferences and so on, and this practice will be followed below, while remaining aware of the inherent limitations of the term. In my context, I usually refer to Pākehā-Māori relationships, but below I adopt the more general terms in referring to Western-Indigenous relationships, while cognisant that this term describes a reified binary, rather than a natural or scientific set of categories.

World philosophies is a plural term, and the word ‘world’, which is linguistically related to ‘whole’ and ‘holism’, has allusions of ecology and harmony with nature, which align well with Indigenous ways of thinking. The word ‘world’ draws our attention to the natural world, as against ‘global’ that calls to mind ideas such as ‘the global economy’. Thinking about ‘the world’ is more likely to make us think of the image of planet Earth from space, with its marbled blue-and-white surface. One example of an international initiative using ‘world’ in this way is the World Indigenous Peoples Conference: Education (WIPCE) that has been held every three years since 1987, in venues rotating between the CANZUS countries (Canada, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and the United States), with the exception of the 2011 conference, held in Peru.

Since the 1950s, the development of Māori studies as a local form of anthropology in Aotearoa New Zealand brought Māori knowledge into the university curriculum, but in truncated form. In this process “Māori language and knowledge were re-framed as knowledge knowable from Western epistemologies” (C. W. Smith, 2000, p. 45). In the history of Māori studies, Māori philosophy has almost always been woven into the curriculum, rather than being seen as an identified topic. The Māori Renaissance, the recent emergence of Kaupapa Māori, and the growth of acceptance of Māori language and culture as part of general society, are aspects of an ongoing process of reviving and re-describing Māori knowledge, including the articulation of Māori philosophy. Māori philosophy research seeks to counter the Māori experience of colonization through history, which ‘has involved a continual experience of decontextualisng and recontextualising the discourses of tangata whenua’ (T. Smith, 2000, p. 54). This central technology of colonization is also described as ‘re-inscribing’ tangata whenua discourse into Western knowledge.

Few Māori people have studied academic philosophy (I know of only two Māori with PhDs in Philosophy), and despite the strength of Kaupapa Māori education, very few Māori scholars have participated in the local sub-field of philosophy of education (C. W. Smith, 2000, p. 43). Despite the voluminous literature on all manner of Māori topics, no previous book with ‘Māori philosophy’ in the title was found at the time of writing (2020). This book stakes a claim for Māori philosophy in the emerging field of World philosophies, and provides an opportunity to re-frame and synthesise my body of work, sometimes pursued under other banners including Māori science education, Kaupapa Māori philosophical research and Māori education more generally. Understood in this way, a series on World Philosophies provides a convenient category and milieu for an introductory text on Māori philosophy.

I find it useful to regard Kaupapa Māori theory as a form of philosophy of education (Stewart, 2017b): a theoretical framework suitable for underpinning my practice as a critical Māori philosophical researcher. The researcher’s identity is a matter of interest in any Māori research, including this attempt to provide an exposition of Māori philosophy. Some biographical detail about what brings me to this work is therefore warranted.

My right to write about Māori philosophy

I grew up in a bicultural Māori-Pākehā family in 1960–70s Auckland and received an excellent education in the state schools in Aotearoa New Zealand. With my family background of both my mother and her mother being teachers and avid readers, as well as poets, from an early age I enjoyed generous access to books, and reading was my first and abiding favourite activity or ‘passion’, as we would say today. So, teaching was ‘in my blood’, but it was not my first career choice, which was to help save the Takahē from extinction, after reading Two in the Bush by Gerald Durrell. When I left secondary school in 1978 that impulse saw me enrol in a bachelor of science degree at Auckland University, resulting in a first class MSc in organic chemistry in 1981. Following that I worked first as a research technician in the Cancer Research Laboratory in the Auckland Medical School, and later in sales and customer support of chemical analysis equipment.

At the end of 1988, I left my job and went north to live at Matauri Bay in an effort to reconnect with ‘my Māori side’. From there I went further north to live with Mangu Awarau in Waimanoni, near Kaitaia, where I heard about Kura Kaupapa Māori, and extended my limited earlier knowledge of te reo me ngā tikanga (Māori language and customs). In 1991 I returned to Auckland and completed secondary teacher training at Auckland College of Education. After a year teaching te reo Māori at Onehunga High School, in 1993 I became the inaugural teacher of Pūtaiao (Science) and Pāngarau (Mathematics) at Te Wharekura o Hoani Waititi Marae in Oratia, Waitakere City, until wanting to live in Te Taitokerau (Northland) drew me to take up the Head of Māori position at Tikipunga High School in Whangarei in 1996.

My teaching and involvement with various national curriculum projects in Māori-medium education spurred me on to enrol part-time in doctoral studies in 2001 for a chance to investigate the Māori science curriculum. After graduating in 2007 I held short-term research positions before being appointed in 2010 as Lecturer in Education, University of Auckland, based at the Tai Tokerau campus in Whangarei. In mid-2016 I moved to my current academic position at AUT, Auckland, as an Associate Professor in the School of Education.

This book is an opportunity to re-frame and synthesise a set of ideas I have been thinking about since I began my doctoral thesis, almost two decades ago. Indeed, I seem to have been thinking about Māori philosophy for most of my life! I was an early observer when my wise old aunts and uncles made basic babyish mistakes in conversational English, such as saying ‘him’ instead of ‘her’. Listening to conversations in Māori from under the hood of whatever car my dad and his mate were fixing made it seem natural to get up early to listen to the weekly Bruce Biggs Māori language lessons on the family radio in the sitting room. Likewise, the weekly Listener column by Ranginui Walker was household reading for years in my childhood home.

My focus in this book moves beyond the school curriculum to consider in more general terms how identifying as Māori and working with Māori knowledge influence one’s everyday thinking and inform one’s views on social matters of all kinds. In this book I present synoptic narrative accounts of central concepts and debates in Māori philosophy in the form of a series of close readings of selected key texts and authors, interspersed with examples and vignettes from personal experience. The key texts and authors I call on are located across a range of fields: Māori education brings in Māori studies and anthropology, as well as sociolinguistics and some in other fields such as legal studies. I use Kaupapa Māori principles to guide a process of critically reading through and past the chauvinism of Eurocentrism and patriarchy found in most published work on Māori. I think of this approach as ‘rehabilitating’ older scholarship about Māori philosophy, for Indigenous purposes, under the wider umbrella of the Kaupapa Māori intellectual project.

Sources and links to social and intellectual history

One early way that Māori philosophy was inscribed in Western thinking was as religion, during the nineteenth-century European mission to convert ‘native heathens’ to Christianity – Anglican, Catholic, Wesleyan and so on. Hence Māori legal scholar Moana Jackson (19...