Māori Way of Life

Water as Prevailing Presence

I met Kelly Kahukiwa at a café in downtown Whangārei. After coffee, we drove to the ngahere atop the nearby Mount Parihaka. The mountain, really an eroded bush clad volcanic cone, housed a former pā site (village) and memorial commemorating the servicemen and women of World War II. It is one of the most significant mountains for Māori in Northland (fig. 13). We hiked for a short bit as Kelly casually pointed out plants for their medicinal or ritualistic purposes. He noticed one that was meant to be eaten when one enters the forest, selected a ripe leaf, recited a karakia (Māori prayer), and handed me half of it. We munched and trotted along, unbeknownst to me, toward a small clearing just off the forest track.

Kelly Kahukiwa is an artist, teacher and musician whose specialty is making music based on the sounds and vibrations of the ngahere. He created Te Reo Ngaro o te Rākau – The Hidden Voices of Trees Project, as a way to tap into the hidden language that exists in the ngahere. His tribal affiliations are Ngāti Io, Ngāti Whakaue, Ngai Tūhoe and Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki. As we circled the clearing, he explained that he visited this spot to think, meditate and gather inspiration for his music, but just as often to sit and listen to the sounds of the ngahere with no ulterior creative goal.

In the center of the clearing stood a single kauri tree, aged as an old man yet quite young compared to its kauri brethren. The ground was packed with a thick layer of acidic leaf litter common to kauri forests and there was a wide berth around the tree base free of plants, excluding the few red matipo saplings that dotted the ground. Despite our proximity to the trail, the clearing felt isolated, the sounds of the world muffled and distant. It seemed to be a testament to the power of quiet in the ngahere that it didn’t require distance to find silence in the bush.

Sitting in front of the kauri, Kelly and I discussed the ecological and spiritual forces connecting the world. He identified one prevailing spirit that runs throughout Northland that he considers the key for understanding an indigenous worldview. That spirit is called Wai and Māori believe that it comes from their supreme being Io Matua Kore. Wai, Kelly interpreted, “is the connecting element through all of us, connected through marama, the moon, and its cycles. Those cycles, their vibrations and frequency, are changing all the time, pulsing through the world as marama sets its rhythms.” In the material world, water is the physical manifestation of Wai. Inside water is everything: all of the mauri, the life force.

I recalled that in the Qur’an, Allah “made from water every living thing” (21:30).¹⁹ Huda, “Creation of the Universe and Evolution in Islam,” As I pondered, Kelly offered a metaphor to further encompass the world’s connections: If the world is a wheel, then natural landscapes like oceans, fresh waterways, mountains and forests, along with the humans and animals who inhabit those landscapes, represent different spokes on the wheel. The wheel only functions properly if the spiritual wellbeing of everything within each spoke is nourished generation after generation. With water, Kelly explained, we must consider how it works in a cycle and think holistically about its past, present and future form in order to understand it and learn from it. With that reasoning, a water expert may be the closest to sharing an indigenous practitioner’s perspective than any other role that we have in Western society. The water expert’s mindset reflects the Māori worldview in that it holds that the ecological health of landscapes, mountains and waterways is beholden to the ultigenerational spiritual wellbeing of each single part.

My time in Northland was spent trying to better understand the Māori philosophy of holistic healing and approach to managing resources in order to discern and portray the ecological history of the region as it relates to kauri and threats to that taonga species. For if our environment consists of response loops between water, light, plants, animals and energy, then by reason ecology is best understood holistically. To solve a problem using a holistic perspective, rather than looking at where the problem is, you search for where the problem came from.

Karakia, Tohunga & Rongoā

Despite it brimming with family memorabilia, Kevin Prime’s home in Mōtatau is just 50 years old. His family bought it after the motorway between Auckland and the Bay of Islands Airport was built, when the government sold inexpensive homes to incentivize home-owning in Northland. It would have been common for Māori to perform a karakia on the house before it came up on the motorway, but that didn’t occur, causing a lot of spooks to travel up with the home. When Kevin’s son Peter was a child, those spirits still inhabited some of the rooms.

Fitting with his decision to withhold Te Reo, Kevin raised his children without knowledge of the spooks and wāhi tapu (sacred sites or land) that frightened him and his siblings. He screened them from it so they might grow up “learning the white man’s ways” and be in a better position in the world than he felt he was in as a child. Still, shielding his children from the spiritual world didn’t void its existence, and at times, the two realities converged.

As I sat listening, I rubbed my knees absentmindedly. Kevin noticed and paused momentarily with interest in his eyes. He went on to say that despite having grown up unaware of the spooks haunting his home, Peter would often cry because his knees were sore. “Peter couldn’t see them,” Kevin explained, “but I could see that there were spooks in the room.” I asked how he approached situations where the physical manifestation was so direct. “I would just do a karakia to drive them out and tell the kids that it was growing pains. I didn’t bring them up to know those things, it’s just one of the decisions that you make in life,” he responded.

In contrast to his children, Kevin has an ongoing relationship with the spiritual world. He offered one ritual called Takahi te Whare or tramping the house for which one walks through the home after someone’s died and been buried, and drives out all the spirits with karakia. Above all, in his interactions with the spiritual realm, water has proven to be the best tool for driving “bad” things out. Water, he pressed, “has always been a cleansing agent for Māori.” In the past, if someone fell ill, Māori would attribute it to spiritual malaise. They would bless water with karakia and then use it to take away curses or bad luck, drive out spirits, bless places or for whatever the situation called for.

A woman named Bronwyn Bauer-Hunt who, at the time we met, worked as the Principal Advisor, Strategy & Policy at Te Rūnanga o te Rarawa (the iwi organization that are kaitiaki of the Warawara forest) but has since left to become Manager for the Department of Conservation (DOC) Office in Kerikeri, provided immeasurable support to me and Hugh throughout our time in Northland. Her support started with an insightful anecdote regarding the cleansing ability of water. When we first met over coffee, Bronwyn had just returned from the United States, where she had participated in an indigenous women's conference. Upon arriving home in Northland, the very first thing she did was take three dips in the Tasman Sea to cleanse herself from the journey.

While karakia over water is done indiscriminately by Māori like Kevin and Kelly and Bronwyn today, in earlier times this healing was the work of the iwi-chosen expert healer, the tohunga. In the event of illness, the tribe’s tohunga would visit a patient to determine what rongoā (traditional medicinal practice or treatment) was needed. If it wasn’t immediately clear, they may perform karakia and enter the bush to see a tree leaning toward them and recognize it as the tohu or sign. They may break off a branch and have a vision of how to use it, either waving it over a patient as they said karakia or boiling it and bathing or drinking the juice. There are ordinary karakia and rongoā methods that most Māori know about and have used in their extended whānau (family) for many generations. Kevin prefers to place all his trust and faith in the singular entity of karakia, but many other Māori practice a mixture of healing methods. From Kevin’s experience, the ability to heal seems to come on different people at distinct times in their lives, but there is always someone in the tribe who can carry it if it has to be done. In the Prime whānau, it has come on Kevin more since his elder brother has grown older.

I still live in the town I was raised. About 1 mile from my house is a modest brick building with a metal star on the façade and a small sign down by the road that designates the building as North Shore Synagogue. As a toddler, I attended pre-school at North Shore Synagogue. I ate pretzels and drank apple juice while I listened to my teacher, Ms. Fran, discuss Jewish holidays, teach Hebrew, and tell stories about our history. I tore off bites of challah and sipped purple grape juice after reciting prayers for Shabbat (Sabbath). After I turned five years old, I attended the local public elementary school and then matriculated to the local public middle school. All the while, on Tuesday evenings and Sunday mornings I attended “Hebrew School” at North Shore Synagogue.

In Hebrew, Bat Mitzvah means ‘daughter of commandment.’ It is the milestone that occurs to bring a Jewish girl into womanhood. In that moment, she becomes equipped with all the rights and obligations of a Jewish adult, including the commandments of the Torah, our sacred text. To prepare for the event, I learned a portion of the Torah which, on an extremely snowy February afternoon, I recited to our congregation along with a h aliyot and a speech to reflect on the Torah/ portion I’d been assigned. The event typically happens at 12 years old, but my family belonged to a ‘reform’ temple where females were Bat Mitzvah’d at 13 years old. Belonging to a reform temple also meant that I didn’t learn Hebrew vocabulary or grammar past what it took to make it through my Torah portion, much less learn it to a conversational speaking level. We didn’t speak the Jewish language at home nor attend services much, though my dad’s brother does speak a bit of Hebrew. I’m sure other members of the temple congregation were more actively connected to their faith, but we were not.

By the time I was Bat Mitzvah’d, both my sisters had already reached womanhood and my dad had recently passed away. While my mom ensured that we all crossed the symbolic threshold, as she did years prior with her conversion, she did not enforce temple attendance. Grief is a necessary part of the memorialization process, but we all preferred to grieve somewhere less stuffy than a temple and as a result, we stopped attending. We belonged to North Shore Synagogue a few more years, soon only attending services for the “High Holy Days” or High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (The Day of Atonement). We celebrated the other holidays at our home with my dad’s side of the family. We still do. We sing the songs, recite the prayers, eat too much, go on hikes, bike ride to the beach, and then we come home, eat more and tell stories. It brings us joy to be Jewish in this way, but nonetheless, it enables a disconnect with the formalities of Judaism.

My reason for sharing this is to say I never cultivated a relationship with prayer. I prayed in temple services, but without understanding the language it never felt like anything more than a gesture. The closest thing I have to prayer now is when I spend time outside. In the years since we left the temple, I took to going on walks to find solace, check in with passed loved ones or talk to forces in the natural world. Sometimes I don’t talk, or even walk, I just breathe in fresh air and fresh smells of wherever I am and think. I return to certain spots that help me clear my head, usually near a body of water or under a specific tree. My mom tells me that my affinity for being outside comes from her genes, the side with Blackfoot DNA, though she never so much as steps outside if she can help it. I am hesitant to attribute a tangible connection to that part of her lineage, given how disjointed it is and that I haven’t built a connection to it. Whatever my intrinsic sensitivity to nature is, the fact of the matter is that I still don’t have a language to communicate the shift in energy that being by the pond, the ocean, the river or under the trees provides. Thus, understanding karakia, the term used to encompass a range of Māori prayers and incantations for spiritual guidance and protection, required deeper insight than I kept in my psychic arsenal. I sought out that insight one afternoon whilst sitting with Kevin and Margaret in their living room.

Kevin explained that the easiest way to understand karakia is to break down the word. “The word ka means glow or it could mean will happen, ara means either the pathway or it means to awaken, ki means to and ia means him or her. The word has often been translated as prayer. To me it’s really igniting or awakening to the pathway to the wāhi ngaro, the unseen one, to him or her. You see, ia doesn’t mean him or her, it’s either. It’s not a gender in the word ia.” He continued, “Karakia is far more than just a prayer. When I was a kid, karakia, meant a full blown church service. It meant having the hymns, the sermon, the prayers, the catechisms, all the things that were part of a full church service were linked to a karakia. Now it’s just a prayer. Whereas the word for prayer is inoi and inoi in English means to ask or plead. And that’s really the way the word inoi is used, let us pray. The depth of the word karakia is far deeper than just prayer I guess, more than the common understanding.”

Learning about the ideal conditions for karakia seemed like a viable point of entry to better grasp the concept, so I asked Kevin and Margaret to describe their ideal headspace for karakia. Their responses clarified its indescribable essence. According to Kevin, “the ideal is when it is quiet...it happens when the need arises. It is a lot to do with circumstance...when you feel the urge.” He motioned for Margaret to weigh in.

“I believe there are so many sorts of prayers: ritual prayers, for food/family/travel, or desperate need prayers– like when someone you know is in circumstantial strife, emotional strife, or spiritual,” Margaret added. “It is independent of what you see, hear, feel, taste, smell. You activate a sixth sense which would be your faith. What the bible would say is ‘evidence of things not seen. None of the natural senses can pick it up but this sense is even more real and it is that which would kick in for [karakia] prayer. Desperation can really cause a heart to speak out and make contact with God,” she mused.