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127 Kaitiakitanga Telling the Stories of Environmental Guardianship JAY T. JOHNSON Place has dropped out of sight in the “globalization craze” of recent years, and this erasure of place has profound consequences for our understanding of culture, knowledge, nature, and economy. —Arturo Escobar, “Culture Sits in Places” My decision to travel to Aotearoa/New Zealand to explore Māori self-determination in resource management did not start out as an exploration of place. Perhaps naively , I was so preoccupied by my central goal of uncovering how the New Zealand government’s commitment to biculturalism was playing out in 2001, a decade into their revolutionary and perhaps vain experiment with holistic resource management in the form of the Resource Management Act of 1991 (RMA), that the politics of place within which these struggles over resource management were playing out was not at the forefront of my mind. Perhaps, as many an academic is wont to do, I was privileging my intellectual pursuits over embodied learning and knowing as I tripped through place. Luckily, I had guides who took me out of the library and archive to explore the beach, the harbor, and the river, to see firsthand what was being struggled over. Hopefully I was not so lost in the “globalization craze” to quote Escobar (2001, 141) that I was totally disconnected from understanding the role of place in Māori struggles and in understandings of culture, knowledge, nature, and economy, but it was finally in place that all I had read and heard from those kaitaiki (guardians) began to make sense. As I have already stated elsewhere (Johnson 2008), my engagement with Māori concerning their self-determination over the management of valued community resources is founded in my own epistemological and ontological understandings, based within both Native American and Western ways of seeing and knowing the world. My Native American heritage provided me with related, although at times very different, understandings of the environment I was encountering with 128 KAITIAKITANGA my Māori guides. Grounding oneself through connections to rivers, villages, and ancestors was all very familiar, but being from the Great Plains, the connections to mountains were as unfamiliar as were some significant Māori concepts such as mana. Unbeknown to me, I was learning not just about Māori self-determination and biculturalism but also about a new way of understanding the environment and the significant places contained within it. To accomplish this, though, I had to begin to understand an ontology that was completely new to me. I had to break out of the “hall of mirrors,” the reflection of the academic perpetually speaking to himself or herself, and begin down an uncanny path, which at times was unsettling, to say the least (see Howitt and Suchet-Pearson 2003). Although the path I had set out to walk was largely focused on describing Māori self-determination in an effort to discover whether it provided a successful model for other Indigenous nations around the world, it was very academic in its orientation . I was, after all, setting out to write a dissertation and receive a doctorate of philosophy in geography from the University of Hawai‘i; “academic” was what was expected. Soon I realized, though, that to record and understand the stories of guardianship (kaitiakitanga) of the environment that I was receiving meant that I would have to open myself to the metaphysical and to seeing the environment as holistic instead of dualistic in nature. I would have to appreciate the “more-thanhuman ” environment, the agency of a vast array of biotic, abiotic, and metaphysical entities (see Whatmore 2002; Ingold and Ingold 2006). Where does one begin in learning a new ontology? How far back do you have to go? As a Māori research collaborator said to my adviser when he questioned why I was exploring Māori cosmologies instead of material he deemed to be more pertinent to my research, “You leave him alone; he’s doing it the right way; he’s starting at the beginning!” Learning a New of Way of Seeing and Relating to the Environment As Eric Schwimmer has observed, Māori cosmology has “the distinction of peering most deeply into the infinite darkness that existed before life began” (Schwimmer 1966; quoted in Roberts, Norman, et al. 1995, 8). It is within this “infinite darkness” that Māori whakapapa, or genealogies, have their foundation. According to Māori cosmology, everything has evolved from Te Kore, the realm of potential being...

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