New Zealand has long had an active publishing industry with a solid output of books examining our land and its people. While many in the past focused on the promotion of a green and pleasant land at the bottom of the earth peopled by a happy mix of Māori and Pākehā, the re-examination of the assumptions and values underlying that construct has become an increasing focus in recent years. Kia Whakanuia te Whenua: People Place Landscape, edited by Carolyn Hill for the Landscape Foundation, joins this discussion and offers 40 essays that explore the relationship of Māori with land and its critical role in Māori identity.

The Landscape Foundation, under whose auspices the volume has been published, is a charitable trust established “to advocate for the health and well-being of the whenua/landscape” and the book’s chapters are said to “guide a hīkoi through the landscape and our relationship with it”. Like any hīkoi worth taking, it is not always an easy or comfortable passage; the sheer scale of the alienation of Māori land, the degradation to which much of the land has been subject and the costs to Māori health, wealth and welfare are tough, inescapable truths that underpin many of the essays.

Though some of the essays are strident in their dismissal of ‘settler’ culture, it is hard to take issue with the central thesis that gathers the volume together: that the contemporary degradation of landscape demands a significant re-examination of our attitude to, and relationship with, land. Within this general discourse, a number of distinctions are drawn between the close, personal relationship founded on the accretion of one’s forbears’ relationships with a place and the abstract relationship implicit in the commodification of land that is characteristic of colonial land definition.

In her foreword, Dame Anne Salmond describes the arrival of James Cook as being accompanied by a “cargo of competing cosmologies”. These included ideas from the Scottish Enlightenment, in which landscapes were complex webs of relationships of different life forms within which people lived. Salmond argues that, while these ideas fitted well with Māori cosmology, Cook also brought ideas of a structured hierarchy of authority and a radically different way of understanding the earth and one’s place in it. Deference was required of those lower in a social order that descended from God and the divine right of kings through all the stations of 18th-century British life to ‘barbarians and savages’. The implicit right to exert authority and control assumed from such ordering was facilitated by the emergent Cartesian separation of mind and body: the abstraction of space and time, and the concomitant measuring, ordering and gridding of the earth.

Salmond suggests that the shift from humans inhabiting a web of natural relationships to occupying land defined by Cartesian logic and ordered by the mechanics of, for example, cadastral mapping, has significantly added to the parlous state of current land use and the ecosystem. The causal relationship between a distanced understanding and treatment of the land and the state of its well-being is explored in the essays, which are grouped within chapters. Each chapter brings together several writers, addressing key ideas and building a strong argument for the critical importance of a more profound relationship with land than the pervasive pragmatism arising from the settlers’ commodification of it.

At times, binary readings of attitudes to land can seem overly simplistic yet it is arguable that the gains to be made from a more profound recognition of the wisdom that long-term, continuous familiarity with land produces are such that an impatient, polemical character is almost inevitable. Lest one think that Aotearoa is alone in the deprivations arising from British colonialism, it is one of the strengths of the book that essays include an examination of post-colonial experience beyond our shores. Liam Campbell’s ‘Exile, Belonging and Post-colonialism in an Irish River Catchment’, for example, explores the critical role of language in understanding and alienation when he states “Local knowledge is not easily translated”. Campbell quotes ethnobiologist Luisa Maffi who asserts that “… along with the dominant language comes a dominant cultural framework which begins to take over”.

In Haare Williams’ opening text, ‘Ihumātao’, he states “Colonial lies hiding in a thesaurus made excuses to take and control those they saw as inferior because they were different.” That same displacement of language referred to by Campbell and Williams is contrary to Article 8 of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, which urges us to “… respect, preserve and maintain knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity…”

Diane Menzies’ introduction to the texts addresses the dichotomy between “so-called traditional science and Western science”. She argues that, while both are based on observation, Māori science is based on long-term observation of the local environment of Aotearoa and, hence, has a special contribution to make in the development of a resilient community in the face of natural disasters and climate change. Writing in Western Science and Traditional Knowledge, Mazzocchi¹ supports this view, arguing that “Traditional knowledge has developed a concept of the environment that emphasizes the symbiotic character of humans and nature. It offers an approach to local development that is based on co-evolution with the environment, and on respecting the carrying capacity of ecosystems. This knowledge – based on long-term empirical observations adapted to local conditions – ensures a sound use and control of the environment, and enables indigenous people to adapt to environmental changes.”

For those of us designing buildings, the issues discussed are, at once, both apposite and problematic. Our projects are invariably constrained by a web of land definition and legal constraints founded in the very apparatus that many of the essays identify as the most pernicious manifestations of colonial hegemony. Certainly, in projects within the purview of city and town councils, one hesitates to pick up a pencil or grasp a mouse until a survey has defined boundaries and abstracted the folds of the land to contour lines or, increasingly, a point cloud of data. The examination of place as physical entity, if nothing else, is at the heart of much of what we seek to know and invariably reference in our projects. Indeed, Andrew Barrie has, in the past, suggested that an undue concern with, and respect for, physical context constrains New Zealand architecture’s ability to partake actively in a global discourse more concerned with architecture as a self-referential research discipline than topographically and climate-driven responses.

If the collective concern of the essays is to argue for a yet-more-profound acknowledgement of our special relationship with place, the essays are cognisant, too, of the urban condition in which much of our work is undertaken. The chapter ‘Whakarerekē Tāone’ contains essays concerned with the urban condition and Rebecca Kiddle’s text on Whakaaro tuawhā argues for an urbanity that “… moves beyond the iconic and sexy to championing ‘Māoriness’ in the mundane”, making a case for an urbanity focusing on equity by facilitating ways in which Māori might
“… live the lives they want to live”. Kiddle’s example of the provision of hāngi cooking space next to barbecues in public parks illustrates her notion of the mundane and points to an everyday utility in contrast to the more familiar expressions of Māori art marking public space and the translation of traditional arts and crafts patterns into building elements.

Perhaps the most unequivocal of the essays is Jade Kake’s ‘Indigenous Urbanism: Seeking Genuine Decolonisation in the Cities of Aotearoa’ in which she argues that “… biculturalism requires a substantive resetting and rebalance of power within the Treaty relationship”. Though such aspirations may seem challenging to the entrenched power structure of the settler polity, change is inevitable and inexorable as new voices displace old white blokes and influence the political discourse.

In a time of pandemic, environmental and ecological threat, Kia Whakanuia te Whenua is an important addition to the discourse and holds the possibility of a future in which the somewhat abstracted relationship with land that characterises much of the country’s built environment might gain a richer sense of its place in the cosmos and possibly a more resilient and sustainable future, too. It is a timely and provocative edition, its many voices offering challenging and thought-provoking ideas, each well referenced, footnoted and beautifully presented in an elegant volume complete with te reo glossary.