When the English settlers began to conquer and colonize Aotearoa to make it New Zealand, they began a process of erasure. They wanted a blank page on which to write their history: the story of thriving cities and tamed nature, populated by creatures that had been imported from their homeland, as had everything else. In her contribution to the “Kin City” series, Christine Winter rethinks decolonial urban ecologies from within and against these relations of violence.
*
Whenua – Land.
Whenua – placenta.
Ko au te whenua, te whenua ko au.
I am the land, the land is me.
I write from my ancestors’ homeland, Aotearoa. I write from my other ancestors’ settler state, New Zealand. I write from a place unique. I write from a place reshaped in Britian’s image. I ask: whose kin are the kin of this settler state’s cities?
Te reo Māori is the language grown on and with these lands. Linguistically connected to the languages of the Te Moana-a-Kiwa (the Pacific Ocean) it nearly died out – would have if it had not been for concerted efforts to breath and speak it back to life. Today thirty percent of New Zealanders speak more than a few words, 8% speak it fairly well. And about 25% of Māori (the Indigenous people of these motu (islands)) speak te re Māori as one of their first languages. A Canterbury University study has shown even non-fluent speakers can define 70 or more words of te reo.
Until the mid-1800’s it was in the dialects of te reo the places of these motu were named. Named for events. Named for tupuna (ancestors). Named as warnings. Named for remembering. Named for kin. Named as kin. Where do those events, tupuna, taniwha, memories and kin go when settlers spread across the land and replace names? Until the mid-1800’s these lands were Māori kin alone they were whenua. Whenua the giver of life: whenua land: whenua placenta. Then settlers came, willingly in the most part, voluntarily severing their bonds with their own home place. And yet as they financialized land and denied the kinship concept of whenua/Land and Māori attachments, their own attachment to their homeland kin manifest in their need to recreate ‘home,’ bringing with them familiar plants and animals, their nonhuman kin, to satisfy their nostalgia.
Imposing a settler regime
Settlers settle. But settlers were/are unsettled by this whenua. Their stories were made on different shores, in different cityscape landscapes and with different flora and fauna. It is those places, geomorphologies and nonhuman kin that were/are embedded within their cells and memories. Unsettled settlers came to settle, rebuild their lives on these shores, with these lands,on this whenua. These were/are not Land to the settler, they were/are land – I have adopted Max Liboiron’s capital letter L Land to denote that the word ‘land’ is not just a plot described by degrees, minutes, and seconds of latitude and longitude, but rather a site of teaming, dreaming multispecies life, stories, relationships, and obligations. Capital L Land comes closer to the meaning of whenua in Māori culture than the word land.
The settler cities of Aotearoa smother whenua. The settler cities of New Zealand recreate the cities of another hemisphere, another place, other voices, other stories, other more-than-human kin. The settler wanted, needed even, to feel in-place. Of course they did: humans are made with and by their more-than-human kin. Hemispheric travel does not, cannot, defeat the cellular yearning for the sights, smells, sensations, tastes, sounds of past homes, homelands and home-kin. To settle the settlers need to feel ‘at home.’
In 1851, during a speech to the New Zealand Parliament, Governor George Grey – the British Queen Victoria’s representative in the fledgling British colony – stated, ‘Nature made New Zealand for the British: it is our duty to take it.’ And in the taking, that duty was to remake it in a foreign image. Trees and flowers, food crops, animals – pet and agricultural, birds and fish – were imported and ‘acclimatized’ to replace what seemed alien on these shores: to make these isles familiar. So, then the settler could settle, could feel at home.
Appropriating ‘wilderness’
For the settler the southern hemisphere was a topsy turvy realm. The seasons did not match the months, the geologically new lands rugged (not the smoothed ancient terrain of England). Frighteningly these lands were ‘wilderness,’ that state of nature the settlers’ ancestors had erased with their cities and farms in their home places. Aotearoa was clad in dense, wet, evergreen forests redolent with unfamiliar sights, tastes, smells, and tactile sensations. Despite no real threat, no man-eaters, no poisonous snakes, no terrestrial more-than-human threat the dark and dense forests intimidated.
Whenua needed taming, needed financializing, needed to be ‘productive,’ needed to feed settlers with familiar foods, and supply the ‘home country’ with the products of settler enterprise wrought from denuded lands, terra transformation, concrete and asphalt. That is, they created a system that disconnected people from whenua, from land, and plants and animals, from streams, rivers, lakes and seas. They disconnected from the kinship relations to which the ideas of whenua land, whenua placenta speak.
In acts of brutal re-modelling the cities of the settlers are spaces of geometry, of straight lines imposed on irregular landscapes, spaces of deliberate erasure: places of enforced familiarity. Theirs are places where making kin required the rapid removal of the ‘native’ (human and Earth’s other): and the transplantation of European species, and European adjacent landscape and building architectures, erasing that which nature had ‘made for the British.’
The violence of colonial cities
Let’s start with the superficial: the renaming of the places that now mark Aotearoa | New Zealand’s four major cities – listed north to south; Auckland; Wellington; Christchurch; and Dunedin. Whose kin, what kin, are embedded in these names? Or with Hamilton, Gisborne, Napier, New Plymouth, Picton, and Invercargill. These names do not make kin with this whenua, they impose a foreign regime and foreign stories to erase the unfamiliar, the dislocating otherness of this place. But these names, histories and stories were imposed atop an already historied and storied place. They deny centuries of knowing, learning, laughter and pain, births and deaths. They void this land’s past while imposing a shallow present and hollow future.
What were these places before they were smothered by colonial othering? Each city, named for British dignitaries and war heroes or after places of origin, spread tentacles that scooped up too many places of belonging to name: villages, gardens, volcanoes, rivers, bays, inlets, mudflats, seashore and sea, forests, fishing grounds, ancestral landing places, boat launching places, trails and paths, fortified hilltops, battle grounds and cemeteries. Smothered are the places of ancestors and future generations, storied landscapes of love, and justice, responsibilities and duties, the sacred and the profane.
Lost are the kin of whenua. Cast aside are the practices that bent towards harmony between human and Earth others, practices, protocols and procedures that grew on these motu over the previous 800-plus years, that sought nurture for all kin, that were humble before the might of nature. In the hubris of colonization, the settlers financialized Indigenous places, and severed already always kinship relations. Place was erased and space imposed. They imagined our storied lands as empty spaces, a void to be filled by ‘culture’ and the ‘cultured’, with civilized plantings, familiar creatures, straight lines and asphalted roads, imposing buildings, ports and railways. Whenua had to be tamed.
Universal other-than-human life?
The kin of the settler: the cats, dogs, blackbirds and sparrows, magpies and pigeons, hens and ducks, geese and swans, the stoats and ferrets, mice and rats, rabbits and deer, possums and wallaby, trout and salmon, are not the kin of whenua. They compete with, kill and maim kin of whenua. The bird song that competes with car horns and motorcycle vrooms is seldom the song of Aotearoa’s manu (birds) – with an extraordinary exception. In Wellington, a city named for a British hero, European war history, English stories, echos now to the tunes of tui, wrestles with the adolescent mischief of kākā, feels the whoosh of kereru wings.
These manu, birds native to Aotearoa, are ‘spill over’ from Zealandia Te Māra a Tāne, a 225 hectare urban wildlife sanctury, which has a 500-year vision to restore one valley to ecosystemic health, an enclave of native forest and freshwater; manu, mokomoko (lizard), tuatara (a reptile unique to Aotearoa) frogs, and native freshwater mussels. How? By eliminating European-introduced species, that prey on native birds and reptiles, from its acreage. Tall fencing and regular checks ensure the space is one for native kin to thrive free from the fang and claw of the introduced predators. Zealandia has morphed from dream to reality to spill-over in just over 30 years. Morphed might imply an easy, labor-free transformation. Not so. Thousands of hours of planning, lobbying, labor, and hundreds of volunteers made one man’s vision a reality. The result is the pride of Wellingtonians-of-multiple-origin-stories.
Settlers now settle into a new relationship with native kin species that belong to whenua, who are reclaiming the skies above a city planned in England as an English city for English immigrants on a land already full of stories, and ancestors, of kin and kinship. As the manu of the whenua who smothered Wellington soar again, a new hybrid kinship arises in a place that could never strictly replicate the British homeland. As te reo is resurging, so too does a connection to whenua land flourish for those kin who were already here, and whenua placenta is burgeoning for the descendants of those unsettled settlers who came looking for home.