Reindigenization

Discussion

From the transcript of a conversation between Daniel Christian Wahl and John Freeland:

"Daniel Wahl: Let me ask you something there because lately, I’m [crosstalk 00:07:56] to think in… I had this wonderful conversation with Joel Glanzberg where we talked about this notion of… And I would love to hear your perspective on this notion of reindigenization, whether you find that quite off putting or whether it in any way resonates with you. Because, in my current thinking, I sense more and more that one of the original mistakes is to in any way assume that land can belong to us, rather that we are the land. We’re expressions of the land. We come from it. And this is so fundamental. We talked about this in London at that meeting at the Commonwealth for a bit, the notion of time, how that traps us, the Western notion of time. I love the way that you’re so willing to build that bridge of that binocular overlapping circles of-

Johnnie Freeland: Yeah.

Daniel Wahl: And I’m also wondering how are we all somehow colonialized in the mind with certain patterns that will make it really hard for us to even fully get back to this dynamic flow participation thinking. Because we don’t even, or I certainly… the Western culture doesn’t even realize how much just these thought forms already trap us in a kind of misperception.

Johnnie Freeland: Yeah. I think that… And I’d used this term, the recirculization of humanity is really critical. So our old people, our elders, are really taking on this term recirculization. Because, for me, language is really important. I think underneath that, the reality is about the reindigenization of humanity. And literally in a sense, and this is what our elders talk about… So my day to day work, I work for our state Ministry for Children. So we take children in state care from break downs in family, family violence. And Maori children are 80% of our population of state care. And that’s really a reflection of the impact of square systems, the impact on family, dislocation, disconnection. And so our elders talk about that in order to generate wellbeing for families and for children, that… Because we use this metaphor within the Ministry of… So we have this native flax bush. So the younger shoot grows in the middle and then you have the parent leaves and the grandparent leaves, so it grows sort of out. And so there’s this Maori saying about if you pluck out the young shoot of a flax bush, where will the bowerbird go and sing? And so the most important thing are people, people, peoples. So the flax bush is a metaphor for family.

And so, while there is a need to keep children safe, our practice actually strips the young shoot out of the family, and, in the indigenous sense, we take it out of an indigenous plant and go and put it in an exotic plant, in terms of care and non-kin care, foster parents, and all that sort of thing. What our elders have talked about is we actually need to uplift and transplant the whole bush into a better garden. Because it’s about conditions of poverty, disconnection, all those sort of things. So they talk about the garden. And so in that process of recirculization or reindigenization, we literally need to replant ourselves back into Mother Earth and allow those systems to heal ourselves as well as part of that process. Because we know in our whakapapa, in our history, that we were all indigenous at one point." (https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/circular-square-systems-thinking-a-maori-perspective-on-regeneration-ba9fa5653f91)