tribal

It is a dawn flight to Christchurch again, to continue on with a research project I have been doing there. I’m working as a consultant to a project with a Maori tribe, and I have had the most amazing time. I have long had a belief that diversity isn’t something we need to be able to tolerate and learn to live with, but something that we cannot live without. This project has confirmed and reconfirmed that idea with each conversation, as I am able to increasingly think thoughts I have never been able to think before simply because I’m bumping up against people who are different and who think differently than I do.

A moment, though, to wax on about what’s outside my window rather than inside my brain. This is the fifth flight to Christchurch I’ve had in the last twelve days. For every flight, I’ve sat in a window seat that looks out the right side of the plan (F on the way there, A on the way back) to see what I think is the most astonishing plane journey I’ve ever had (I suppose it’s really the percentage of magnificence to airtime that makes this one so special; about 90% of the time you fly along snow covered mountain ranges tumbling to green sea). Each of those flights has been in low cloud, leaving me imagining how beautiful it must be, until today. Today I am looking at impossibly craggy ranges dusted with a powdered sugar of snow from this cold southerly we’ve had over the weekend. The taller ranges are thickly encased in snow, the light and shadow etching the wind trails into the white. On the lightly powdered hills, the warmer north faces are brown while the colder south faces are a bluey white with yellow tips from the rising sun. The thick snow on the top of the tallest hills blunts the craggy sharpness but as the snow falls into the crevices lower down the hills, it highlights the angularity, making spiny fingers pointing towards the valley. Now the Kaikoura peninsula is below me and what I know are some of the richest waters in the world for marine mammals. I have walked on those rocks amongst the seals and swum in this cold water with the dolphins. It is a wondrous land at sea level or way above. In the enclosed valley, there is low mist rising from the braided rivers, puffs of cotton that somehow got trapped in the tangled mess of river and rock. I am breathless.

I think the discoveries I’m making about the world, and about my own thinking, are no less intense and beautiful than the folds of this green and white, brown and blue land. I am here to understand a particular set of strategies, and I have thoughts running through my head about privilege, responsibility, community, membership.

In a bicultural place like New Zealand, where the Crown made a kind of peace with the tribes more than a hundred years ago, how do we live together in ways that are the most honouring of those differences and that let us learn the most we can from them? How do we use our resources in intelligence and money and land and love and relationships to create opportunities for more of that? And which responsibility belongs to which group? Whose job is it to make sure that children succeed in school? Does that belong to the state or to the tribe?

There is something massive about the organisational implications of being a tribe rather than a company. I am just getting my head around what it all means. They have lots of money because the Crown didn’t keep its promise for generations, and then paid a price in the settlement of that claim. But the money doesn’t belong to individuals, but to a people. And it’s not the familiar “shareholder value” that so many companies put up as the ultimate goal. Here the money is sensibly used to invest in the people of the tribe and in their tribeness, their culture, their language, their traditions. One person I spoke with told me that he didn’t want to have a 5 year plan, he wanted to have a generational plan, a multi-generational plan. The tribe had been there for 1000 years, and he thought he probably needed to think of his work as a part of a 1000 year plan. This is why it matters to protect the land and to remember that what happens in the mountains eventually makes its way to the sea—it’s for your grandchildren’s grandchildren. This is why it makes sense to protect a language that is nearly dead, and to try to revive it by getting parents to speak it to their children, to compose waiatas (songs) of joy at the birth of their babies. What is the incentive plan for that? How do you get people to change their individual behaviour like that? They’re working on the hows of it all.

I find that I have become invested in their mission. I believe that the world will be a poorer place if they are not successful, if they cannot save the language and the waiatas and the stories. When I spend time in interviews, my mind swims with the frequent peppering of words that sound so foreign to my ears: the whakapapa, kaupapa Maori, the whole idea of the runanga system. The syllables wander and blend, and I struggle to make meaning out of them, listening for words and patterns to repeat, trying to spell them phonetically in my notes so I can ask my partner later. But surrounded by Pakeha (=white New Zealanders), I miss the music of te reo Maori, miss the mystery of it, miss the way it washes over and through me.

It is in the missing of a language I don’t speak, the thinking of questions I’ve never thought, that I see the great promise of diversity and the great need for us to protect and cherish the many differences we have. I want to help this tribe thrive and succeed not only for their sake (because they deserve it) or out of some kind of sense of responsibility or guilt (because it was white people who got in the way in the first place). I want them to succeed because the world is richer for them, because they have a place in the cultures of the earth and they are the only ones who can fill that place. I do not want to bring a romantic glory to these cultures that are so foreign to me. Rather, I want to notice the way my culture creates me, and I want to be a part of helping others cherish their cultures. We need one another.

This all leads me to wonder about our global tribe and what we’re all doing in the world. What are we all building toward? What is the beautiful thing we’re creating and leaving behind? What is the language we speak to our children that we want our grandchildren to hear? How can we think of all our communities and organisations as a tribe planning to live together on this planet for the next 1000 years?