Monday, December 9, 2019

Far from home - reflecting on Ihumātao - a 'thin place'

I am almost the farthest away I can be from home while remaining on this planet. If I travelled 170 km northwest from Madrid to El Capio, I would be the furthest way. Such movement - possible to be done within 30 hours today - prompts me to think of the human migration project, if we may call it that. Of course, "project" implies by design, orderly and planned. Many cases of human migration are far from that, especially in our times of huge disruption of people through war, poverty, environmental disasters.

Recent revisions of the history of Aotearoa New Zealand I grew up with point to the main migrations of Polynesians to Aotearoa as being intentional and planned, after Kupe's original, legendary discovery of this bold new land - the land of the long white cloud. The more I grow to understand my land's history, in the context of human history; and see that ongoing history unfolding now, the more I am proud and blessed to be sourced from Aotearoa. Maybe we come to appreciate our home the more we are distant from it.

In any case, that is not what I set out to write about today. I wanted to share a small fragment about Ihumātao in Auckland (New Zealand's largest city), where a small group of occupiers, led by local Maori, are seeking to protect a special place in New Zealand's history from a housing development. It is the place where the first arrivals to Aotearoa started growing the plants they had brought with them from elsewhere in Polynesia. It was the place where their descendants adapted European vegetables for growing in Aotearoa conditions, before land wars tore many of them from their homelands. What the Save Our Unique Landscape (SOUL) group seek is that the land (whenua) be returned to the indigenous people (mana whenua) of the area, "to be held for the benefit of all the people of Aotearoa to enjoy as an open, green, historic reserve." Elsewhere they say: "We want a liveable city. We need places to breathe, to dream, to connect to our ancestors, and engage with our history. At Ihumātao we can do this".

As Brendan Corbett testifies in the video below, Ihumātao was the end point of the 100,000 year "human project" of migration out of Africa. When I first heard these words, it blew my mind - that this land of my birth was indeed the last significant place of human settlement on earth. It is a young land: geologically, in human terms and in its integration into so-called 'modern life'. And it still gives me hope, when we, through greed and destructive environmental practices, threaten so much of our natural spaces, our wild spaces, and our life on this earth. Here is Brendan: