Symbiotic
Relationships
Dhaagun:
Sovereignty and
WorkingTogether

To be earthed means to be grounded,to be sure of yourself, to be solid, tohave confidence in your decisions andto trust yourself. Māori ontologicalrelationships with whenua– the Māori concept of earth/land, which alsomeans placenta or afterbirth – like many First Nations cultures, is a groundedrelationship both culturally and spiritually. It conveys fundamental beliefs aboutthe nature of reality and the symbiotic relationship between humans and the land.Even in the abstract, in the most tapu (sacred) of all our creation genealogies, thefoundation from which all our whakapapa derives (whakapapa being the layeredand complex Māori knowledge system that binds all things), land is presentedas something we belong to, are made of, come from and return to. At theculmination of one key Māori creation genealogy or whakapapa, the earth/land/whenua is personified as the primal Mother. The concept of our original parentsRangi-nui and Papa-tū-ā-nuku, sky father and earth mother, gives voice to ourenmeshed relationship.

Dhaagun, the Wiradjuri word used as one of the seven themes of NIRIN,the 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020), similarly speaks of earth/land/whenua andof the interconnection between land and people. In English, dhaagun can betranslated as ashes, earth, dirt, soil or land, but it also can be understood as areference to a grave.1 An anchoring concept for NIRIN, the power of dhaagun is inthe significance of its dual meanings and the holistic relationship, from a Wiradjuriperspective, it elucidates. Dhaagun makes clear in its associations, as expressedthrough its English translation, that earth/land/whenua is both something that

people are sustained by and which weinevitably return to in our death.Sovereignty in an Indigenoussense is similarly connected to earth/land/whenua. The word sovereignty, appropriated from the English language,became ‘a critical source of self-determination for Indigenous peoples globally,’2and has been used as a corrective strategy by First Nations people to counterthe ongoing dispossession of our lands and resources by successive settler-nationgovernments since our colonisation. Colonisation in Australia was founded onthe false pretext of terra nullius, land that was legally deemed by western lawto be unoccupied and uninhabited. The colonisation of Australia is described byAboriginal people – the mana whenua or first peoples of Australia – as invasion.

In a Māori context, the term tino rangatiratanga can be defined asabsolute sovereignty.Tino rangatiratanga was used in the 1840 Te Tiriti o Waitangi, thefounding document of New Zealand, with the promise from the Crown thattino rangatiratanga would be guaranteed for Māori people.

Rangatiratangameans chieftainship and can be translated in English as responsibility, authorityor sovereignty. Tino is an intensive word and means full, total or absolute. Socombined, tino rangatiratanga means complete responsibility, absolute sovereignty,full authority or control (see John Miller and Elisapeta Heta on p. 180 of thiscatalogue). In the English translation of the Māori version of Te Tiriti o Waitangi,the British Queen agreed to the rangatira and the iwi (chiefs and people)maintaining full tino rangatiratanga of all our lands, kāinga (villages) and taonga(anything prized), including our ways of life. In the Māori version of the Te Tiritio Waitangi treaty, tino rangatiratanga was defined as a fixed term, and as theexpression of absolute Māori authority and autonomy over all things Māori.

Within the treaty, what was agreed by Māoriwas not sovereignty but kāwanatanga.Kāwanatanga can be interpretedas governorship, with governorshipgranted by Māori to the Crown as‘limited power to control new settlers.’3Te Tiriti o Waitangi did not makeMāori people into British subjects;instead it recognised our continuedrights to experience and practice ourown customs and lifestyles, and topossess our own laws.

In her seminal book MaoriSovereignty (1984), Donna Awateredefines Māori sovereignty as: ‘Māoriability to determine our own destinyand to do so from the basis of our landand fisheries’4 (see Emily Karaka on p.150 of this catalogue). Native American academic Jolene Rickard believes powerand authority in relationship to sovereignty are synonymous, with sovereignty atool that could be used to ‘perpetuate the existence of a group.’5 Sovereignty in aFirst Nations context, Rickard states, is part of an ongoing strategy for our survivaland is ‘… the border that shifts indigenous experience from a victimized stanceto a strategic one.’ The recognition of sovereignty, she adds, ‘… puts brains in ourheads, and muscle on our bones.’6 Rickard also calls for First Nations artists to beunderstood ‘through the clarifying lens of sovereignty and self-determination … ’7rather than being identified and defined in relation to assimilation, colonisationand identity politics.

During the 2019 curatorial symposium ‘It’s as if we were made for eachother’, held at St Paul St Gallery in Auckland and convened by Taarati Taiaroaand Balamohan Shingade, a conversation took place between the two Aucklandbased academics Te Kawehau Hoskins and Alison Jones about Māori–Pākehārelationships (Pākehā is the name given to settler New Zealanders by Māori). Inhis blog on the conversation, Dan Kelly noted that ‘[t]o be Pākehā is to belong toNew Zealand by virtue of Te Tiriti and the relationship established with Māori.’8The conversation relayed the ‘entangled personal and theoretical trajectories’9of engagement and outlined a way for Māori and Pākehā to work together. Bothspeakers stated that engagement is the crucial pivot, but the desire for answersand finality needs to be set aside and, with that, the engagement is ‘situational,contingent and unpredictable.’10 Their proposal for working together has beenformed from an ‘interminable struggle’ and from a relationship position thatis being ‘made and remade.’11 The tenacity of the return, they said, is what wassignificant, not the engagement alone.

sovereignty or the inter-relationships between Indigenous and settler cultures. Itis being witnessed currently by us all, and overwhelmingly in the form of climatechange. Although some choose to deny it, climate change is the unmitigatedcatastrophe of our age. It relates to the significant and long-term changes to theglobal climate as a result of and related to our – the human – impact on the earth. The connectedness between our activity and climate change makes it clear thatthe world is in crisis and is manifest in what we have come to know as globalwarming, the increasing temperature of the earth’s atmosphere. Its influencescan be seen in the melting of glaciers and the rising sea levels that will eventuallydrown some of our small island countries, including many of our close neighboursin the Pacific.

It has altered ecosystems, seen important food species and cropswiped out, and is responsible for the acceleration of natural disasters that we areincreasingly experiencing around the globe. With the biblical intensity of pestilenceand plagues, the natural disasters we are bearing witness to include unprecedentedheatwaves, droughts, floods and cataclysmic environmental crises such as therecent devastating bushfires that have raged across Australia.

The Australian bushfires that escalated during Christmas 2019 and thenew year period of 2020 were of a scale never before seen; the smoke that pollutedand choked the air in Australia created a haze that coloured skies as far afieldas New Zealand and South America. The bushfires have caused, to date, theburning of 14.5 million acres of land in Australia, the heartbreaking destructionof an estimated half a billion native animals and the devastating loss of people’slives. Apocalyptic and terrifying, the bushfires can be seen as a tangible result ofclimate change. This calamitous disaster underlines again the significant symbioticrelationship between us and the earth/land/whenua. The other terrifying missiveit leaves us is the urgency to stop what we are doing and to work together in anattempt to reverse and halt the environmental genocide we have, through ouroblivion, created.

Megan Tamati-Quennell is the curator of Modern & Contemporary Māori& Indigenous Art at Te Papa, Wellington, and Associate Indigenous Curator,Contemporary Art | Kairauhī Taketake Toi Onāianei at the Govett Brewster ArtGallery, New Plymouth. Of Te Āti Awa, Ngāi Tahu and Kāti Māmoe descent,Megan has a 30-year art curatorial career.