traditional knowledge conference 2008 te tatau pounamu

On the 19th anniversary of my mother’s death I stopped making cakes. I was 19 when my motherdied. For every year after her death, I had a year of memory of being with her to match each year ofbeing without her. When it came to the 19th anniversary, when I turned 38 and effectively it was the20th year of her death, I had run out of years. I had to start mourning.I started to ask myself, have I any other craziness happening in dealing with her death apart fromthe icing monuments? Apparently, I was what is known as a motherless daughter. What was that? Whatwas motherloss? How do you cope with losing your mother? Had anybody written about that? Ismotherloss any different from any other loss, and why?My mother’s upbringing was by her Whakatōhea (Eastern Bay of Plenty tribe) elders. Her tangi(time of mourning) was very traditional, with many protocols that are not practised as strongly today.The conventions and processes of tangihanga (funeral rites) were still evident. Then why did it still hurt19 years later?Ngā Mōteatea is an annotated collection of traditional songs made over 40 years ago by thedistinguished leader and academic Sir Āpirana Ngata. These songs were published from 1928 onwards.Ngā Mōteatea has been published in four volumes with English translations, the first three volumesbeing translated by the great scholar Pei Te Hurinui Jones. I researched every incidence of the word“mate” (death) in these volumes. There are 240 occurrences of this word. None of them deal with thepain a daughter feels on losing her mother. There are no mōteatea (traditional chants) in thesecomprehensive volumes that talk about motherloss.I come from Tūranganui ā Kiwa (Gisborne). My iwi (tribe), Te Aitanga ā Māhaki, use the wordkōkā for mother. Like many other iwi, this word is not specific to mother but can be used for an auntieor, in fact, any female relative of the generation above the speaker.In my search for examples of songs recording the pain and anguish at the loss of a mother by adaughter, I was unsuccessful. I was searching for something that wasn’t there. Traditionally, Māorisociety ensured that a daughter was collectively nurtured and shaped by female relatives. Theserelatives took a collective responsibility for the child and were constantly interacting in her life. Hersocialization and enculturation was a responsibility of the collective. Loss was a given and griefexpected at the death of one of these important nurturing figures. My research did not show theexistence of a single linear relationship between mother and child.I am the only daughter and the youngest of three children to my father and mother. From my verybeginning, my mother had built around me he puni kuia (a collection of grandmothers). I was neverbabysitted by my brothers or any young enterprising cousin. I was always taken to Nannies. My motherwas following a very traditional norm. She was ensuring I was surrounded and loved by a collective offemale relatives. She was ensuring I would never feel abandoned of mothering love.Even though I didn’t find examples of motherloss in Ngā Mōteatea, I found powerful, extremelypoignant, heart-wrenching expressions of grief. These expressions were, as Scheper-Hughes’ researchhad shown, constructions of our feelings. In Death, Mourning and Burial, edited by A Robben, shesaid:Emotions are discourse; they are constructed and produced in language and human interaction.They cannot be understood outside of the cultures that produce them … radically put, without ourcultures we simply would not know how to feel. (2004, p. 190)How we feel is determined by our cultural contexts. The context provides the expression andmeaning. In Ngā Mōteatea, examples of this discourse are available. These are reliant on our owncultural worldviews to translate them. There were expressions for the announcers of death that weremost often symbolized as lightening. Grief was likened to a rising and falling tide, loss likened to ablistering barren day, the shattering descent of loss like a falling star. Finally, death was likened to the143