traditional knowledge conference 2008 te tatau pounamu

poverty, a poverty of the heart, a poverty of wairuatanga (spirituality) that is just as pervasive and justas damaging and does not relate to money. Along with Māori on the coast and a couple of other places,we (of Northland) are often called the top of the bottom. This means that in nearly every indicator thatyou can think of we win a prize that you never want to get. If you want to have the least of somethingwe have got the most of it. If you want to have the most of something we have got the least of it.However, we are also awesomely innovative and creative and that is something that is rarely captured inthose kinds of negative statistics.When we come to approach this whole issue, how many of you here are familiar with the field ofneuroscience? It is relevant to many of the things that we look at when we start to talk about violencewithin whānau. All of us can understand that trauma can have a negative effect on the body. Evenspeaking in front of some of you might raise my heart rate. I might be worried about what you think andthere is a change. There are some physiological changes: the heart beat speeds up, the breath changes,the blood pressure changes, all of those things. Those are physiological responses to stress and totrauma. Those of you who have worked with children and young people who have been exposed tostresses will know that sometimes the weight of that trauma and the regularity of it becomes so muchthat they are unable to turn off those stress-related chemicals, like adrenalin and cortisol and others. So,they are constantly locked into fight, flight or freeze. It is not surprising, then, that sometimes we seewhat we call unexplained violence. It is actually very logical from where they are. It is not surprisingthat some of what we need to recapture is the knowledge around how we care for women when they arecarrying babies, how we reduce their stress levels, how we support them, how we make sure they arenot isolated, how we look after and love and bond and attach with our tamariki (children) so they arenot washed with those negative chemicals.But at a collective level the phenomenon of ethno-stress, which is often referred to by people likeAgnes Williams and Winona La Duke, is really a collective response to that intergenerational traumaand dispossession. So, there is a sense in which many of our communities and whānau then becomelocked—almost a collective fight, flight or freeze response—and we see that the violence begins to turnon ourselves. Hence, violence within the whānau, violence between those who should be mostconnected. Hence, the flight into the worlds of alcohol and drugs, and the suicides. The freeze: thatmeans that whānau members sit and know and say nothing when our babies are hurt. We have to findsome ways of challenging and disrupting the way this is consistently reproduced and internalized andthe representations of us as these kinds of people. Often we will say, “Who are the children you knowof who have been killed within their whānau?” I have heard Moana say it. I have heard Mereana say it.I have heard many of us say it. Whose faces do we see, tamariki Māori? We are hyper-visible whensomething goes wrong. We are invisible when it comes to celebrating and doing what is right.It really comes to me because, as Mereana said, “I have worked in this field.” I think I am actuallygetting less bureaucratic. The more I have thought and reflected, in the end it comes down to twoquestions for me. How do we change the world and how do we use our powers for good and not for evil?Only two questions! How do we change the world? How do we use our powers for good and not forevil? Because we all have those powers. It could be said that when we walk in the sacred there are veryfew enemies. We talk so much about being holistic and about wairuatanga and spirituality but we oftenhave very little actual spiritual practice. Part of that, of course, is linked to the fact that much of ourspiritual practice was linked to whenua (land) and to places; once we become separated from thoseplaces then the practices begin to fall away. This is because the practices are not necessarily based insaying, “I believe a list of things that we subscribe to,” but rather, “Here are things that I do that are partof me and part of my place, my whenua.”My other reflection is that, while there is never enough temporal power—so many of us will havebeen down interesting journeys at different times in organizations around biculturalism and all of thesethings—it is always wonderful until someone has to hand something over. The theory is wonderful butif the thing that has to get handed over is pūtea (money, resource) it is even more difficult because thereis never enough. So, someone has to give some up and hand it back to someone else and that is verydifficult. If we stay in that realm, where we are trying to change the world and use our powers for goodand not for evil, we will constantly be thwarted because there is never enough. Given the ethno-stress66