“Thinking through Whakapapa”

March 17, 2021

By AHNZ

By Thor’s Hammer! If Anglo Saxons must turn away from the Enlightenment might we at least have our own, better, Pagan Druidic, lore and conceits back? If we must ditch history and science why should it be for a Maori Academic one? Let’s have back King Arthur, Merlin, Robin Hood, The Green Man, Hern of the Forrest! Give me back the Greek Pantheon.

It’s one thing for Distinguished Professor in Anthropology at the University of Auckland, and 2013 New Zealander of the Year, Dame Anne Salmond to take grant money to suck Maori people back to their dark ages. Now here she is glorying in the idea Western kids are being forced in government schools into the same time warp hole!

“In whakapapa, the world is seen as a vast kin network, in which all forms of life are related…Ancestors remain active in the world, and in touch with their descendants.” – Thinking through Whakapapa: Aotearoa New Zealand histories in schools, Newsroom (Mar 2021)

That’s not ‘whakapapa’ that’s just primitive man. All our ancestors were polytheistic up to the point where they transitioned to the monotheism of Christianity. Maori got out of that and now academics like Salmond want to push them back in!

Why we going backwards?

“In the draft curriculum for Aotearoa New Zealand’s histories in schools, recently released for public discussion, it’s said the curriculum will be grounded on whakapapa and whanaungatanga – “our familial links and bonds, our networks and connections”…A key challenge in introducing Aotearoa New Zealand histories in schools, then, is to echo its expansive, kin-based approach to the past…We confront not just our ancestors but also our own capacity for determining who our ancestors were” [note: by ‘ancestors’ the Professor includes mountains, rivers, and other inanimates…]

If backwards we must go, I say again, why not fund and revive and instate in the teaching curriculum the primitive rites of Paganism too? For the Asian students, how about a bit of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom styled Thuggee occultism? We’ve got a lot of Chinese kids in New Zealand now so how about our teachers learn to school us in their out-dated demonology and ghosts? Are we ready to revive ideas about pilgrimage trails and the magic powers of relics and Saintly bones for the descendants of Medieval Catholics? Let’s not be hypocritical and privilege only Maori world views¹.

“The notion of ‘taha’ – different ‘sides’ in ancestral legacies that one can align with or activate on different occasions – is obscured. Different groups are pushed further apart in the ‘culture wars,’ as people hurl insults at each other from virtual bunkers, and eventually, in reality, with fatal consequences.”

In “touch with their descendants,” she says? Yeah, ‘touch’. And *curse* and kill and bewitch and rape…the fairy stories are getting siloconed over here! It was bad touching.

Give me a break, Salmond! Pretending to care about ‘taha’/different sides of ancestral legacy. Didn’t give a damn about that when lynching/debating men like Sir William Gallagher. Only up to the point where someone’s Ancestors of the Mind involve post-Enlightenent thinking.

The truth about what Salmond calls ‘taha’ is that Maori used to pick the ancestral legacy that suited the occasion. If the pedigree of a person or a thing suited the occasion they’d run with that but if it didn’t they’d keep cogitating about it for days if necessary. It must have been worse than waiting for a sports umpire to make a decision these days by reviewing every angle of replay footage. If the “occasion” warranted then different “sides” would “activate” so that the tribe could do or not do a thing they really wanted to do or not do. Also known as Selective Memory. Salmond’s acting like this is some kind of improvement to basing decisions on reason and evidence. Really it’s just a Maori equivalent to reading goat entrails or fox footprints or the number of vultures squatting in a tree or ducking a witch. It’s an epistemology re-wind.

“The conception of gods as superhuman beings endowed with powers to which man possesses nothing comparable in degree and hardly even in kind, has been slowly evolved in the course of history. By primitive peoples the supernatural agents are not regarded as greatly, if at all, superior to man; for they may be frightened and coerced by him into doing his will. At this stage of thought the world is viewed as a great democracy; all beings in it, whether natural or supernatural, are supposed to stand on a footing of tolerable equality…the idea of the world as a system of impersonal forces acting in accordance with fixed and invariable laws has not yet fully dawned or darkened upon him…he attempts to explain the world he lives in..as the manifestation of conscious will and personal agency.” – Frazer

Frazer’s writing helped me not to look down on Christians, instead that it was a stepping stone to better philosophy. The Old Testament’s One God is pretty bad, until you compare it to what it replaced. The sacrifice of the New Testament is also awful, except compared to the Old. Shifting this same projection of our individual virtues and sins from God/Satan to Big Government is also a step up. We are developing, we are getting better. We’re getting closer to not projecting into fantasy at all but becoming individuals fully human and fully alive. Not some sacrificial part in a giant collective machine! This is our journey, our unknown ideal, ushered along by what psychologists call the Self Actualising Tendancy.

“…as a Mother I’d have tonsay via EXPERIENCE that each little personality is delivered with Morals and Principles and Values very intact….Our Soul reincarnates and records every lifetime. Our Awareness develops…We all have Morals we are born with” – Comment to AHNZ (March 2021)

Everyone has their own path to walk. We’re still living in what Carl Sagan called the Demon Haunted World. New Zealand is full of the superstitious who aren’t out of their own stone-age metaphysics yet. What a terrible blow it is, then, for Government to indoctrinate the young not only in state-worship but in primitivism. No wonder our growth as a people and a nation is stunted!

—

1 Besides, which Maori views and myths should be taught? It’s not a monolith. The answer will be to teach the homogenised version cooked up at Salmond’s University. Academic Maori Clone Formula.

Image ref. Robin Hood talks to his Forrest god, Hern. Scene from Robin of Sherwood (1984)

Image ref. Prime Minister John Key takes part in the Maori blessing of the Singapore Kiwifruit Gooseberry office, led by a wood carver with pretensions of being Dumbledore; Photo: New Zealand Ministry of Zespri (August 2015)

Image ref. Traditional Santa returns to Nelson Santa Parade, as does Hana Kōkō; Stuff

Ref. The Golden Bough, James Frazer (e1996)

Like    Comment     Share