As Waitangi Day commemorations continue drawing people from across Aotearoa and around the world to the Bay of Islands, Te Tii Marae has become a gathering point for Indigenous ocean leadership from across the Pacific.

Taiātea: Gathering of the Oceans held its public forum yesterday, uniting more than 20 Indigenous leaders, marine scientists and researchers from Australia, Canada, Cook Islands, Hawai’i, Niue, Rapa Nui and Aotearoa.

The forum forms part of a wider 10-day wānanga taking place across Te Ika a Māui (North Island).

• READ MORE: Big Ka Lāhui Hawaiʻi delegation joins Māori in solidarity over Te Tiriti
• Other Waitangi reports

With a focus on the protection and restoration of Te Moana Nui a Kiwa, the Pacific Ocean, kōrero throughout the day centred on the exchange of knowledge, marine protection, ocean resilience and the accelerating impacts of climate change.

A key message remained prevalent throughout the day – the moana is not separate from the people, but a living ancestor, and a responsibility carried across generations.

‘Continue that path of conservation, preservation’
Hawaiʻi’s Solomon Pili Kaho’ohalahala, co-founder of One Oceania, a former politician, and a respected elder, framed his kōrero around the belief that there is no separation between human and nature — “we are all one”.

For Kaho’ohalahala, being present at Waitangi has been a powerful reminder of the links between past, present, and future.

“Waitangi is a very historical place for the Māori people,” he said. “It is where important decisions were made by your elders.

“So to be here in this place, for me, is significant.”

“We are talking about historical events that have happened to our people across Oceania, preserved by the elders who had visions to create treaties . . .  decisions that were going to be impactful to the generations to follow,” Kaho’ohalahala said.

“It brings the relevancy of these conversations. They are what we need to negotiate and navigate the challenges we face in the present. The purpose for this is, ultimately, no different to the kupuna (Hawai’ian elder), that this was intended for the generations yet unborn,” he added.

Kaho’ohalahala also reflected on the enduring connections between indigenous communities across oceans.

“To be a part of this conversation from across the ocean that separates us, our connection by our culture and canoes is to help us understand that we are still all connected as the people of Oceania.

“But we need to be able to reiterate that, and understand why we need to emerge from that past to bring it to our relevancy to these times and issues, to continue that path of conservation, preservation, for those unborn.”

‘Our ocean … a living organism,’ advocate says
Cook Islands environmental advocate and Ocean Ancestors founder Louisa Castledine reiterated the responsibility of Indigenous peoples to protect the ocean and pass knowledge to future generations.

She said Waitangi was the perfect backdrop to encourage these discussions. While different cultures face individual challenges, there is a collective sense of unity.

“One of our key pillars is nurturing our future tamariki, and the ways of our peu tupuna, and nurturing stewardship and guardianship with them as our future leaders,” Castledine said.

“It’s about reclaiming how we perceive our ocean as being an ancestor, as a living organism, as whānau to us. We’re here at Waitangi to stand in solidarity of our shared ancestor and the responsibility we all have for its protection,” Castledine said.

She said people must be forward-thinking in how they collectively navigate environmental wellbeing.

“We all have a desire and a love for our moana, our indigenous knowledge systems of our oceans are critical to curating futures for our tamariki and mokopuna,” she said.

“We want to ensure that generations that come after us will continue to be able to feed generations beyond all of us. It’s about safeguarding their inheritance.”

Learning about shared challenges
Canadian representative Chief Anuk Danielle Shaw, elected chief councillor of the Wuikinuxv Nation, said the challenges and goals facing Indigenous peoples were often shared, despite the distances between them.

“This is [an] opportunity to learn about common challenges we may have, and how other nations and indigenous leaders are facing those challenges, and what successes they’ve been having,” she said.

“It just makes sense that we have a relationship, and that we build that relationship.”

She noted the central role of the marine environment for her people.

“It’s not lost on me that my people are ocean-going people as well. We rely on the marine environment.

“Our salmon is the foundation and the backbone of our livelihood and the livelihood of all other beings in which we live amongst. I’m a world away, and yet I’m still sitting within the Pacific Ocean.

“So the work I do at home and how we take care of our marine environment impacts the people of Aotearoa as well, and vice versa. And so it just makes sense that we have a relationship, and that we build that relationship, because traditionally we did,” she added.

Following the public forum, indigenous leaders will visit haukāinga in the Tūwharetoa and Whanganui regions for further knowledge exchanges and to discuss specific case studies.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Crisis is a word often used in politics and the media — the covid crisis, the housing crisis, the cost of living crisis, and so on. The term usually refers to single events at odds with common ideas of what’s acceptable, fair or good.

But in New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere, Indigenous policy can be portrayed as a different kind of crisis altogether.

Indeed, it can often just seem like one crisis after another, one policy failure after another: poor health, poor education, all kinds of poor statistics. A kind of permanent crisis.

• READ MORE: Indigenous recognition is more than a Voice to Government – it’s a matter of political equality
• Racism, exclusion and tokenism: how Māori and Pacific science graduates are still marginalised at university
• Can colonialism be reversed? The UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples provides some answers

Policy success, on the other hand, often doesn’t fit the crisis narrative: record low Māori unemployment, for instance, or the Māori economy being worth NZ$70 billion and forecast to grow 5 percent annually.

It may be that crisis makes better headlines. But we also need to ask why, and what the deeper implications might be for Indigenous peoples and policy in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia.

Colonialism as crisis
Last month, I published a journal article titled “The crisis of policy failure or the moral crisis of an idea: colonial politics in contemporary Australia and New Zealand”. In it I argue that when public services don’t work well for Indigenous peoples, the explanation does not just come down to isolated examples of policy failure.

The solution is not that governments simply get better at making policy. Instead, colonialism itself is what I call “the moral crisis of an idea”.

Earlier this year, former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said that Indigenous policy usually fails because:

[Governments] perpetuated an ingrained way of thinking, passed down over two centuries and more, and it was the belief that we knew better than our Indigenous peoples. We don’t. We also thought we understood their problems better than they did. We don’t. They live them.

Morrison was describing a problem with the way the system ordinarily works. Yet a crisis is supposed to be something out of the ordinary, something that needs fixing. How, then, do we fix an idea?

Listening, reflection and justification
Colonialism presumes a moral hierarchy of human worth. It presumes Indigenous people shouldn’t have the same influence over public decision making as others (for example, ensuring a hospital or school works in their favour).

Addressing this problem is the point of the Māori Health Authority, established in New Zealand last month, and the Māori Education Strategy released in 2020.

The democratic theorist John Dryzek says there is a crisis of communication in modern democracy. This is because people understate the importance of listening, reflection and justification in public decision making.

Colonialism, however, doesn’t require listening, reflection or justification. Its essential idea is that some people just aren’t as entitled as others to a meaningful say in public policy.

Entrenching listening, reflection and justification in the workings of democratic politics would support different and non-colonial aspirations. This is something I have called “sharing the sovereign” in my 2021 book of the same name.

Sharing the sovereign
Sharing the sovereign means recognising many sites of decision-making authority. This is the point of the treaties being considered in Victoria, the Northern Territory and Queensland. It’s also the point of Te Tiriti o Waitangi/the Treaty of Waitangi in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Te Tiriti affirmed the Māori right to authority (rangatiratanga) over their own affairs. It also conferred on Māori the rights and privileges of British subjects, which continue to evolve as New Zealand citizenship. This was the right to influence the affairs of the new state — the right to be part of the new state in a meaningful way.

Successive Waitangi Tribunal reports show that crisis in Māori policy occurs when these two simple ideas of independent authority and meaningful participation in the state are absent.

In Australia, the Victorian Treaty Assembly says: “Treaty is a chance to address [the] future together as equals”. The idea of an Indigenous voice to Parliament, which the new Australian government is supporting, is also a step towards sharing the sovereign among all citizens.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, sharing the sovereign would mean the Crown is not, in the words of the first Māori judge of the Supreme Court, Justice Joe Williams, “Pakeha, English-speaking, and distinct from Māori”.

Political equality then becomes possible because the sovereign is not an ethnically exclusive entity. It’s not an all-powerful authority over which Indigenous people should not expect any real influence.

Colonialism under permanent scrutiny
Equality through inclusivity is fundamentally different from colonialism and its inherent moral crisis. Equality and inclusivity make different assumptions about what the state is and to whom it belongs.

However, normalising public institutions to work for Indigenous peoples as well as they work for anyone else is still a contested idea. In 2019, for example, the New Zealand cabinet instructed public servants on the questions they should consider when advising ministers on Treaty/Tiriti policy.

On one hand, cabinet affirmed Māori influence in the policy process. On the other, it didn’t consider the possibility that governments might sometimes stand aside entirely in the making of effective and fair public policy. So, cabinet didn’t require advisers to ask questions such as:

• Why is the government presuming to make this decision?
• And why does the decision not belong (partly or entirely) to the sphere of tino rangatiratanga (self-determination, sovereignty)?

Asking these kinds of questions involves sharing the sovereign. They presume listening, reflection and justification to put colonialism, as the moral crisis of an idea, under permanent scrutiny.

Dr Dominic O’Sullivan, is adjunct professor, Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences, Auckland University of Technology, and professor of political science, Charles Sturt University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

By AUT News

The Tonga episode in Auckland University of Technology’s Pacific language video series – Adapting to a Changing World, Shaping Resilient Futures – has been released.

The video is narrated in Tongan (with English subtitles) from the viewpoint of a 15-year-old girl, to acknowledge the language being celebrated in Aotearoa New Zealand this week.

It looks at the issue of food security among our Pacific families in Aotearoa, based on significant findings from the Pacific Islands Families Study (PIFS).

PIFS director Associate Professor El-Shadan Tautolo said the availability and cost of healthy food options was a significant issue faced by many communities across Aotearoa, including Pacific families.

“Our research found that around 40 percent of the 1300 families interviewed, could not afford to buy healthy food, and as a result, they would often skip important meals and go hungry, or they would buy food that was less nutritious, but cheaper,” said Associate Professor Tautolo.

“Much more needs to be done for our communities when it comes to this issue.

“There are some resources available, including AUT’s Certificate of Proficiency in Pacific Nutrition, which supports our communities to utilise healthy eating options or alternatives, at a low cost, to avoid diet-related health diseases.

“However, at a policy level, governments need to do more to close the gap between food availability, choice and cost, particularly in light of the recent covid-19 situation and the impact on household incomes and the ability to buy nutritious healthy food.

“The upcoming elections provide an opportunity to see this issue highlighted – we need urgent regulatory changes to ensure healthy food options are prioritised.”

• Tongan language Week: September 7-11, 2020

Release dates for upcoming videos:

• Te Wiki o te Reo Māori (Māori Language Week) – Sunday September 13 2020
• Tuvalu – Sunday 27 September
• Fiji – Sunday 4 October
• Niue – Sunday 18 October
• Tokelau – Sunday 25 October

Indigenous people fought alongside youth movements in the creation of an Indonesian nation. But, in the historical writing of Indonesia’s struggle for independence from colonial powers, stories of Indigenous people’s role are nearly non-existent compared to that of the elite educated youth leaders.

This lack of representation reflects the marginalisation of Indigenous peoples, which continued throughout Indonesia’s 75 years of independence.

Indigenous people, whose traditional knowledge and way of life proved to be a force to be reckoned with during the current covid-19 pandemic and who for generations serve as guardians of forests and natural environments, continue to be stigmatised and experience oppression in their own country.

• READ MORE: West Papua, oil palm expansion undermines the relations of indigenous Marind people to forest plants and animals
  

Nearly 20 million, out of a total of 268 million Indonesians, Indigenous peoples are often being associated with “dirty, primitive, underdeveloped, alien, to forest encroacher.”

The stigma resulted in them being underrepresented, either economically, socially, politically, and culturally.

In addition, these communities suffered oppression from the government’s economic driven investment, evicting them from their customary lands to make way for large scale forestry, mining, and plantations.

Freedom fighters
History books barely mention how Indigenous peoples took arms with the Youth movement during the struggle for independence and helped to finally established the Republic of Indonesia.

Rukka Sombolinggi, who comes from the Toraja tribe in South Sulawesi, recalled the experience of her own family. She said that her great grandfather and grandfather were freedom fighters who fought along with students.

Rukka is the secretary-general of the Alliance of Indigenous Peoples of the Archipelago (AMAN). The alliance currently represents 2366 indigenous communities throughout Indonesia or more than 18 million individual members.

“My grandfather died as a veteran. The history might not have recorded Indigenous Peoples’ roles for fighting the colonialism, but there were hundreds of thousands of them who died in the wars. Unfortunately, history recorded only the youths movements,” said Sombolinggi.

Sandra Moniaga, a Commissioner for Assessment and Research at the National Commission of Human Rights (Komnas HAM), said the majority of Indigenous Peoples, such as Sedulur Sikep in Java, were among the groups who rejected to collaborate with the Dutch colonialists.

Moniaga added that Indigenous peoples have a unique contribution to Indonesia’s struggle for independence. “They preserve Indonesia’s local cultures, protecting our identity as a nation known with hundreds of tribes and cultures,” she said.

Forest guardians
Most of Indigenous peoples’ customary lands are within and near the country’s forests. They play a huge role in protecting the country’s forest and natural environment.

In her recent study about the Marind-Anim Indigenous Peoples in Merauke Regency, Papua Province, anthropologist Sophie Chao who has been living among them for more than a decade, mentioned how the tribe is “caring for the forest, respectable to plants and animals, and nourishing relationships with the natural world”.

Under the administration of Indonesia’s first president Sukarno, Indigenous peoples got their recognition through the State’ agrarian law in 1960.

The law was the first to mention Indigenous peoples. But it stipulates that customary law applies as long as it aligns with national and State interests.

After Soeharto took power in 1966, there was systematic destruction on customary rights during the New Order, according to Sandra.

She said that the government carried out land-grabbing by issuing forest permits on customary lands for forestry, mining and large scale plantations.

“Most of these customary lands were also claimed by the government to be handed over to migrants and TNI (the army) or the police,” she added.

Towards recognition of Indigenous rights
Things started to change for Indigenous peoples in following the end of Soeharto’s rule in 1998.

The 4th Amendment of the 1945 Constitution enacted in 2000 acknowledged their “traditional existence” and “traditional way of life”.

This became the legal basis for the Constitutional Court to rule out customary lands (Hutan Adat) as State’s forests in 2012, or locally known as MK35.

Another progress, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo had revived the Indigenous Peoples Bill, which will strengthen Indigenous peoples’ existence in the Republic and to resolve ongoing conflicts related to customary lands.

“Still, it is difficult to realise these regulations. Instead of RUU MHA (Indigenous Peoples Bill), the government and lawmakers are more eager to pass the Omnibus Law on Job Creation,” slammed Rukka Sombolinggi.

She said currently, Indigenous peoples are facing another form of “colonialism”. Since decentralisation in 2001, the regents and governors were the ones issuing permits over Customary Forest without their consent.

“We are no longer fighting foreign companies, but locals, like the bupati (head of regent), the governor. Their own people,” she said citing Sukarno’s famous speech: “My struggle was easier because it was to expel the colonialists, but yours will be more difficult because it is against your own people.”

Moving forward
During the pandemic, Indigenous peoples that are still practising their traditional knowledge are considered to be the most resilient groups because of their closeness to nature.

“Indigenous peoples who are guarding their areas and not massively exploited their resources and have the spirit of sharing, they have strong resilience against this pandemic. They can even provide their own food,” said Rukka Sombolinggi.

Meanwhile, those who are exposed to modernisation or in conflict with the industries suffer from unemployment, food security, and lacking in health, clean water and sanitation access.

“The claim and promises from big corporations to provide food, open access to education, or employment, they are now becoming helpless due to the characteristic of the virus,” Sombolinggi added.

Sophie Chao admired the courage, resilience, endurance, and creativity of Indigenous Peoples, in general, in the face of ongoing threats to their lands and ways of life.

“For me, my hope is that the cultures and values of Indigenous Peoples will be fully recognised, protected, and promoted by the Indonesian state and by the international community,” said Chao.

“This means making sure that their rights to land are guaranteed, that their full consent is sought where development projects are being planned, and their development takes place in a bottom-up way, based on Masyarakat Adat‘s own aspirations, dreams, and hopes.”

Rukka Sombolinggi, secretary-general of the Alliance of Indigenous Peoples of the Archipelago (AMAN), and Sandra Moniaga, a Commissioner for Assesment and Research at the National Commission of Human Rights (Komnas HAM) were interviewed for this article, part of a series to commemorate Indonesian Independence Day on August 17. Fidelis Eka Satriastanti is editor of Lingkungan Hidup, The Conversation. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.