#2: 3/6/25

Sit spot: Backyard garden behind my flat

3:30pm 

New Zealand’s indigenous peoples, or Māori people, consider water to be the foundation of all life. At a museum I was at a few weeks ago, there was an exhibit about those who fought in the New Zealand wars. At the end of the exhibit, there was a wairua bowl filled with water to sprinkle over our heads to cleanse of negative energy before re-entering the everyday world. I have been moved by the presence of Māori customs, language, and culture in New Zealand. It has made me think deeply about relation to the land, visibility and presence in government and law, and what makes culture particular and far-reaching. 

In my Contemporary Pacific and New Zealand Anthropology course we read about the shared Oceanic regional identity being bound to the ocean. New Zealand is one of the larger colonial islands in this region and has some similarities and some differences with smaller, farther out Pacific islands, but one of the similarities I notice is the connection to water. Some bodies of water in New Zealand have the legal status of personhood, and there is this almost tangible love and reverence for the oceans that surround the country. The beaches, the ocean, and their animals are protected in marine reserves with strict laws on fishing and harvesting.

 

I live in a flat next to the Leith River, which also supplies most of the water for Dunedin. The energy that flows through my lamps consists of 55% hydroelectric power. The water near me is integral to the identity of the university, flowing directly through campus. Buses run to the neighboring beaches, and I have been to beaches filled with sea lions and rimmed with starfish and tide pools several times since arriving here. 

In a country that devotes so many governmental resources to protection of the forests, rivers, oceans, lakes, valleys, and everything that lives there, I feel reverence for the land in a way I haven’t fully felt in the US. I think much of the legal preservation efforts and appreciation for the natural landscapes comes from the advocacy of Māori peoples and their worldviews. As a budding biologist, I think a lot about life, where it comes from, and what sustains it. Water is most definitely one of the core components to life, and I find it beautiful to respect it as such in the way that Māori traditions do.