Maori futures, post-apocalyptic sci-fi trade policy

MĀORI FUTURES SYMPOSIUM

20 June 2021

DISCUSSANT PROVOCATEUR NOTES

Carrie Stoddart-Smith

Introduction 

The creation of OpinioNative was the direct result of my learning and experience through the Masters of Maori and Indigenous Leadership programme at the University of Canterbury. I resigned from my public sector role immediately after our haerenga to the U.S but it took me about a year to really understand what my business does. Currently, I like to frame it as creating and curating Indigenous inspired content for policy makers and systems shapers. 

Definition

Like the other panellists, I spent some time trying to understand what was being asked of me as a “Discussant Provocateur”. It was a role I hadn’t been asked to do before so to help with others who might find themselves in this role in a future symposium, in brief:

A discussant provocateur is a final speaker (or speakers) who help the audience to better understand the topics or ideas presented. This could be by way of comments, drawing connections, adding new questions or points and challenging or reinforcing the ideas. The overall point is to explore how the ideas presented advance the aim of the Symposium. 

Unity

Unity was a common theme throughout the Symposium. Not unity in a homogeneity sense but in a connected through whakapapa and cosmogeny sense. The notion that we are part of a cohesive whole in a multiplicity of forms not a singular whole within which we are forced to fit in sameness.

Working in a policy space unity comes up a lot. Unity though is almost always conflated with sameness. However, the depth of thought around karakia, purākau, and our atua all enabled me to frame up some of my irritations with the policy use of unity by formulating a distinction in my mind between unifying identifiers and homogenous labelling. My frustration being that labelling too often brings into being negative stereotyping even when it might not be the intention.

Table: Exploring distinctions between unifying identifiers and homogenous labelling.

The above table certainly does not capture everything. It only attempts to provoke us to look at identifiers and labels as distinct ways of understanding our identities and how in a policy or political context our unifying identifiers are too often misused, misunderstood and misapplied in a way that results in harmful homogenous labelling. 

 When our unifying identifiers are misused the multiplicity of voices that ought to represent our diverse rights and interests are reduced to a mere few for departmental expediency. Any level of consensus, agreement on non-questioning put forward by the few simply reinforces the misuse or misapplication. This also happens with our tikanga and is increasingly a concern with the growing acceptance of tikanga Māori as guiding values for all New Zealand. In principle this isn’t a negative but in practice, it needs much more work and thought. Tikanga Māori are not “bicultural values” in my view. They are and will always be tikanga through our unifying identifier as Māori. Adopting them and then changing their state from Māori to bicultural serves to erase their whakapapa. Regardless of how widely adopted they may become, tikanga always has its roots firmly in Te Ao Māori and ought not be subject to interpretation and adaptation from outside of it. 

 A unifying identifier responds to the question of why not to the question of what. It opens us up to why we are connected and how we connect, rather than to define our identities as a what we are. Dr Eru Tarena asked us to consider what problems we might be sustaining as a way of building greater self-awareness of our own imperfect actions. In my view, our drive for greater acceptance and recognition of te reo Māori me ona tikanga must be carefully managed so as to avoid the complete appropriation of our values and our language. Let us not sustain the continued taking of our values and the narratives that support them for some false global narrative of our benevolent coloniser, and instead stand in our tikanga demonstrating that the aroha and the wairua comes from within Te Ao Māori.  

Identity

In standing in our tikanga, we ought not be afraid to also stand up as First Nations. Our hapu are the First Nations that emerged on this whenua. Tangata whenua. We built and sustained the first economies, and over the past 30 years we have been experiencing a period of economic resurgence and regeneration.

Currently, the NZ government is negotiating a Free Trade Agreement with the United Kingdom. Few people know this, but Maori already have one. He Whakaputanga was the first international trade agreement signed by a collective of our First Nations Chiefs which was accepted in its entirety by the UK in 1835. This was reaffirmed in the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, which also serves to protect our international trade and economic rights and interests. Yet, we are still constrained to having our trade and economic rights, interests, and aspirations filtered through the Government as it negotiates a new agreement. Now is the time that we ought to demand that the UK recognises its original agreement. We have an opportunity to hold the UK to account for its derogation from the terms of the Declaration which resulted in the systematic undermining of Māori international trade opportunities for almost two centuries. It is an opportunity to raise the matter – not through the Crown, but by standing in our tikanga, and the tikanga under which the original trade agreement was signed.

When we let go of the power struggles within and own our unifying identifier then we will be able to not only navigate but also to withstand the many winds that currently prevent us standing nation to nation. 

As Ereni Putere noted, “there is no Maori future without a Maori past”. My question then is, if we allow, He Whakaputanga to be shelved or ignored during this very pertinent time, are we consigning it and our ancestors intentions to the past and will this help or hinder our aspirations toward our preferred future?

Narratives

Narratives drive policy change. Popular and unpopular opinions influence our policy environment because they shift mindsets - in both a positive and a negative way. Just as a song’s chorus can create an unexpected earworm so too can narratives. Its why propaganda is used in wars. Its why soundbites are political artillery. Its why memes go viral.

Fortunately, Indigenous peoples are strong narrators and storytellers. We tell our stories in ways that connect us not just to our words, but to our environments, to our atua, to each other and to our hopes and aspirations. Compelling modern narratives embody both traditional and contemporary tools so alongisde, our knowledge holders – tohunga, our digital creatives and tech entrepreneurs will be key to helping us rewrite the next 2000 years. After all, don’t we want to create earworms that will stamp out racism, help us unlearn negative self-talk, invoke empathy and understanding and most importantly to elevate and accelerate the pathways to our preferred futures?

In my view, Indigenous futurisms offer a new way to explore policy tools and outcomes that drive us toward our preferred future. One idea I’m currently exploring is using post-apocalyptic stories as the basis of possible futures and exploring how in these worst case scenarios we can keep our values intact and identify the infrastructure and support systems we would need to prevail post-apocalypse. We had a minor glimpse into what a rapidly changed world feels like when the country was thrust into Level 4 lockdown in March 2020. But are we prepared for a much more severe change? If we are prepared, we will not respond with fear and we will not be at the whim of someone else’s plan. We will respond with the tools our ancestors have left us in our stories and with our values at the centre.

In addition to thinking about worst case scenarios, we must also be planning for futuristic settings that don’t exist yet. A lot of my work deals with trade and economic policy. But these policies are still largely written by old men, with old money and old priorities. With the pace of technological and digital development, policy makers cannot keep up. To keep pace, we should be writing trade and economic policy for tech that doesn’t exist yet with our values firmly in the frame.

Sci-fi provides a useful basis for this new type of analysis, particularly for thinking about the scenarios that could arise in relation to things such as AI, time travel, space travel, inhabiting a new planet and so on. An Indigenous futurisms approach will also ensure that we are undertaking this analysis with our Indigenous values and cosmogonies at the centre. Exploring how our values and knowledge systems might enhance a radically technologically different world while retaining our cultural integrity, sounds super fun right?!

My final bugbear brings together the three overarching themes: Unity, Identity and Narratives and revolves around the question of “What does Māori success look like?”. It’s a terrible question and one of the most irritating yet common questions policymakers will ask. What’s my beef? It implies that Māori success is a future state. It asks us to imagine ourselves in our homogenous label – as Māori in sameness not in our unique whakapapa. It implies that our current overarching whole state is one of failure. It compels us to view our current state as a burden we place on society. Whether consciously or unconsciously we start to internalise negative messaging that we are not enough. We begin to buy in to the homogenous label and through this the deficit lens prevails. We overlook our everyday achievements in the face of extreme adversity. Adversity underpinned by intergenerational trauma that we are taught to suppress as it does not exist except in our minds.

Whilst it is often a well-intentioned question, it’s a terrible frame for writing policy because it’s also geared toward specific and measurable outcomes. We end up with audits and over scrutiny of funding targeted at the specific and measurable and if they are not achieved within the set political cycle it reinforces narratives that Māori (homogenous label) continue to fail in every socio-economic domain and are a burden on society. 

This is why narratives matter. It’s why homogenous labelling is harmful, and why we need to move toward the language of unifying identifiers. To do this, we ought to be asking what our (Maori as a unifying identifier) preferred futures look like? This is a much richer conversation that turns our minds to hope and inspires us to celebrate our everyday successes in all spheres of our lives.  I want to see more future makers influencing and dissecting our policy system. Because as someone whose business is creating and curating policy content I’m excited to learn about what our preferred futures might look like, what our possible futures might entail and how we might respond to them and how we plan to change the probable future. I want to be part of a community who builds frameworks that help us analyse whether our ideas are futuring - accelerating toward our preferred future or defuturing hurtling toward the probable future or a destructive possible future. Indigenous futurisms could be the approach that guides us in this work to helping us build the narratives that will drive the mindset changes we need to shift the policy frame as we plan for our preferred future. 

Conclusion

During my comments, I also briefly discussed the idea of reclaiming commercial centres and building them Indigenous at their heart. This relates to the future narrative that I plan to write for OpinioNative over the next 10 years and will dive deeper into this at another time. But I leave you with this question:

What is the narrative that Indigenous peoples, Māori, Iwi & Hapū, Whānau and you want to write for the next 2000 years?

We don’t have to answer that question right now. But we ought to start thinking about what role we want to have in shaping history for our descendants. It goes to the heart of the provocation that “if we don’t have a plan, we are part of someone else’s”.