Toward Naturalization:

Intertwining Cultures and Environment

article by Payton Mitchell

My first encounter with Aoraki was under the name of a man who had never himself met

this imposing ancestor of Ngāi Tahu: Mount Cook.

This name was given to him by my ancestors, the European colonists of Aotearoa New Zealand in 1851,

in order to honor the first among themselves to map this corner of the so-called "New World.”

Eric William Young,

Aoraki Mount Cook (c. 1980–1989).

Auckland Libraries.

It contains within itself two of their fundamental follies, mistakes that we, their descendants, continue to perpetuate today. The name “Mount Cook” both ignores the indigenous Māori population who have known Aoraki intimately

for centuries before European “discovery” and constitutes

a refusal to really see the being itself.

It is a reduction of an individual, recognized as such by the name “Aoraki,” into the universal category of “mountain.”

Categories are smooth, small mental objects that offer no resistance to human manipulation. This tendency towards abstraction and universalization is one of the

great strengths of contemporary society; it is through abstraction and universalization that we have all the wonders of modern science.

But when I stand at the foot of Aoraki, I am struck by the absurdity of the name “Mount Cook.”

How could this immense individual be reduced into an object and placed in the shadow

of a man who never stood at its foot? A grave mistake is made when, instead of extrapolating universal categories from particulars, we view a particular as an instantiation of a universal category, granting the category ontological primacy

over the individual.

This inevitably deflects us from the particular, from the beings and phenomena that rise up in the world in their singularity and impenetrability. This is what the name Mount Cook epitomizes: it may be a particularly tall mountain, but it is just another mountain, like countless others back in Europe. It is not an individual.

Burton Brothers,

Aoraki Mount Cook (c. 1880–1899).

Auckland Libraries.

This may seem like a quibble best left to philosophers sitting up in their ivory towers, splitting hairs over insignificant differences in language. However, this seemingly minute distinction reveals an artificial chasm between humans

and the non-human world and a hollowness at the heart of colonist society.

For one cannot have a relationship with a universal category; it is possible only with individuals. Thus, the European colonists of Aotearoa New Zealand and their descendants (through inheriting their aforementioned ontological assumptions) find themselves floating above a contingent alien landscape, an undifferentiated mass that yields itself only as resources. This orientation lends itself to utilitarian assessments, where the only value the land has is what it instrumentally contributes to human well-being. Even traditional conservationism is limited by this stance, arguing against exploiting the land for economic gain either because there is higher utility in having an unpolluted place to live or because the utility gained through the aesthetic use of the land as wilderness is greater than that gained by extracting resources.

The land does not have its own voice, because it is not constituted of individuals. Humans are the only true individuals, and thus the only beings with ultimate value; all else in the world accrues value relative to our interests.

This stance is convincing, in large part because there is a genuine correlation between environmentally exploitative practices and human well-being (although these benefits accrue unevenly across society).

However, a relationship based on domination has decidedly negative ramifications for the environment, as is readily apparent when considering the damage wrought by climate change. It is also a highly damaging stance for a person to take to the rest of the world, as the French mystic Simone Weil understood.

In exile from Nazi-occupied France in 1943, Weil wrote a landmark work of philosophy called L'Enracinement, or in English, The Need for Roots.

In it, she defined what she saw as the greatest social and spiritual need of human beings: rootedness.

Simone Weil (1921).

Weil writes that “a human being is rooted through their real, active and natural participation in the life of a collectivity that keeps alive the treasures of the past and has aspirations for the future. This participation stems automatically from place, birth, occupation, and those around them. Every human being derives [almost] all their moral, intellectual, and spiritual life from the environment to which they belong.”

These collectivities are a fundamental part of the individuals who are born into them, giving shape to their soul and person. A collectivity is also more than simply a human artifact

It is a unifying amalgamation of history, people, culture, and environment, in which each component

is a necessary and active participant. It is a unique place in the world where one belongs and in which their existence is justified as a vital member.

Weil contrasts this deep sense of belonging and spiritual nourishment with what she saw as the defining malaise of her era: uprootedness.

Uprootedness is the severing of all connection to place, past, community, and, in a strong sense, one’s own identity. Those who are uprooted are stripped of their citizenship as a member of a particular collectivity in the world, banished from their own self-hood and left to drift in a torturous contingency. To be uprooted is to be alienated from the nature of being, alienated from even having the capacity to form a solid being.

Weil identifies the only two possible ways for those who are completely uprooted to respond to their condition, “either they sink into an almost deathlike inertia of the soul…or they throw themselves into an activity that always tends to uproot, often by the most violent methods, those who are not yet, or are only partially, uprooted.”

This is why “uprootedness is by far the most dangerous disease of society,” as its destruction is spread by those it has infected. Weil gives an example of an uprooted people going about violently uprooting others: the atrocities of the English colonists against the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Pacific.

The British obviously did not “discover” the places they colonized; there were already communities and cultures there, rooted collectivities who had inhabited those places

for centuries. The deep rootedness of these collectivities originates from different

ontological assumptions than those held by the colonists.

Mount Egmont (c.1860),

Hocken Digital Collections.

This contrast is particularly striking in Aotearoa New Zealand. Where colonial societies tend to view things in terms of universal and abstract categories, Māori ontology

is fundamentally relational. The relationships that an entity has are what defines it,

a view that finds resonance in the very structure of te reo Māori, the Māori language.

The tūī bird has fourteen other names in te reo, depending upon differences in sex, season, and location. Its identity is continuous with and constituted by its environment.

The discreet concept in Māori philosophy arising from this orientation toward relation is whakapapa, which translates into English as “genealogy.” However, the English term fails to capture the full nuances of the Māori concept. Whakapapa extends to all elements of the natural world – beyond being able to trace lineages to the first ancestors to have settled Aotearoa from Polynesia, lines of descent are traced all the way up through the environment to the primordial Māori parent gods, Ranginui and Papatūānuku. Whakapapa can also be used as a verb, meaning “to place in layers,” indicating that the relation is not one of humanity contrasted against and above the rest of the world, but one of humanity enmeshed inextricably within the world.

Relations are not isolated phenomena solely between two entities, but richly layered on top of and intersecting with one another to create an intricate web in which everything that exists is in some way connected to all else. The element of whakapapa that corresponds to the English word "genealogy" identifies this web as lines of descent. Thus, the familial concept is continuous with the natural world, and entities within the natural world are not just individuals, but also family members to whom respect and other obligations are owed.

Indeed, the word for land in the Māori language is “whenua” - the same word for “placenta.”

Particular location in Aotearoa New Zealand is constitutive of identity for Māori in a way that it is not for Pākehā, the descendants of European colonists. It is not simply that one’s ancestors are buried in the land, but that the land and all that populates it is itself an ancestor, a family member.

Māori collectivities are thus deeply rooted in Weil’s sense, uniquely and incommensurably. This connection to the environment being conceived in terms of familial bonds disallows exploitation and destruction of the natural world while emphasizing reciprocal obligation and mutual flourishing. One would not annihilate their own mother in

order to maximize profit.

This deep rootedness has real world implications, most readily apparent in recent landmark conservation policy. In Aotearoa, the forest of Te Urewera, the Whanganui River, and the mountain of Taranaki Maunga have been granted legal personhood, recognizing their status as individual entities.

Ronald Thomas Bateman Clark,

View of Mount Taranaki (c. 1960-1979)

Auckland Libraries.

This would not have been possible without a rooted attachment to the particularities of this land and the recognition of the entities that populate it as individuals. It represents a new frontier in climate policy where it is no longer the values instrumental to humans that justify protection of the environment, but the value, dignity, and sovereignty that accrues intrinsically to an individual person, whether human or non-human.

Pākehā, as a group, have lived uprooted and disconnected from Aotearoa New Zealand since arriving, committing atrocities against Māori and their non-human relatives – the uprooted uprooting others.

Recognition for wrongs has only just begun and reparations are far behind where they should be.

What can the descendants of colonists do, then, to become good neighbours, to integrate into the land of Aotearoa?

Pākehāare not indigenous, and it is a further violence and usurpation against Māori for Pākehā to demand that title. We cannot claim descent from a lineage that is not our own. But we can begin to weave ours into the landscape and begin a new genealogy firmly rooted in the particularity of place; we can come to know Aoraki as an individual.

We can become naturalized, a term originating in botany, used to describe a non-native plant that has integrated into the ecological community without exploiting the richness of the environment to its own destructive ends.

Naturalization is a setting aside of one’s own voracious desires and working to facilitate the mutual flourishing of each linked member of the community.

This can only be done by recognizing the individuals that constitute one’s environment as persons and as possessing the intrinsic value and dignity that disallows their exploitation. But more than this, it means slowing down to really seeour nonhuman neighbors as persons and building intimate relationships with them.

How does one go about forming these relationships? In our world of constant acceleration, how does one slow down enough to really see things for their individuality and not as a category?

As Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer asks, what “can you offer the earth, which has everything?” There is nothing you can give “but something of yourself.” The most sacred gift you can give is that of your attention, an idea that finds resonance in Weil, who thought that pure attention was a way of coming into contact with the divine. However, this is not the almost muscular effort of attention we give to our studies or work. It is a careful abiding, waiting for the object of concern to pierce your soul and psyche. This type of attention is cultivated through ritual, according to both Weil and Kimmerer. It is the task then of the uprooted, as we create new genealogies, to begin new ritual traditions as well. We must invent practices that draw our attention to the nonhuman persons around us, thus threading our souls into the network of relationships that constitutes the world and everything in it.

As Kimmerer writes, “being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit.”

To become naturalized is to become, in the strongest sense of the word, rooted.

References:

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2020.

“Māori Names.” Manaaki Whenua. https://www.landcareresearch.co.nz/tools-and-resources/education/the-story-of-tui/maori-names.

Taonui, Rāwiri. “Whakapapa – Genealogy | Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand.” Te Ara: the Encyclopedia of New Zealand. https://teara.govt.nz/en/whakapapa-genealogy.

Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots. Translated by Ros Schwartz. Penguin Classics, 2023.

“Whenua.” Te Aka Māori Dictionary. https://maoridictionary.co.nz/search?&keywords=whenua.