Environmentalism is a big part of pākehā identity. But for those of us who grew up in so-called ‘100% Pure’ Aotearoa, the reports of polluted rivers make for hard reading. Where exactly did we go wrong?
In 2017, this question brought our group of mates together: the catalyst for a mission to follow the Waikato River from its highest point in the snowmelt of Tongariro National Park, all the way to where its waters meet the Tasman Sea at Port Waikato.
The journey took us a month, on foot at first, and then in kayaks, portaging our way past the river’s eight hydroelectric dams, camping in public reserves and back paddocks, yarning to locals and watching the water change. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was changing too.
We’d planned to make a book from the get-go, but as research progressed, I found myself increasingly stuck. I had wanted to talk about the river’s colonial past and to distinguish ourselves from both the early settlers and the dairy farming implicated in fresh-water health. But as I scratched away in libraries and online, it became increasingly obvious that we, too, were implicated in the fate of the river. Different from the early settlers, but still so focused on movement and the rush to solutions – as if our lives weren’t linked. As if we didn’t live in the world they had made.
Slowly, I came to see that our environmental woes were a symptom of deeper problems, a product of the colonial mindset that continues to limit what New Zealand could be. From our fixation on economic growth, separation from nature, and the competitive, other-devaluing approach on which our ‘wealth’ is built, I came to understand that our international pride as pākehā masked an uglier past. In the colonial history that makes the river what it is today lay a different story to the myth of good race relations on which we’d been raised. In it was an invitation to a different, more connected way to belong.
I still think that New Zealanders’ love for the bush is a big part of what makes us who we are. But I’m under no illusion as to the Māori history of what became ‘our’ national parks, re-imagined as nature’s pure form: a pristine, human-less place. Nor am I blind to the ways in which – as ecologist Dr Geoff Park’s observed – preservation was also subordination. We’d grown up without this history, insulated from its hurt by our privilege, by the fact that we benefited from our access while Māori were left to their loss.
While this history can’t be erased, my hopes for pākehā New Zealand are that we can continue to learn from the bush and all that its ongoing respect and care demands. There’s no denying the successes that have seen wildlife regenerate, nor the efforts countless Kiwis go to in order to assist this. But neither can you deny the colonial invasions that have decimated them. We’ve made this mess, and it’s right that we do our bit to make it well.
So, too, with New Zealand’s race relations, and the ongoing negative outcomes that Māori experience as a result of colonisation. If pākehā are to live up to the egalitarianism we so enthusiastically claim, then this is where we need to work, decentring and unsettling ourselves, giving up on our claims to control and finding an honourable place. For those brave enough, it’s one in which we sit squarely with the history and people that make up this land.
It’s not something I would have guessed at the start of our journey, but in our love for nature’s diversity lay an insight, a path forwards. The river, meanwhile, flows on.
Where The River Runs
$35, from Strange Goods
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