He Waka Eke Noa

Words by Rachel Trow | Kāti Māmoe, Kāi Tahu & Ngāti Hine, Ngāti Tūwharetoa | She/Her

Time slows down on Rakiura. There’s no running water or power during the day. Not where we live. For hundreds of years, my whanau have returned to the remote islands surrounding ‘Stewart Island’ to harvest Titi. 

Most are only contactable by radio. The emergency call to return to the mainland in March came just a week into the three month harvest season. Many were reluctant to return. The journey to the islands isn’t just about feeding whānau. It’s about feeding wairua—that of our own, and that of our whenua. 

Ask most Kāti Māmoe and they’ll tell you it’s the same thing.

All In This Together?

In Hawai’i, the Rim of the Pacific Exercise is gearing up for its 2020 rendition. Rim of the Pacific is somewhat of a misnomer. RIMPAC invites militaries from far beyond the Ring of Fire to participate in maritime and terrestrial war exercises. It’s the largest maritime warfare exercise in the world and New Zealand has long played a part in it. Organised by the United States Military, the exercise is intended to “sustain cooperative relationships that are critical to ensuring the safety of sea lanes and security on the world's oceans.”

Mana whenua tend to disagree with this assessment.

When Dr Emalani Case (Kanaka Maoli) isn’t lecturing Pacific Studies at Vic, she’s fronting Indigenous environmental kaupapa. Dr Case tells me that she is, of course, worried about the pandemic. However, like a lot of Indigenous people, she can’t help but worry about the issues that persist despite everything else coming to a halt.

“I've actually just been really asking myself what it means to be Indigenous during a pandemic […] Despite the rhetoric of being all in this together […] we're not all standing on equal grounds.”

If the pandemic has highlighted anything for marginalised communities, it’s that we are not all in the same boat. Just like the climate crisis, the pandemic is affecting some people harder and faster than others. When inequalities are compounded with contested and unstable environments, it highlights that “colonialism doesn’t stop in a pandemic,” as Emalani puts it.

Overpopulation and Eco-Fascism

Saying that ‘humans are the real virus’ isn’t a hot take. It’s eco-fascism. 

Michael E. Zimmerman characterises eco-fascism as “portraying ecological despoliation as a threat to the racial integrity of the people.” Essentially, eco-fascists believe land is spoilt by the mixing of blood between those who live with it. Additionally, it “would have to urge that society be reorganised in terms of authoritarian, collectivist leadership principle based on masculinist-marital values”, meaning the forceful movement of people based on blood quantum was a justified means to meet an ecological end.

This is why environmental academics, or at least, those who know better, are not talking about the dangers of over-population. 

Dr Amanda Thomas is a lecturer of Environmental Studies at Victoria University. Having graciously agreed to repeat the environmental justice section of GEOG314 for me, Amanda explains the narrative of overpopulation. Essentially, the overpopulation rhetoric dictates that it is the sheer size of the human population that is “causing the destruction of the climate.”

“The thing that really annoys me about that narrative is that it misnames the problem. It evens out blame for things like climate change as evenly shared across the planet and that’s not the case.”  

The inherent danger of the overpopulation narrative is that it implies that individuals contribute equally to environmental problems. In reality, the biggest contributors to environmental degradation are mega-corporations and settler-colonial governments. 

“We are really lucky to have a high degree of trust in our government and in the science advice that we are getting,” Amanda says. However, it’s a bit of a double-edged sword. As she tells me, “there’s also a reliance on the police without an acknowledgement of the way policing is highly, highly racialized, and is a racist organisation.”

Environmental Justice

Emalani has been thinking about her home a lot throughout the pandemic. She tells me about a highly contentious construction project in the Waimānalo area authorised by the Mayor of Honolulu. After issuing the stay at home order, the local government began construction over known burial sites. The construction was halted when bone fragments were found, and protestors travelled to the site.

“When I read the news about the bone fragments sitting here, [I was just] weeping, thinking, God, that's what it means to be Indigenous in a pandemic. It means wearing a mask and showing up to a protest so you don't have to see the desecration of your kupuna, of your ancestors” 

While others celebrate marine life returning to the canals of Venice, Indigenous people are reconsidering their kuleana, their kaitiakitanga, their responsibilities. How do we manage them with the restrictions of the settler-colonial government? It’s not just tangata whenua, tangata moana that have to ask this question. 

When I asked Amanda what environmental justice meant to her, she highlighted just how “tightly linked,” experiences of gender, class, race, and ability are to the environment. “If we’re talking about environmental justice, it means addressing all of those things at once.”

Not only do the arguments of overpopulation and eco-fascism violently impact Indigenous peoples, but they remove us from our lands, our waters. Emalani reveals the implications of this succinctly:

“Papatūānuku is an essential worker, you know? She’s an essential being right now. And we need to be tending to her and caring for her.”

When the boats return to Rakiura, they’ll find as much plastic on the shores as they did the year before. The tracks will be overgrown and the gutters of the houses will be full. But we will return. We’ll clear the bush and the Tītī will return to their burrows. We’ll return the Tītī innards to the sea and the kaimoana will flourish. The islands will be fed, and so will we.