A Language Older Than Words (24 page)

I asked Bruce, "What will it take for us to survive?"

He motioned us to follow, and led us outside to a beautiful vine reaching out to shade a planked walkway. Large white flowers hid in the recesses of the foliage. He said, "This vine no longer has a name. Our Maori name has been lost, so we'll have to find another. Only one of this plant remained in the world, living on a goat-infested island. The plant could go any day. So I got a seed and planted it here. The vine has grown, and although it normally takes twenty years to bloom, this one is blooming after seven."

He continued, "If we are to survive, each of us must become
kaitiaki,
which to me is the most important concept in my own Maori culture. We must become caretakers, guardians, trustees, nurturers. In the old days each
whanau,
or family, used to look after a specific piece of terrain. One family might look after a river from a certain rock down to the next bend. And they were the kaitiaki of the birds and fish and plants. They knew when it was time to take them to eat, and when it was not. When the birds needed to be protected, the people put a
rahui
on them, which means the birds were temporarily sacred. And some birds were permanently
tapu,
which means they were full-time protected. This protection was so strong that people would die if they broke it. It's that simple. It needed no policing. In their eagerness to unsavage my ancestors Christian missionaries killed the concept of tapu along with many others."

I looked at Jeannette. Her face was hard. Bruce continued, "To be kaitiaki is crucial to our existence. So while I am in agony for the whole planet, what I can do is become kaitiaki right here. This can spread, as people see this and say, 'We can do that back at home.' Perhaps then everyone can, as was true in our Maori culture, become caretakers of their own homes. Children will say to their parents, or to others, Tm sorry, but you can't do that here.'

"I'm more of a practical man, so rather than write papers about being kaitiaki, I just do it. I don't trust words. I'm frightened of the intellectualism that can insulate us from action and turn the problems and solutions into puzzles or fantasies. As Maori we already have the words, the concepts. But we can't rest on what our ancestors gave us. The work has got to be done." I thought about the question I ask myself each day, about whether I should write or blow up a dam, and asked, "Where do writers fit in?"

"Part of this work must be done by artists, philosophers, educators, and others who can articulate and perpetuate the Maori way of living, people who can help us untangle ourselves from the
pakeha,
the Europeans. And as a pakeha yourself there are many important things that you, too, can articulate. From your knowledge and from where you live. But I hope to think any piece of art spurs us into action. I want to believe in sustainability. Now. Not in the future. Not some distant day. Now. Great artists, such as Witi Ihimaera, describe that way of life and help us live it."

He stopped, stared at me intently, then said, "I'm sixty, so I only have ten or twenty years left. I don't have time for a lot of words; I want to use those years for action."

He looked away, then continued, "I hope before I die that I can hear kiwi again. Thousands of people come here, and I ask them, 'Hands up those of you who've heard a kiwi in the wild.' A bit less than one percent raise their hands. Kiwis have not always been so rare. Years ago I heard hundreds of kiwis all around me, in parts of Fjordland where predators hadn't reached. Because people hear the
ruru
in television advertisements, or kiwi on the radio, they think these birds are still common; it's not until they stop and listen that they realize they haven't heard a living ruru for a long time. The truth is that New Zealand has the most endangered birds in the world. The birds can't handle the rats, opossums, and cats—the worst of the introduced predators. People must begin to feel the responsibility of that very quickly."

He paused, then began again to speak, at first slowly, then with greater urgency, "We need different heroes. One day in the native bush in Fjordland I stumbled across a tombstone. Scraping off the moss I made out 'William Doherty, 1840.' Doherty died trying to save birds. Seeing that rats were making their way into Fjordland he started to move some of the birds onto an island where they could be safe, and he died rowing back. He deserves to be recognized as a hero, as a man 150 years ahead of his time."

Bruce was on a roll now, and spoke so quickly I could barely understand his New Zealand accent, "Actually, he wasn't ahead of his time. That was the time, then, and he could see it. I want to create a monument for him, do a garden in his honor using endangered native plants. We need heroes who leave threads for the rest of us to follow."

He looked out the window, and his speech slowed. "We also need patches of native bush full of native birds and animals, cathedrals where man is not as important as he makes himself out to be, where he instead recognizes himself as a small part of the big family. If we were to make those spaces of harmony available within walking distance from every house, so everybody was a kaitiaki, we would change the world. That's the plan I'm working on. If everyone nurtured a seedling and planted it they would be building their new church. And I'm in a rush."

Yesterday I received my monthly electric bill from the Washington Water Power Company. The envelope also contained a flyer for an event entitled
Stars: A Celebration of Heroes
that the utility will be putting on to benefit local charities. The head-liner for the evening is General H. Norman Schwarzkopf.

The flyer doesn't mention that in 1992, an international war crimes tribunal found Schwarzkopf and his fellow defendants guilty of nineteen counts of War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity for their roles in what is inaccurately known as the Persian Gulf War, a "war" in which 148 United States soldiers died (many from so-called friendly fire) and between 250,000 and 500,000 Iraqis, mostly civilians, lost their lives as well. Schwarzkopf was in charge of the American assault. In this war, American troops used plows mounted on tanks to bury Iraqi soldiers alive in their trenches: after one wave of bulldozers incapacitated the defenders, another filled the trenches with sand. In at least one verified incident, American soldiers slaughtered thousands of unarmed Iraqi soldiers walking toward American positions, hands raised in an attempt to surrender; the Americans used anti-tank missiles to blow apart ostensible prisoners. Two days after the cease-fire was declared, Schwarzkopf approved the combined arms slaughter of Iraq's Republican Guard Hammurabi Division as it retreated from the front ("Say hello to Allah," an American said as his laser-guided Hellfire missile destroyed an Iraqi vehicle). In clear violation of international law, American forces used napalm, fuel-air explosives (which release a cloud of highly volatile vapors that mix with air and detonate, creating overpressures of up to 1000 pounds per square inch—"Those near the ignition point are obliterated," notes a CIA report blandly), and cluster bombs (some of which, called "Bouncing Bettys," rebound off the ground to explode at stomach level, and others of which spew almost 500,000 high-velocity fragments— "specially formulated metal shrapnel to maximize damage to both man and machine"—per acre, and which were overwhelmingly used against taxis, buses, trucks, and Volkswagen Beetles; less than ten percent of the destroyed vehicles in one section of what has been called the "Highway of Death" were associated with the military. Most were, as one GI described, "like a little Toyota pickup truck that was loaded down with the furniture and the suitcases and rugs and the pet cat and that type of thing."). The United States Air Force intentionally bombed a baby milk powder factory, a vegetable oils factory, a sugar factory, the country's biggest frozen meat storage and distribution center (three times in one day), grain silos across the country, twenty-eight civilian hospitals, 52 community mental health centers, a major hypodermic syringe factory, 676 schools (including eight universities), many marketplaces and apartment buildings, and civilian highway traffic (Najib Toubasi, to provide one example out of tens of thousands, was driving a bus filled with 57 civilians when it was struck by two bombs: "People were running away and the planes followed them and strafed them with machine guns. ... I was wounded in my right leg. I was holding on to a woman with my right hand and a child in my left hand. We were running across the desert. The woman got hit, and the child was screaming, 'I don't want to die! I don't want to die!'"). Many of these attacks took place after the cease-fire was declared. Americans intentionally bombed the Amariyah civilian bomb shelter, twice. The first bomb opened a hole in the shelter's roof, which enabled the second bomb to be dropped cleanly through the hole to blast its way to the bottom of the shelter, where it killed all but seventeen of the 1500 mostly women and children hiding there—"Nearly all the bodies were charred into blackness; in some cases the heat had been so great that entire limbs were burned off."

I will not be attending the event billed "An Evening to Honor the Heroes Among Us."

"Not everything the Maori have done has been beautiful," Bruce Stewart said, "and I can't let my love for my own people blind me to that. Before the Maori arrived, there were other groups who lived here, called the Maoriori and the Patipiahiti. These groups were extreme pacifists, and very evolved in their thinking. It is said that whenever any scuffle broke out among these people, at the first sign of bloodshed all fighting must cease. The Maori then came, and slaughtered these earlier, more peaceful people. We need to not only cherish and maintain what is best from our Maori culture, but we also need to face the parts we do not find pleasant. And we need to see our way to re-evolve a culture as beautiful and advanced as the one once here."

Jeannette looked at him closely, seemed to study his features. There was a long silence, then she asked, "What would you wish to save?"

Bruce said, "It frightens me that being Maori is becoming a matter of wearing greasepaint and singing action songs for competitions. It hurt me to learn that computers are now used to judge singing contests, and it disturbs me that dances once held in circles are now held in rows, with people facing each other like in combat. I'd like to see the circle come back, and the drum, and I'd like for people to once again dance for their own spiritual well-being, rather than for competition.

"Still, because the culture is hard to annihilate altogether, some good things remain, such as the familyness and the maraes. I'm especially glad that people are starting to get back to the concept of nonownership of the
whenua."

As was true for so much of my time speaking with Maoris, I got lost in the vocabulary. I raised my eyebrows.

He saw me, stopped, then said, "The English word would be
earth.
But English, which is very exacting when it comes to legal deals and dollars, is imprecise when it comes to things like earth. In English, earth can be called soil, which has connotations of being unclean, as in 'The clothes are
soiled.'
And it can be called dirt, which of course has similar connotations. That could never happen in Maori.

"
Whenua
also means placenta, and so is associated with female energy. That caused problems when the Christian missionaries came. The Maori recognize two types of energy, the
tapu,
or male energy, and the
noa,
or female energy. We view these energies as opposites. When the opposites are in balance harmony is reached, called
waiora,
the two waters. But the missionaries said the tapu was good and the noa was evil.

"My point is that the Maori still have these concepts; we just need to reclaim them, and to live them more. In this way the young give me great hope. They are searching for truth and wanting to live it. It does wonders for mothers, for example, to take their children down to the gardens and speak Maori while they plant their food."

We were back inside now, and Jeannette looked at the walls of the room where we sat, and to the beautiful wood that made up the textured ceiling.

Bruce noticed her look, and said, "This place arose from the need to be sustainable, and not just on the dollar or food levels. Maraes are our art galleries, our museums, our places of history, our universities, our preschools. They are the places where we are buried. They become our whole life.

"People say they don't have the money to build them, but I don't think that's the problem. The problem is that most people don't have the will. This whole place is assembled from the wastes of the city, and is a statement on the use of materials. In the old days they just flattened old buildings with great big donkey-knockers on cranes. I used to get in there and grab all this beautiful timber, some of which you can't find anymore because the trees are gone. And most of this place is made of car cases that originally came from tropical rainforests and were just going to be dumped. I love these car cases; they're so beautiful, I haven't got them covered. I'd love to be carried to my gravesite on a car case."

He paused for a long time, and had I been able to think of a question, I might have asked it. I'm glad I didn't, because finally he said, "But this place is more than a statement. It represents my mum. It
is
my mum. When I was a child, racism was lovely and loud and blatant. When I was just starting school I was wounded deeply by the other kids, who would point and call, "Maori, Maori, Maori." Suddenly I knew I was something that wasn't good. I didn't know what it meant; I just knew the kids were pointing at me. Many things like that happened. And now I'm glad they did, because eventually instead of trying to become a pakeha, which I did for a lot of my life, I started to get angry. I used that anger to do this work.