Deepening Ecological Relationality Through Critical Onto-Epistemological Inquiry

Abstract

Indigenous worldviews remain at the margins of education, science, and sustainability efforts. The emergence of sustainable science holds promise as a means of advancing deep sustainability and recentering Indigenous knowledge. Transformative learning’s engagement with sustainable science has the potential to play an integral role in this paradigmatic shift which necessitates a broader legitimation of our ecology as a deeply interconnected living system. An important part of this project is learner-centred critical onto-epistemological inquiry—the critical study of one’s own reality and implications for ecological relationship. Drawing on Intuitive Inquiry and Kaupapa Māori research, this article illuminates the partial decolonization of my own Life-World and arrival at a deepened sense of ecological relationship. Initially focusing on “the dreaming,” it integrates my visceral experiences of the land and Indigenous constructions of reality through interviews with Ngāi Te Rangi and Plains Cree elders. The implications for transformative learning and sustainability are discussed.

Keywords

transformative learning transformative pedagogy personal transformation

Introduction

The predominance of modernist science, premised on a mechanistic, Cartesian, and materialist worldview means that many of us now inhabit a life-world that is very much a contracted experience of reality—that which we can physically apprehend defines the limits of our experience. Transformative educator Maureen O’Hara (2006) has correctly identified this habit of mind to have “severed the deep empathic links our ancestors had with the earth, their kin and with other beings” (p. 112). This cauterized form of relationality is now widespread throughout our systems of education and scientific inquiry. Recent developments in the fields of sustainable science—a holistic form of inquiry orientated towards deep sustainability (Broadhead & Howard, 2011; Lange, 2012)—and transformative education—a field increasingly engaged with effecting deep shifts in human consciousness and behaviour towards ecological well-being (Lange, 2012; O’Sullivan, 2008, 2012)—are however promising. Both are increasingly prominent fields which as integrative, holistic, and increasingly intercultural modes of inquiry have significant areas of overlap; a more deliberate alignment of these disciplines could prove a potent force for enabling forms of human consciousness more compatible with deep sustainability.

My own positioning as a White, Indigenous (of Māori and Scots descent, born in Aotearoa¹), and migrant woman living in Canada has been vital in informing this research. Healing the ravages of the colonization of my own Life-World² has been important; like many others, much of my earlier education has been implicitly grounded in a reductionist reality. In this sense, the study draws on and extends the research concept of “self as human instrument” (Lincoln & Guba, 2000, p. 183) to include not only the researcher/educator’s social and cultural locations but the underlying terrains of ontology and epistemology. While seemingly subtle, the latter are ultimately influential and subject to influence within processes of knowledge construction.

Given the almost totalizing effects of reductionism on human consciousness, work aimed at the decolonization of human perception, or the reintegration of modernist tenets (e.g., objectivity, rational empiricism, or linear forms of logic) into the more encompassing science of deep interconnectedness, is now an ecological imperative. As the Rachel Carson Chair in Human Ecology, Richard Borden (2011) so aptly articulates, the key problematic of sustainability is no longer whether “nature can absorb the impact of humans.” Rather, increasingly, the question has become “Can human consciousness comprehend our relations with the living world?” (p. 48). Our systematic and rigorous engagement with our onto-epistemological foundations is therefore crucial; inevitably, our actions as human beings are shaped by our beliefs about reality and our relationship to the world.

The objectives of this article are as follows. First, to position this inquiry of ontology and epistemology, and its attendant Indigenous and shamanic construction of ecological relationship, as integral and legitimate aspects of transformative education and sustainable science. Second, to illuminate the transformative process of my own deepened ecological reality through the Intuitive Inquiry approach taken and to briefly consider the implications of this for transformative learning, as this concerns an alignment with sustainable science.

An Indigenous and Shamanic Approach to Ecological Relationship

Every iwi (tribe) will have its maunga (mountain), its awa (river), its mana (divine authority), its people, its whenua (land). And that’s the whole essence of who you are (Williams, Cavill, Ngatai, Dickson, & Ngatai, 2010, p. 2).

The words of this Ngāi Te Rangi elder signify a fundamental truth for many in Indigenous societies: A human person does not stand alone, but shares with other animate and, in the Western sense, “inanimate”³ beings a relationship based on the shared essence of life. In Māoridom, this shared essence is referred to as mauri. Mauri is the binding life force energy (present at birth and enduring until death) that gives rise to unity in diversity and impels the cosmic process forward (Marsden in Royal, 2003). Māori academic Ranganui Walker (2004) locates mauri within a tripartite framework of existence which includes wairua (spirit) and tinana (physical reality). Wairua is the “spirit, soul, or quintessence of a person” (Māori Dictionary, 2012). Tinana, the physical nature of existence, is imbued with mauri and wairua. Within a Māori Life-World, this underlying cosmology along with the significance of place, of landscape, whakapapa (genealogical lineage), and the spirits of a place, are definitive in terms of shaping a person’s essential being.

Wairua is multidimensional (pertains to people, land, ancestors, and human creations such as language) and relational (being related to everything in existence connecting Te Ao Māori, the earthly Māori world and Te Ao Wairua, the spiritual world; Valentine, 2009). As the medium between the spiritual and earthly worlds, it is a person’s wairua that is active in the dreaming and visionary dimensions of reality; a person’s wairua leaves the physical body to engage with the larger cosmos (Valentine, 2009). The introduction of the Tohunga Suppression Act (1907) in New Zealand meant that Māori cosmology, epistemology, and ontology—the ability to apprehend and fully inhabit one’s Life-World or sacred ecology—was driven underground. This form of exile, both spatial and spiritual in nature, resulted in the colonization of life-world for many; this semi-barren terrain constitutes my early dreams described later in this article.

The Māori cosmological framework outlined here aligns with other Indigenous worldviews⁴ that conceive the fundamental reality of the universe as a continuum, a unitive field or fabric of energy or consciousness that is beyond time, space, and all forms, and yet within them (Metzner, 1997, p. 4). Consciousness is embedded in the nature of all things and is intimately linked to matter. This reality is implicitly shamanic: We are at all times embedded in this unifying energy of consciousness with the potential to “attune with, identify with, and communicate with any and every other life form, object or being in the universe” (Metzner, 2005, p. 12). This holistic perception is the keynote of traditional Indigenous knowledges and includes, but goes beyond, the material sphere to embrace the metaphysical. As a form of “Native science” (Cajete, 2000), in Indigenous societies, expertise in this area was commonly the providence of a shaman. This Indigenous Life-World or relational worldview sees things in a more than human-to-human context. “It is a perspective that involves human beings, animals, plants, the natural environment and the metaphysical world of visions and dreams” (Fixico, 2003, p. 2). It is an inclusive notion of kinship that in Donald Fixico’s (2003) words “involves more accountability on the part of native people for taking care of and respecting their relationships with all things” (p. 2).

The Dreaming and the Indigenous Life-World

Within Indigenous societies, dreaming experiences are commonly regarded as valuable sources of knowledge and human innovation (Moss, 1992; Tedlock, 2006; Wallace, 1958). In my own tribe, and Māori tikanga (culture) more generally, moemoea (dream) or matakite (foreseeable future)—specifically envisioning the future—was highly regarded as an important source of divination (Stokes, 1980). Similarly, in speaking of his Plains and Woodland Cree ancestors of Canada’s Northwest, Neil McLeod (2007) remarks that “in the old days people knew how to listen to the world; they relied on dreams and intuition for knowledge through spiritual beliefs and practices” (p. 31).⁵

Cultural anthropologist Barbara Tedlock (2006) conceptualizes “the dreaming” as a sort of “crossroads location” (p. 20), halfway between the world of the senses and the world of intuitive understanding. This location in consciousness signifies a departure from the normal waking state in which one only perceives through the senses, to encompass a form of “inner vision” or “seeing” that transcends the immediate physicality of being (Aizenstat, 1995). Ecopsychologist Stephen Aizenstat (1995) refers to this as the “World Unconscious,” making a clear distinction between Western-based Jungian understandings of psychological archetypes embedded in the human psyche and dream images that exist independently of the human psyche. “Seen through the eyes of the world unconscious, the dream image is an independent presence in a broader psychic ecology, a dreamscape where there is room for many beings to walk around and be regarded by another” (p. 96). These experiences largely occur in our sleeping dreaming experiences because of our lack of ability to tune into the wider psychic ecology by day. My own position is that the dreamscape is constituted by both kinds of experiences: Western-based Jungian psychological archetypes embedded within the individual and collective psyche and the Indigenous perspectives of communing with entities that exist outside the human psyche. It is one’s wairua that enables navigation of this multidimensional dreamscape, including past, present, and future.

Glen Aikenhead and Herman Michell (2011) position the phenomena of dreaming and visioning within the field of sustainable science in their work on bridging Indigenous and scientific ways of knowing nature. According to Michell, a Woodland Cree, this empirical knowledge is manifested in different forms, which range from practical day-to-day activities to revelatory knowledge that engages with metaphysical reality in the form of visions and dreams (Michell & Herman 2011). It is through dreaming that we come to know the nature of the multidimensional universe, our obligations to the earth, and to all of life (Moss, 1992).

Deepening Relationality: Sustainable Science

Approaches to sustainable science and transformative learning are intimately connected with our beliefs about reality and our relationship with it. Sustainable science, however, is more overtly focused on integrating a range of epistemologies conducive to deep sustainability—harmonious human development in ways that honour the flourishing of all life forms (Spariosu, 2005). As such, it provides some important insights regarding the cosmological, ontological, and epistemological framings that might inform transformative approaches to learning. One of the most distinguishing features of sustainable science from modernist forms of science is the capacity of the former for relationality and holism. Today, sustainable science represents an increasingly broad and burgeoning number of approaches to inquiry inclusive of Indigenous and more recent developments within Western Science, sometimes referred to as the “New Science” (Lange, 2012). Epistemologically, Native approaches to science are articulated within the Indigenous and shamanic worldview outlined earlier. Rather than seeking to control natural reality, Native Science focuses its attention upon inner natures, the rich textures and nuances of life (Cajete, 2000). In the latter vein, Lee-Anne Broadhead and Sean Howard (2011) argue that:

The most advanced science in [I]ndigenous cultures is practiced by the healers and the shamans—men and women with a particularly strong connection to what [Lakota scholar Vine] Deloria, [Jr] called the energetic mind undergirding the physical world. (p. 310)

Within this framework, culture or knowledge is an emergent property, resulting from a complex process containing multiple interactions with the physical and metaphysical environment. While rationality per se is significant within this process, it is not the overriding emphasis (Aikenhead & Michell, 2011; Broadhead & Howard, 2011).⁶

In recent years, the West’s hiatus from the science of interconnectedness (e.g., as practiced by the earlier alchemists, see Chalquist, 2007, p. 94) has been broken by what sustainability educator Elizabeth Lange (2012) refers to as the New Science, an emergent paradigm within Western Scientific approaches “predicated on relativity theory, quantum physics, complexity and chaos theory, enactivitism, Gaia theory and deep ecology” (p. 199). For Lange, the new knowledge from the physical and biological sciences as well as mind and consciousness studies has coalesced into an emerging vision of science conducive to sustainability. The “New Science” accounts for what Native Science has long known: Consciousness is collective, matter and energy are fundamentally expressions of the same thing, and our Life-World is inherently an alchemical one as energy (including consciousness) and matter are mutually transformative. As Lange (2012) iterates:

At the sub-atomical level, matter and energy are interchangeable as either particles or waves affecting each other synergistically and emergent with the act of human observation … thus matter and mind co-emerge as an intimately interlinked system within a larger bio-sphere … Potentially we have access to this transpersonal consciousness based on our holistic or expansive self [Life-World] … (p. 199)

Considering the implications of the New Science for sustainability, Lange (2012) adds:

Our constant, though not necessary conscious dance with other minds and the world around us should give us a new sense of responsibility. … It reinforces our sense of oneness with nature and the universe. (p. 200)

Sustainable science positions our reality as deeply interconnected. Within this alchemical cosmology, the transformative and reciprocal nature of our universe results in the continual transmutation of all living presences from that which is easily apprehensible to the subtle subatomical levels. We are co-participants within a vast, interdependent, animate, and mutually reconstituting universe (Cajete, 2000; Esbjorn-Hargens & Zimmerman, 2009). As it transforms, so do we. This reality is infinite and emergent, in continual movement and transformation, moving to increasing levels of complexity, well beyond the bounds of human consciousness and imagination.

Deepening Relationality: Transformative Learning

The word “transformation” implies the power behind the process of the very reconstitution of the form and essence of something. For transformative education scholar Stephen Brookfield (2012): “When something is transformed its component elements undergo a profound metamorphosis so that what emerges is fundamentally different from what went before” (p. 131)—a view consistent with the alchemical Life-World onto-epistemology framing this inquiry. As such, this study does not sit neatly with transformative learning’s key theoretical pegs—constructivism, humanism, and critical social theory—at least as these are commonly articulated in the literature (Cranston &Taylor, 2012; Denzin & Lincoln, 2011). For example, the construction of knowledge through an alchemy of consciousness that connects and reconstitutes all living presences is beyond the bounds of traditional notions of constructivism premised on the modernist fallacy of an independent mind. This inquiry is therefore inclined towards the idea that our deepest source of knowing often arises out of our direct engagement with eros, the replenishing power of this deeply interconnected life force energy (Lorde, 1984). While this study is inclusive of a rationalist epistemology, its roots lie in what can be sensed, felt, and intuited largely because it is my experience, as transformative educator Edmund O’Sullivan (2012) so well articulates, that “while there is no question that challenging discussion can stimulate change … often crucial learning takes places non-verbally in the inarticulate dimensions of our bodies” (p. 172).

The journey of onto-epistemological inquiry and deepening is, I argue, very much a process of individuation that involves “a recognition of the self in relation to the world” (Kovan & Dirkx, 2003, p. 102). It draws on ideas of Jungian or depth psychology, as it requires that a person comes to a deeper understanding of who they are, apart from the “pressures of the social and cultural contexts in which they are inextricably embedded” (Dirkx, 2006, p. 18). Jung referred to individuation, the lifelong journey and often struggle of becoming one’s self, as “Being Called Awake” (coincidentally the name of a second dream [Williams, 2012, p. 110]) and a powerful metaphor for reengaging with our capacities to be deeply connected. These ideas are consistent with the Intuitive Inquiry approach (Anderson, 2000, 2004) taken for this study, which deliberately works with the ruptures in everyday consciousness and the potentially live-giving fault lines of the human psyche. For Rosemarie Anderson, and I would concur, these fault lines or psychospiritual wounds are often indicative of psychospiritual forms of transformation or healing that are often also deeply necessary in the culture at large. Within the acts of onto-epistemological inquiry and making what is unconscious more conscious, affective and dreaming states become important informants. Not only do these liminal (and often marginalized) states of being offer an insight into the less conscious aspects of self, which are often powerful determinants in terms of how we engage with others, they also enable the possibility of transcending a solely materialist reality and corresponding rationalist epistemology into a much more encompassing and deeply resonant Life-World.

Inquiring Into the Alchemy of Being: Intuitive Inquiry and Kaupapa Māori Research

As distinctive sustainable science methodologies, both Intuitive Inquiry and Kaupapa Māori research share an emphasis on holistic approaches to knowledge and the value of epistemological sovereignty. As such, both have the potential to be deeply transformational methodologies.

Kaupapa Māori research is used both as a form of resistance and as a form of a methodological strategy, “wherein research is conceived, developed and carried out by Māori for the benefit of Māori” (Walker, Eketone, & Gibbs, 2006, p. 331). Its defining principal is tino rangatiratanga or self-determination, which is essentially about power and control resting within Māori cultural practices and worldviews; disruption of Western hegemonic framings of Māori realities is an essential aspect (Mahuika, 2008). In its final analysis, Kaupapa Māori research is a manifestation of Māori cosmology (Henry & Pene, 2001) founded upon:

the collective (whanaungatanga), interdependence between and among humankind (kotahitanga), a sacred relationship to the gods and the cosmos (wairuatanga), and an acknowledgement that humans are guardians of the environment (kaitiakitanga), combining in the interconnection between mind, body and spirit … Kaupapa Māori emphasises interdependence and spirituality as a fundamental component of intellectual endeavour and knowledge construction. (Henry & Pene, 2001, pp. 237–238)

Ironically, in part due to the colonization of my own Indigenous being, this article draws on elements of Kaupapa Māori research rather than positioning it as the overarching methodology. However, given my own identity, the epistemological imperatives inherent in a journey of reclaiming a deepened sense of relationality, and the emergent Ngāi Te Rangi cosmology that I now inhabit as a result of this research, Kaupapa Māori research occupies a significant position in this process. In the final analysis, however, as my epistemological lineage includes both Native Science and Western Modernity, and that the transformational learning task of reengaging our Life-World is virtually a universal one I have chosen to continue to name this research as Intuitive Inquiry.

Intuitive Inquiry consciously positions the researcher and his or her experience at the core of the research endeavour. Through its reintegration of the inner, subjective, intuitive, and spiritual with the outer, external, sensory, and more “objective” ways of knowing, Intuitive Inquiry (Anderson, 2000, 2004) establishes an intimate dialogue between the knower and that which he or she is attempting to know. It reestablishes knowledge not as the accumulation of facts, but as the integration of all our experiences in the world. This is consonant with ideas in Māoritanga and other Indigenous cultures where knowledge is held sacred, derived from the integration into our centre, of different ways of knowing that include and transcend the world of our five senses (Cajete, 2000; Royal, 2003).

Intuitive Inquiry (Anderson, 2000, 2004) consists of a forward arc and a return arc. The forward arc, “entering the circle,” consists of two cycles: “the claim of the text” followed by the “development of the interpretive lens.” In the first cycle, the research topic “surfaces” from repeated study of a text that particularly resonates or has some “claim” on the reader. Such a text should interrupt our everyday discursive realities, perhaps with the “potential [over time] to explode the conceptual frameworks we inhabit” (Anderson, 2000), as did the dream “Looking Back” I later describe. Vivid both in imagery and in feeling, I instinctively recognized this was a take “note kind of dream,” one that I engaged in repeated remembering over the years as I studied its meaning and nuance.

The development of the interpretive lens is accomplished through engaging the emerging research topic with a variety of other texts (in my case, with my initial dreams in Aotearoa and then my visceral relationship with the landscape and dreamscape of Saskatchewan, together with the Cree Life-World discourses to which I was exposed), formulating one’s onto-epistemology over time, structuring subsequent research questions and methods. During the “return arc phase,” the researcher collects original textual data bearing on the topic. Typically, these data take the form of interviews with participants or alternative texts that speak directly and accurately to the research topic. This was achieved through interviews with Ngāi Te Rangi elders, further analysis of a report produced as part of a research project I had undertaken with Cree elders from Sturgeon Lake First Nation (SLFN), Saskatchewan, and consultation of other texts. Using the hermeneutical lens developed, the researcher then analyses the new texts as a means for modifying, reorganizing, and expanding his or her understanding of the research topic. This was achieved through the triangulation of ethno-autographical data, various historical, social, and cultural texts, and elders’ narratives from both countries.

The incorporation of “the full domain of being human, including experiences generally thought of as spiritual and mystical” (Anderson, 2000, p. 4) is an invitation to confront modernist hegemonic conceptualizations of validity. It incorporates Ralph Metzner’s (2005) notion of “radical empiricism,” which through its emphasis on systematic observation gives equal ontological priority to inner subjective and outer external experiences.⁷ This study’s approach to validity is also underscored by Hawaiian researcher Melani Meyers’ (2003) “triangulation of meaning,” which incorporates ways of knowing through body, mind, and spirit, captured throughout the research and elaborated on further in the conclusion. Validity calls the researcher to “accurately relate the fullness and richness of human experience” (Anderson, 2000, p. 3) through repeated systematic observations from the same observer, replicating them and testing them against other observations. This, writes Metzner, “is what distinguishes the scientific method from haphazard observation” (p. 4).

For the purposes of this article, my account of this Intuitive Inquiry and subsequent reconstitution of my Life-World draws on a selection of narratives published earlier (Williams, 2012). The focus here is more on my own dreaming experiences; thus, I have omitted much of the tribal and historical narratives and have abbreviated elder’s explanations of human–environmental well-being. However, my locations within these tribal social histories and the knowledge shared with me by my elders are significant contributions to the reconstitution of my Life-World. In the sections that follow, I illuminate as much as space allows some of the transformative aspects of my journey of onto-epistemological inquiry and deepening ecological reality.

Tales of Exile

Ko Mataatua te waka Mataatua is the canoe

Ko Mauao te maunga Mauao is the mountain

Ko Tauranga te moana Tauranga is the sea

Ko Ngāi Te Rangi te iwi Ngāi Te Rangi is the tribe

Ko Ngāi Tukairangi te hapū Ngāi Tukairangi is the subtribe

Ko Whareoa te marae Whareroa is the marae (meeting place)

Ko Ruawāhine Puihi te tangata Ruawaahine Puihi is the person

Ko (Lewis Williams) ahau My name is (Lewis Williams)

Lewis’s Story

I am Ngāi Te Rangi and whakapapa (genealogy) back through my mother (Shirley Williams), some 20 generations to the Mataatua canoe which crossed the great oceans of the Pacific from Hawaiki to Aotearoa some 700 years ago. I also claim descent from (Daniel Sellars) who was Indigenous to the Isle of Arran (Scots Gaelic: Eilean Arainn). As a result of the Land Clearances on Arainn, Daniel set sail for the Pacific eventually landing in Tauranga, Aotearoa, marrying (Jane Faulkner), daughter of Ruawāhine Puhi, Ngāi Tukairangi, hapū (subtribe) of the Ngāi Te Rangi iwi (tribe). Soon afterwards, our ancestral lands (including our sacred mountain Mauao) were confiscated by the colonial government. It was in the wake of this spatial and spiritual exile (Mcleod, 2007) that my family came to Auckland, never seeing their ancestral lands again. My ancestral inheritance has been fragments, feelings, conversations, and … dreams. These dreams were of many things Māori; including knowledge pertaining to my own tribal history that I had no way of knowing at the time.

Dream: “Looking Back”—January 2000

I am walking onto the Marae in search of the casket of Jane Faulkner, daughter of Ruawāhine Puhi, high-class woman of the Ngāi Te Rangi tribe, and John-lees Faulkner, Pākehā ⁸ trader. I expect to see a Māori-looking woman in Pākehā clothing, because to me that’s who Jane was—bilingual, schooled in both Māori and European ways. For me, though, her heart was Māori.

I enter from the back. There is a group of rangatahi (youth) standing around. I walk by and look to them expectantly; they do not see me. I can see no coffin. I walk into the wharekai (dining house) where there are some wāhine (women). Again they do not see me, do not greet me. I am invisible. I wander outside, feeling bleak. I look about. I had expected to see Jane lain out in her coffin in all her finery. I see no one, I see nothing … I am nothing.

I’m now on the wildest part of the Marae, the grass all long and overgrown. And then I see it. A coffin, lying in the long grass, in a state of disrepair, completely closed, one lid folded over the other, dusty, cobwebbed, long forgotten. I am long forgotten … to my iwi and myself. I wake. I feel a deep despair. (Williams, 2012, p. 105)

In the days, months, and years that followed, all I knew was that I had to descend, down the “inner thread,” the thread of my Ngāi Te Rangi tanga. And I continued to do what I normally do: notice what comes next in my waking life.

Tales of Transformation

It is 2001. I am still living in Aotearoa, struggling to finish my PhD amongst much internal upheaval. I have already started to dream of animal spirits like the bear, snake, and buffalo. These animals do not belong to my land but to another continent, as if I am being somehow taken forward. The essential nature of these dreams feels deeply transformative.

The Land Continues to Call: Saskatchewan, Canada, 2003–2008

I went to live and work in Saskatchewan, a sparsely populated province in the heart of the Canadian Prairies. As the newly appointed director of a Health Promotion research centre, I decided one of my first tasks was to get out of the office and talk to the communities. I noticed, on my travels, that whenever I talked with Aboriginal communities the discussion always came back to the land. “If the land is sick, our youth are sick,” one elder told me. I began to understand well-being on new terms.

Here, the process of “being called awake” continued: the change in the energy of the land was palpable, which my dreams reflected. My dreaming life continued and intensified. By night, brown bears, polar bears, coyote, snakes, and buffalo continued to visit. I felt grateful for their medicine and became more aware of their presence by day as well. I was also increasingly exposed to a number of North American Native discourses (Cajete, 2000; Nelson, 2008) that spoke of the land as being deeply animate, alive, resonant, conversational; a land that was populated by animals, spirit beings, and dream helpers, as well as people. Discourses, ceremonies, and my research with SLFN elders gave me a language for my experiences. During this time, I began to write my way home—figuratively and literally into the soul of my Indigenous being. My longings for my own tribal lands grew.

The beginning of 2009 marked the beginning of my return home in a physical sense. After climbing Mauao one day, Aunty Maria, a Ngāi Te Rangi kuia (woman elder) spontaneously took me with her to a tangihanga (traditional Māori funeral) being held over 3 days at the Tutereinga Marae.

A Reunion and a Healing: February 2009

I enter the Wharenui Tupuna (ancestral house), kneel by the coffin, and exchange whakapapa (genealogy) with the whanau (family). Hearing murmuring behind me, I turn around. The koroua (male elder) is addressing me speaking in te reo Māori, the mother tongue of my ancestors. I don’t know what he is saying. At first my body is numb to his words—125 years have passed since my great, great grandmother, my ancestor, walked these lands, since my family really knew these lands as their turangawaewae, a place to stand. His words start to go through the numbness … something in me is stirring.

Deep in my body some intelligence is recognizing what he is saying, taking him in, taking all of this deep within. My body straightens, alert, energy rising up through my spine. My body is listening deeply, re-membering. My wairua (spirit) is being called forth. I am being called home. (adapted from Williams, 2012, p. 111)

Sometime later I realized my waking world had provided me with a healing for my earlier dream of 2000 in my search for my ancestor Jane Faulkner. Here, I had also been attending a tangihanga—her tangihanga. The dreaming and the waking worlds are one.

I return to Saskatchewan and take time to absorb the many things of my trip back home. I reformulate; my being somehow reorganizes itself (an onto-epistemological deepening that is somehow embodied). I prepare to go back for a longer time. I am energetically connected. A week or so before my departure for Aotearoa, I have the following dream.

Dream: The Elders Sing - May 2009

I dream I am in a meeting room. There are two tables. I sit at a one table with Pākehā middle-aged people. It feels stale. Next to me some Māori women begin to gather. I want to be at their table. More and more Māori come and gather at this table. The lights are dim. A woman with a baby is right next me. She’s youngish. She turns to me and says, “Look, the elders are going to sing.” I turn and look. The elders are gathered and they begin to sing to us in the most beautiful tones. I am now completely surrounded by Māori. I do not understand what the elders are singing, but again my body, my spirit, does. Some sort of transmission is occurring. I feel their waiata (song) go deep within me. The harmonies are so rich; their message has a pure, calming effect on me. I feel completely at home.

I am ready to return home. (adapted from Williams, 2012, p. 112)

Tales of Recovery and Re-Visioning

I returned to Aotearoa, to continue my journey of reconnection with my Ngāi Te Rangi roots. My dawn ascent of Mauao several months earlier had marked the beginning of my reconnection with Mauao in a literal and visceral way. I also carry with me the past 5 years of being part of the physical and psychic ecology of Saskatchewan, my terrain of human agency profoundly altered by the alchemy of these experiences. In conversation with Aunty Maria, it became evident that as part of getting to know who I am and who Ngāi Te Rangi is, I needed to know who Mauao, the iwis’ maunga (mountain) is. From this time onward, my research consisted of informal conversations and interviews with the elders, explorations of Mauao and surrounding tribal rohe (territory) on foot, and consultation of historical documents pertaining to the topic (Stokes, 1980, 1992; Williams et al., 2010).

Today, the Ngāi Te Rangi tribe numbers over 12,201 people; of these, 42% remain in the area. By contrast, SLFN today consists of 2,188 band members, over 72% (1,578) of whom live on the 9,209.5-ha. reserve. For both, treaty claims and the reestablishment of traditions in ways relevant to contemporary times remain a priority. These are more than about land and language and resources; they represent the recovery of a deeper Life-World—a world that for many like their colonizers, has become the “world unconscious” (Aizenstat, 1995).

In spite of land confiscations and other oppressive colonial practices, Ngāi Te Rangi and SLFN elders remember a life during the twentieth century that was in close relationship to the land and still in relative harmony with many of the tribal traditions. Kuia Ngāroimata Cavill, Ngāi Te Rangi, has fond memories of growing up on the land. They lived off wild pork and seafood and grew vegetables. Ngāroimata remembers the land and sea as being bountiful (Williams et al., 2010, p. 16). Similarly, Elder Mike Daniels, SLFN, talks about the land as being the provider:

My late grandfather and grandmother, Minohoween and Peyasewasini, those old people lived off things that grew in the earth. That is where they received their life. They took medicine [from the earth]. The old lady would heal anybody that went to see her (Williams, 2012, p. 113).

Mauao: A Ngāi Te Rangi View of Well-Being.

Despite the confiscation of the Maunga and surrounding whenua (land), subsequent “development,” which came to the Tauranga moana and continued to erode traditional ways of life and being, Mauao remains intimately bound with the lives of local iwi:

We have sustained ourselves from the kaimoana [sea food] from the moana around Mauao. Some of the taonga species we collect there; paua, crayfish, mussels, you know kuku green lipped mussel). So over time it’s been the pātaka kai [pantry or storehouse for food]. (Williams et al., 2010, p. 6)

The maunga is the sacred keeper of the mauri of the iwi and the final resting place of esteemed rangatira (chiefs), other important ancestors and ancestral taonga (treasures; Stokes, 1992). For the Tauranga Moana iwi:

Mauao is a taonga which has immeasurable value, and which symbolizes the endurance, the strength and the uniqueness of each iwi. For each of them, Mauao is a link between the metaphysical and the physical worlds, and between the past and the present, and the future. (Iwi of the Tauranga moana in Williams et al., 2010, p. 7)

The elders share a number of perspectives about Mauao that speak of a worldview of deep interconnectedness; well-being is the result of harmony and balance between the human and nonhuman worlds. Their narratives and other works consulted (Stokes, 1980, 1992) speak to four interconnected concepts related to well-being: mana, tapu, mauri, and whakawhanaungatanga. In various ways, our elders speak of Mauao as whanaunga or kin. In talking of educating the younger generations about Mauao, Kuia Maria Ngatai states, “And that’s how we’ve got to work with our young people. Just say, this is yours, this is your tupuna (ancestor). Let’s make it look beautiful” (Williams et al., 2010, p. 23).

This Ngāi Te Rangi worldview of deep interconnectedness is expressed time and time again by our kuia and koroua (female and male elders). Ngāroimata experiences a strong sense of well-being when she is in physical proximity to Mauao: “I feel so good when I am up there, because he is a part of me and I am a part of him.” She later adds, “I feel like its [Mauao] the sacred part of my life. And anything happens to it, happens to me” (Williams et al., 2010, p. 25). Mauri is present in the stories of Ngāi Te Rangi and Ngāti Ranginui with the arrival of the waka (canoes) and the implanting of the mauri into Mauao and surrounding areas. It is because of the “mauri and spirituality along with all the other reasons that Mauao is designated sacred or waahi tapu (sacred site)” (Williams et al., 2010, p. 25). Ngāroimata speaks of Mauao as being “alive.” Speaking about the need for Council to return the Maunga fully to local iwi, Maria Ngatai says, “What they’ve (Council) given is just the top … but it [Mauao] grows from the bottom” (Williams et al., 2010, p. 24). These narratives speak to Mauao as a living being, deeply connected to local iwi, not only through the historic implanting of the mauri of the new arrivals but to the mauri that both imbues the Maunga and his people, knitting them as one.

Despite the Crown’s confiscation and disregard for Mauao, for local iwi, the maunga (mountain) is sacred. The lore of tapu (sacred) removes a person, place, or thing from ordinary secular association or use. Tapu is also closely related to the flow of mana, an extraordinary presence and spiritual authority pertaining to humans and other beings. Mana flows through a person, manifesting from the gods. For mana to flow, tapu must be observed. As waahi tapu, the use of Mauao for the everyday, secular (profane) activities undermines the mana of the maunga and, by extension, the mana of the iwi of the Tauranga Moana. It does so because not only does this inhibit the expression of the forementioned qualities of tapu, mana, mauri, and whakawhanaungatanga but also because Mauao is in part the essence of who Ngāi Te Rangi are. The health of Mauao and the well-being of the iwi of the Tauranga Moana are linked through the active exercise of whakawhanaungatanga (the act of relating to and caring for one’s kin). When this is fully supported by the Crown, tapu is able to be observed correctly, the mauri of the maunga is nurtured, and mana through a mauri (i.e., strong and vibrant) is able to flow freely.

Dream: “Mauao Calls” - February 2010

I’m sleeping in Toronto, on what I call the “concrete slab.” In my rented apartment, on the ninth floor, concrete on concrete, all the way down. It is in a sense “modernity epitomized”—devoid of Life-World.

However, I find myself suddenly, as if transported, thousands of miles across the ocean, standing in front of Mauao. The maunga of my ancestors, my maunga draws me in. He looks healthy. He is vibrant. He has no language in the human sense, but I feel his being through every pore of my skin. I know him—I am empathically resonant to this exchange. I wake feeling quite refreshed.

I am reminded of Fixico’s (2003) words about Indigenous “see[ing]” in a linear world:

It is like living one’s dream that seems so real while you are sleeping. It is acceptance of the fact that a relationship exists between a tangible item like a mountain and a dream. (p. 3)

Tihei Mauri Ora!

Conclusion: Transforming Relationality

The initial gateway into a deepened knowing of my Life-World was a dream. The dreaming continued to act as a significant portal—both as a medium for accessing and revealing the “energetic mind that undergirds the physical world” (Deloria in Broadhead & Howard, 2011) and eventually accessing the Indigenous Life-World cosmology pertaining to Mauao offered to me by my Ngāi Te Rangi elders. The few windows articulated here into my experiences, which led to the reconstitution of my Life-World represent an intuitively based form of inquiry that enabled me to probe beyond my habitual onto-epistemological framings of relationality.

Spirit, body, and mind were all integral to these transformative learning experiences, which can be seen as the result of my movement through states of exile, transformation, and recovery. Although represented linearly, this movement actually wove back and forth creating a “triangulation of meaning” (Meyers, 2003). My experiences were informed by spirit, emotion/affect, rationality, and my visceral, felt, embodied way of knowing. My initial dream, my experience of exile, came from a place of wairua or spirit. Its emotional impact, which I experienced as a kind of “psycho-spiritual wound” (Anderson, 2000, 2004), also points to needed collective cultural transformation and healing. This dream was vital in pushing me to probe below the surface and understand the untended casket of my Tupuna as a metaphor for the explored Life-World terrain of my ancestral and ultimately epistemological lineage. The experiences/dreams that informed or shaped my transformation included night time dreams, but were also of a broader dreaming quality that incorporated sleeping and waking states that again enabled me to probe beneath the layers of apparent reality to other levels of intersubjectivity that led me to experience my wairua being called up through my being by the Koroua at the tangihanga. These embodied and intuitive ways of coming to know were also present in my participation in Cree ceremonies, or climbing and sensing into Mauao and the culture, land, and soulscape of Saskatchewan. These same states were similarly drawn on throughout the recovery phase, ultimately leading me to recognize my deep connection to the maunga of my ancestors, as reflected in my final dream Within all three phases but particularly those of transformation and recovery, cognitive and rational inquiry processes were involved in my review of texts, statistics, interviews with elders, data analysis, and eventually my renewed onto-epistemological framing of my Life-World.

In particular, the dreaming has been presented as valid form of inquiry and one means of augmenting a deeper sustainability. Because of the Ngāi Te Rangi part of my identity and epistemological lineage, this has been mainly articulated within a Ngāi Te Rangi and Māori Life-World framing based on a “tripartite nature of existence” (Walker, 2004). Here, wairua plays a significant role in engaging with the collective fabric of universal consciousness and energy, and ultimately the sacred collective knowledge that includes but transcends human consciousness. For me, my final dream of Mauao was very much an exchange between two living presences; a deepening of relationality as a result of my Intuitive Inquiry. A relationality of this quality augments not only a deeper more resonant Life-World but an epistemology of empathy and an ethics of connectedness with the rest of creation, which is very different from my earlier modernist training.

My point here is not to prescribe a particular cosmological framework other than the suggestion that our reality is a deeply interconnected and resonant one. Rather, I am more broadly emphasising the importance of ongoing inquiry into the nature of reality and our relationship to it. As transformative educators, and perhaps scientists of sustainability, our willingness to be perpetual students of our evolutionary unfolding is important. Given that “self as human instrument” (Lincoln & Guba, 2000, p. 183)—the vessel through which we mediate and understand our experiences of the world is integral to both fields—then critical study of onto-epistemology lies at the heart of each. Such learner-centered inquiry represents a potentially powerful meeting place of these two fields. The intentional engagement with the numerous epistemological fault lines that conjoin and crisscross each could prove potent in transforming the nature of our relationality with our Life-World, perhaps inculcating a deep and embodied sense of sustainability, distinct from the shallower forms that proliferate human consciousness today. To inquire, and therefore engage with body, mind, and spirit, within an alchemical Life-World is to open oneself to deep transformation. It is this deeply resonant but unbounded transmutation in this ecological sense that will have significant implications for the ways in which we understand and go about our transformative learning endeavours.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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