Reindigenizing Our Ways of Being: Tina Ngata, Diana and Mark Kopua
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Maurizio Benazzo: [00:00:00] We are now joined by three extraordinary voices, Dr. Diana Kopua. She's a Māori psychiatrist and co-leader of my Atua, which is revitalizing indigenous knowledge through community-based care in Aotearoa. Then we have Diana welcome. Welcome, Diana.
And Mark keeper of ancient marine knowledge and master carver and a cultural leader.
And then we have Tina Ngata,
Tina's work involves advocacy for environmental, indigenous, and human rights. Yes. Such a joy to have the three of you here. [00:01:00] Tina, we never met in person, but the, we had the turn the typhoon, the divert. Yes.
Zaya Benazzo: A cyclone. Come and visit you and gave us the gift to spend three days with Mark and Diana.
Maurizio Benazzo: And as a note on that, both me and Zaya, we had not tattoo in our life never, but when we spent, we couldn't resist to, to be to
Tina Ngata: He's good like that.
Maurizio Benazzo: Oh my God, I'm so honored still every, Sandy, I cherish like my skin. Yes. So thank you.
Tina Ngata: Yes. Ancestors evidently decided that she needed three days with Uncle Mark, and it's really the tattoo, and they also decided you needed a as well. So there you go.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yes. So thank you. Thank you.
Zaya Benazzo: Before we begin, if each and every one of you would like to introduce yourself perhaps we start with that and we can ask a question [00:02:00] afterwards.
Mark Kopua: My name is Mark ua. I come from a little community on the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand. And I'm a dad. I'm a granddad, all those lovely things and an uncle. And and I and a husband, I've got,
Maurizio Benazzo: I know, happens all the time.
Mark Kopua: And I've, I'm fortunate. For me, I grew up in a very cultural context throughout my most of my life. And then I branched into a field of Māori art which was founded on that, the way that I was raised, so that I. Maria allowed me to store all the history and all the genealogies and the stories and whatnot.
And I'm just fortunate that through the work that we are both doing, I'm able to, not just through carving [00:03:00] and the tattooing that I do, pass that on to the next generation. And hopefully those stories like, like what we are doing here live on and on, and are the founding cornerstones of our, of each culture.
So that's me. I'm Mark ua. I'm married to this wonderful woman here and Tina is my niece. And it's lovely to see who, we haven't seen Tina for some time and it's also lovely and nerve wracking to be here amongst all of you. Yeah, that was an interesting visit that happened with the, this bad cyclone instruct, but it allowed us to spend three days together with no power. But fortunately we had a roof to share with you guys and and that worked.
Zaya Benazzo: Yes. Thank you for your hospitality and for sheltering us.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yeah, it was such a beautiful time. Thank you. Hello
Diana Kopua: everyone. My name's Dr. Diana ua. I'm Diana, I'm actually Tina's auntie as well, but that was funny 'cause we knew that we were [00:04:00] from the same line and we were closely connected, but we couldn't decide whether I was your auntie cousin, but, I am a psychiatrist. I don't work in the psychiatric system, so I do not work in the way that you might expect me to work as a psychiatrist. I literally became a doctor so that I could create more space for indigenous ideology to thrive and be reinstated. It's been a bit of a journey. I'm very passionate about music.
I like the idea of shifting mindsets, not necessarily just intellectually, not just banking knowledge, but being able to shift his collectives and move into more powerful ways of being Loved. The last story of Uncle Willie talking about the words and the power of words, and I think that's exactly where we need to go.
That's a passion of mine to create our own words that have meaning, that will grow ways of being that we cherish, quote, [00:05:00] kga. And oh, and by the way, I'm from the same places, mark's from along the. Of the north island of New Zealand of Aotearoa we are well known for being the place on earth that sees the sun to rise first every day.
Kda.
Tina Ngata: K Thank you for the invite. So lovely to see your faces Uncle Mark and I need to get used to calling you Auntie Die. Yeah. He, as my dad used to say, he yeah, uncle Mark and Auntie Dai. It's just so lovely to be here. Ua. My name's Tina. He is my mountain pu is my river UA is my food cupboard.
I'm from all the same places also that uncle Mark and Auntie D are from, and I have been involved in teaching and political advocacy around the doctrine of discovery. I. [00:06:00] Indigenous justice, earth justice and and supporting our people at a local level and at a national level and with indigenous groups at an international level as well.
And I do that in service of indigenous people, but also in service of Papa, our Earth mother, because I know deeply know in my bones that the support for the stories that we carry is also the best way to protect and look after her as well as, broader humanity as well. So I've been very blessed to work with uncle Mark and Auntie Di for a number of years now.
I'm so excited to see their faces because yeah when this government did kick into a new level of attack against our people and against our treaty, it necessitated me stepping into new roles. And so I've been. March 24 7 on supporting people through that process [00:07:00] and haven't been able to spend as much time.
So I'm just really grateful for the opportunity to be here with them and with you all. Kiara Ra
Maurizio Benazzo: Kiara.
Zaya Benazzo: Thank you Tina. And maybe we can just start right there by you sharing for a moment what's happening in New Zealand, currently in Aurora, and what is the threat for Maury Rights, cultural rights and what this crisis review in terms of the broader systems in which we untangle and we see everywhere, pretty much it's.
Tina Ngata: Sure. Okay. Okay. In the film you discuss and you touch upon the doctrine of discovery as as a force, a colonial force that moved around the world impacting upon indigenous peoples dispossessing, indigenous peoples. It's sometimes described as the source of all indigenous dispossession.
What I [00:08:00] think is less discussed is that the doctrine of discovery was a vessel that carried a particular mindset around the world and entrenched that mindset on every shore that it landed on. And that mindset was one of individualization and of extraction and exploitation. And when that arrived on the shores of ua, there were many ways that our Una resisted.
Its arrival. And they were very concerned. Our leaders were very concerned about the behavior of people who were carrying that mindset of individual interest and over collective interest and exploitation and extraction over wellbeing. And so there were fights, there were battles but also what eventually happened was that there was a treaty that was brought to us.
Now, importantly, before that treaty was [00:09:00] signed, we also made a declaration of sovereign Independence, and that was acknowledged. And within that declaration we said that if we did want to grant someone limited power to take to, to make laws, then we would do that. And we did that in the treaty. That treaty says it's a beautiful thing, actually, particularly when you think about the context of what our people were undergoing at the time.
But the treaty, the agreement was essentially, yes, we will allow other people to call this land our land home, so long as it is not at the expense of those whose home it already is. That is the core message of the treaty. Of course before the ink was dry it started to be violated. And so that really is the beginning of a long standing centuries long story from 1840 when it was signed to now of our people [00:10:00] calling upon the crown to honor that story.
And the other thing, the other way that we look at that treaty is that treaty was a protective shield that our incest, that our ancestors intended to put around us to protect us from the doctrine of discovery. That's exactly what the treaty and many treaties are intended from the indigenous perspective to protect their people from the doctrine of discovery.
And what we've seen is that mindset has never gone away from colonial ways of thinking. These ideas of extraction, exploitation, and individual interest have continued and they're present in all of those violations. And now it eventually came to inform a global economy, the principles of a global economy, of extraction, exploitation, and individual interest above all other things above earth interests, above human interests.
And [00:11:00] and so what we are seeing in New Zealand now is the end product of that mentality, not ever really being reckoned with and dealt to. And that mentality and the idea that mentality is supreme to all others, resulting in a crisis, a humanitarian crisis around the world. And there are systems that have been put in place on every shore to uphold that mentality.
And those systems are colonial governments. And so our colonial government has reached I would just say the most honest and obvious expression of that mentality because it's been there in every government, but under a far right, government is the most obvious, right?
So that's what we are fighting at the moment is the most honest, upfront, obvious expression of a mentality that's been there for a long time.
And it's seeking to [00:12:00] regress every step we've made towards indigenous justice over the last couple of centuries, it's seeking to put us all the way back in history.
Zaya Benazzo: Wow. Yeah. So when we say it's been dismantled now, it has taken different shape and it's living throughout the world that Exactly.
It's just
Tina Ngata: pivoted.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah, exactly. Thank you for sharing. And Mark and Brianna, like if you wanna add anything here as well, how you see that the impact of that colonial mentality, how that has impacted Māori communities. And, but also maybe you could speak about how was the original understanding of wellbeing for Māori people?
What was, what wellbeing meant?
Diana Kopua: As a. I can the bridge and carry on with Tina's conversation about mindset [00:13:00] because I work in the world of psychiatry. In fact, I feel like I grew up in an institution that promoted that mindset and it was psychiatry and the side disciplines role to maintain that social control and social order.
And anyone that stepped outside of that order, people like Tina Nata that stepped outside of that order would be diagnosable. Mental health and psychiatry never, ca never was a thing until they had deviance and people who were resisting or didn't know how to sit inside that structure that was organized by the story, the threads that Tina's talking about.
And so it. To as medical practitioners to do something with them. And that's where diagnoses came from. And you have to remember, medicine as a [00:14:00] model is about causation. You go to your doctor because you have a problem. You are looking for the cause of that problem. When you come to see a psychiatrist, when you are depressed or angry and not fitting into society or anxious about and fearful of your future, depressed about your past, we are not actually looking at the causative factors that Tina just talked about.
We are looking at your individual factors and that's where I'm the bridge because of the enlightenment period, was about individualization, getting rid of anything that we believed, the spiritual connections that we had and truly believed. The sacredness that Tina talks about often it's all just become about you as an individual, have feelings and those feelings are not helping you be productive.[00:15:00]
To be productive from this mindset Tina talks about is about being able to maintain neoliberalism, the global economy, that whole system of making you part of the workforce. Think about it for a second. When we think about the work that we do, it's become our identity. And so when we can't work because we are not part of that social, that society that the doctrine has worked bloody well.
To put us into that we don't thrive in. When that happens and we are not functioning well, we think there's something wrong with us individually. So the pipeline is through to me where I can say, let me help you. Let me help you with your individual feelings so that you can control your feelings. And there's another added bit to that when we think, and [00:16:00] I love what you said Zaya about wellbeing, traditional ways of wellbeing.
I think it's a great question. 'cause our cons, we spent, we had a wellbeing budget, I can't remember what year it was. It was one that Labor, labor thought they were doing the right thing, so the wellbeing budget spent $9.1 billion because our child mental health and youth mental health was problematic.
Highest rates of suicide in the world for our Māori teenagers. And so it made sense to spend $9.1 billion, but it all went on mental health services, on guidance, school guidance counselors on side disciplines because we believe that we need more of those so that we can help you with your individual problems.
But what that means is that we put more money into giving you tools to cope with your emotions. Because some time ago, psychology, and I'm talking about [00:17:00] positivist psychology as well as developmental psychology, said that wellbeing is synonymous with happiness. And if that's the. That's what we've had indoctrinated into our mind.
Then that means that emotions are drivers, motivators of wellbeing, which is happiness. And happiness is about not having those other emotions, right? Imagine what that does to the activists and the indigenous people that don't fit in this social construct, and so as we are working to make sense of that, part of our healing, part of wellbeing.
For us as colonized indigenous people is awakening and being aware and plugging in and creating space for people like Tina, because wellbeing is more than just having control of my anger and my anxiety and my depression. Wellbeing is understanding that story. And she helped me understand that [00:18:00] story, Tina.
But when she came to see me one time ago, she said, surely there's a diagnosis for these people that just seemed deluded. We're talking about our government and people thought that we the problem, and I said to her, and this is where Uncle Willie's caught it, or the story just at the end, we have to be careful with our words.
We grow what we speak and we speak what we grow. And if we use their words to describe them, actually I've changed my mind now Tina, I think we should we use their words to describe them? But we should be careful because we have to create our words to describe us. Yeah. And that's the of the side disciplines.
And that actually is a beautiful segue because when Mark and I met, the depth of his story allowed us to start sharing stories and pulling words and concepts that will create a different [00:19:00] way of understanding distress. Because we had distress before colonization, but we had a social, we had systems and it was contextualized within our values and what we believed in, our connection to our ancestral ways of knowing.
So for me, wellbeing is synonymous with Oranga. Whakapapa, keeping our genealogical ties to the earth and sky and all of the universe connected. So that's a, is that a beautiful segue? Yes. Yes.
I guess what I really wanna say is that he holds, he is a historian. He holds stories that keep our whakapapa Alive, where people like me who were disconnected through industrialization, I was gonna say consumerism. That's a fact. And urbanization. He's that receptacle that holds those stories. [00:20:00]
Mark Kopua: Yeah. I think one of the, what's making me what this is called or is making me think is about wellbeing as something that you can see in a family or in a, in the, even in the environment you can see wellbeing.
And that means that you can, I was just thinking just in, for example, as an example, that even when we go to a collectively we share the grief of losing somebody. So we share that as a family. And one of the things that I notice often or here when we're at attending those events is that if there's a lot of people that are contributing in the background to ensure that all the visitors and all the family get their three staple meals for the three days that they're there, that is an indicator for me that there's wellbeing within this family because of the amount of activity that they will, imagery that they [00:21:00] will put in to even death and how to mourn and how to stay connected and collective in, in that sad process.
There's all these different examples that show me what wellbeing looks like. You can look at the land and see it there that the trees are healthy the land is healthy, but then you can look at another piece of land, especially one that's being worked over and worked over to extract as much as they can out of that land and see, ah, this poor place is struggling a little bit.
And then you can go into another piece of land and you can hear the noises that are rich of the bird life of the animals that are there for me, those are the symbols of wellbeing. Wow.
Zaya Benazzo: [00:22:00] Beautiful. And that reminds me, one of the Māori healers we met when we were there, she was saying, when you clear the forest, it impacts the lungs of the humans.
When our lungs are connected to the forest is the same. Apart. So wellbeing is not this individual human body we define ourselves to be. And we also heard about a lot of the struggle of pharmaceutical companies coming and taking the traditional medicine and patenting it. And that's part of the disrupting those ancestral technologies for healing.
I dunno, Tina, if that's something you want [00:23:00] to carry on to bring in or maybe there's other more important aspects of the. Fight now that you are working on? Yeah,
Tina Ngata: sure. Isaiah. I think what you're describing also is a, kind of an extension of what Uncle Mark was also talking about there when we mentioned that for instance, like I said, the mentality is to extract, exploit and individualize, right?
So in order to individualize, they need to invisibilize relational wellbeing. They need to diminish and devalue the importance of relationships in order to, in individualize. And so they need to so in, in that sense, you look at the way in which western science, understands wellbeing, and it's often in an individual unit format.
That's not by conseque, just by happenstance. That's because the easiest way to feed [00:24:00] something into a capitalist economy is to turn it into a consumable unit. And so people, medicine, all of these things depend within their Western health unit. Construct, depend upon invisiblizing the importance of relationship, individualizing people, and commodifying all of the.
Aspects of their wellbeing. So the individualizing part feeds into this the, this western pharmaceutical approach and medicalizing approach and diagnosing approach to, to to wellbeing. There's also the exploitation part. So I said individualize, exploit, and extract. So the exploitation can only be done when you remove sacredness, right?
Because sacredness comes with restrictions. Sacredness comes with restrictions to keep people safe. And so you need to remove those, that sacredness in order to exploit something. [00:25:00] You cannot exploit something if you believe it to be sacred. And so what's the first thing that they will do? They'll remove your systems of sacredness in order to be able to exploit and consume those aspects of your culture or your wellbeing, including your medicine.
And lastly, the third point that I raised was the part of our of the colonial mentality, which is to extract. Because this whole project is an economic project. It's a commodifying project. So the first thing that they need to do also is to remove people from their land and remove them from their ecosystems in order to be able to extract from those ecosystems so that you are not physically standing in the way of their methods of extraction.
Which is why we keep saying land back because our people need to be back on the land, back by their water in order to establish and reestablish and reinforce that relationship [00:26:00] with it. So all of those things amount to exactly what you are describing, a wellbeing system that is heavily capitalist, that is heavily individualizing, that is exploitative and extractive.
And that is, is I think, manifest in the pharmaceutical approach. They have been, and I know, has been very vocal also around, and a number of our healers have been very vocal around the therapeutics legislation here, which sought to commodify our traditional medicines. And Uncle Mark was also one of our leaders in the way, 2 6 2 claim, which was a treaty claim seeking to protect a lot of that traditional knowledge as well.
But the current attack is a constitutional, and this is something that is mirrored off USA and Canada, a constitutional attempt to devalue collective rights and in and indigenous collective intellectual property. [00:27:00] And to prioritize corporate rights, the corporate right to extract so that corporations that have no ha have no.
Life force or breath get given superior rights over humans, over the bodies that carry that indigenous wisdom as well. So that's where the mentality comes from and that's how it is manifesting in front of us today. That's a part of our current fight.
Zaya Benazzo: You both Mark and Diana, you mentioned whakapapa and for many Westerners that we don't understand, like I think one of your the people who work with you, she, when we met her, she said, I know the name of 13 of my grandmother, 13 generations. I know the name. Both them,
Maurizio Benazzo: I remember she made actually a joke.
It said, yes, some Western barely know the name of their grandparents. And I was, [00:28:00] yeah, I felt so bad. And since then I'm trying to rebuild my genealogical tree. Go back to the name and far, so thank you. Sorry.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah, no. I wanted to lead towards your body of work, which is the mahi atua, if you can speak to that and how whakapapa comes into the ancestral remembrance in healing.
Diana Kopua: Yeah. He's sitting here whispering, saying, go, I'll try. And it's so his
Mark Kopua: realm talk about Yes, our answers were very connected to the, to their world, to the environment. Even at the time when the cyclone hit here we had an expert who could speak many dialects of moon, ring us up and say, the moon has the biggest lunar glow around it that I've ever seen.
This is the big storm. [00:29:00] And then when he rang me and he was telling us this, just to give us a heads up warning, I said to him, look, it's interesting because the ways that I, and things that I understood as a child growing up, I just seen them in the last day. I went to feed my hands. I saw snail trail going up the side of the shed.
When I looked up under the ve it was loaded with snail other animals were coming in. So this is how when I grew up, I was my own parents and that were so connected to the environment that they used the environment as a compass, as an advisor, as a consultant, all those different things to help them live in the world that they lived in.
And so we understood that the storm was big because of the science that the environment had. It was feeding to us. And so because our ancestors were so connected in this way, observing the environment that they were very connected [00:30:00] to I think way, way back they decided that they would have a a genealogical connection to that environment.
They started to look at how the environment evolved and then place, place that into an ancestral realm as such so that eventually they could recite back 20, 30, 40 odd generations to be able to connect to a mountain, to the mountain that sheltered them for the duration of their life and their ancestors as well.
So rivers, all those environmental places have a genealogical tie to us. We have stories about the creation concepts. And the creation concepts are really just a series of genealogies and where things started from invisibility to where it's ended up to us now and the generations that [00:31:00] are in the current and to follow.
And that's what genealogy is. And I've spent most of my life trying to pursue that. And I think one of the things that really resonated with me when I was a younger person was understanding that the sky and the earth was predominantly the beginning of most things. And then seeing a chart that had a gen, a series of genealogies, of X amount of generations.
And at the bottom of the chart was my dad's name. And so it suddenly became a validation and a reality for me that what I've grown up in the school, predominantly a, under the colonial system of education and being told that all that stuff was bu and now it became a reality for me that it was, I was actually connected to the sky and the earth.
And so that really motivated me to bury myself in this oldest genealogy. [00:32:00] Understand how the world came about and how we fit into it, and how we are so connected. If you wanna understand the weather patterns, have a look at those animals and creatures that have to rely on knowing what the symbols are in the environment in order to live within that, within the weather patterns
Zaya Benazzo: anyway.
And what I'm hearing also, in a western world, we are like, oh, ancestors means humans. And what you're saying, ancestors are not just humans, right? The river is an ancestor. The mountain is an ancestor, and we've grown and learned with them through them. They've given languages, they've given us the
Mark Kopua: yeah.
The cloud is an ancestor. And yeah. I try now to not go back to my younger ways of being and just slapping and killing an, I gotta be, I gonna be more careful about those ancestors because. They're actually in a more senior genealogy to me. [00:33:00] So I have to be very careful. The birds are as important, if not more because of the level that and status that they live in.
We evolve from birds from all those animals. Yeah. So they, the word that we use for that is that they are our, they're our elders, our seniors. So I've gotta make sure that I think before I slap and kill one of my seniors, that seems to be my bread.
Those sorts of
that
of mindset in itself to be able to shift from how you were as a younger person, to being able to be more conscious about your environment, your world, your journey,
Zaya Benazzo: and. Just the I know a big part of your work is the aka the stories, the old stories for healing. And again, I'm thinking Western mindset often is oh, it's my healing.
It starts with me. It ends with me. And [00:34:00] if you can share something about bringing old stories of healing and how death can be a vehicle for us to remember the ancestral ways. 'cause it is not the first time we've been here, right? It is. We this is deep time. Our ancestors have been through this many times.
Many
Diana Kopua: in in the past ua was the term we used to share story with people who came into the Western concept of a health system. And we would. Share story, ancestral story from creation stories with the hope that we were reconnecting, not just the whanau industry, the family industry, but myself, my own yearning for it.
So we would sit there and share the story under understanding that they had come in distress. But my premise or my formulation was [00:35:00] those causative factors that we talked about early in this conversation, which is the impact of the doctrine on our mindset and on our personal story. If we understand that in order to kill indigenous people, the people that were doing the killing and their families, those early settlers, it was horrific.
It was actually dehumanizing us. And so in order for it to be okay for them, they had to see us as less than human, or we are still holding that. You just need to have a relationship breakup and all of you feels not good enough, not lovable a waste of space on this earth. All of those thoughts come back and we, because we have been individualized and think that's me and my thoughts, it's not, it's so much deeper.
It's in the land that you sit on, you can see symbols and you are [00:36:00] blinded and unconscious to the historical threads that are in your sight. Some people say to us in our trainings, oh, I don't experience racism. And I remember Tina saying, you wake up every, we try really hard to hold their space and understand the person.
That's how delicate is. We are so vulnerable and so colonized. We think we know right from wrong and good from bad, but it's important that the colonizer. Is not educating us about our history and the historical components to what's making us feel the way we do. So I don't go there. I don't do the psychiatric assessment about your education history.
'cause I already know the education system's racist. So if you are a normal person, you wouldn't have done well in school as an indigenous person. And if you're telling me stories about how you were incarcerated I'm gonna expect, of course they did that to you. [00:37:00] I'm not gonna like it. I'm gonna understand the heaviness and the weight.
But instead of making you sit with that story and feeling so heavily wounded, what I do is share an ancestral story as a gift. Without judgment. And in that story are some power stripers, right? But they're our ancestors pre colonization. 'cause there's always power struggles in all cultures. Everyone wanting to have a stronger connection, sometimes takes the wrong step, uses the wrong words, thinks that they're doing the right thing, but they need to learn how to dance together.
And we share those stories and understand the characteristics. And then you find that moms of teenagers say, oh my gosh, I'm like, so and so one of their ancestors. And I'd rather be like that one. And they're being connected to their whakapapa [00:38:00] genealogical ties while holding their hurt story.
Making sense of it with their reconnecting, with the ancestral relationships, the characteristic, the traits, the ways of being. Because when you are thinking about handing down or they're not just names, the ancestors don't just come with names, they come with complicated context to their story characteristics that were shaped because of relationships.
All of those things matter. And when you understand that the part of you that you don't like to show the rest of the world actually also was in that character, in the creation story, it's a connector, not a disabler. And in that story, once you've done that, what we are also doing, I keep harping on about Uncle Willie, those words come from it.
And the story is something called the he. It's, it represents hope. Potential and [00:39:00] all of a sudden across people are talking about hi rather than hope and potential. Hi, you are in distress, but you're searching for the hi. But it doesn't have to be specific. It's not like the a and d, the a OD rehab.
It's not go into the ward. Not that sort of specific. It can be rich and cultured and collectively shared about what means for all the individuals. So what we are bringing about is the concept that actually our ancestors had that he calves in our meeting houses. And now once we've heard the story, we've connected it to our pain and we are making sense of it, he'll point to the meeting house that we are sharing the story and then go, there it is on the carved ancestor, the he nare symbology.
And it's wow. All of a sudden. I'm alive again and [00:40:00] something meaningful is happening to me, and that has to be healing. When you're engaging in something meaningful, that's ua. It's a philosophical way of understanding our existence Now, in terms of understanding it. You rather than beat yourself up about your inadequacies not being clever enough, not being good enough, not being rich enough.
What we do instead is think about connectedness. Connectedness to our ancestral stories and our relationships with the universe. That's mato. We have to also be ized to racism in that philosophy because we are indeed colonized and everything that we think about is probably tainted, no necessarily tainted with colonization, and we have to watch out.
For what we are willing to share with the rest of the world, [00:41:00] because that concept could come from the doctrine and you trip over your words all the time. I probably have a thousand times in the last two minutes, but Yeah. But I'm willing to accept that I'm. I am colonized. I have racism. And that's UA to enjoy engaging in that dance.
Okay.
Zaya Benazzo: And what I'm hearing is the, again, because of the disconnect, many of us think, oh, [00:42:00] my ancestors were good or bad. We either romanticize them or we make them. They were the bad ones. And this is coming from Christianity is good or bad? Bad. We've lost the way of seeing the fullness of the experience of being alive.
And I heard you say that. Like the ancestors, yes. They struggled and they had their own. So you are inviting for us to connect with all of it. Not like the positive psychology, right? That Oh, it's just about happiness. The happiness. Like as long as I'm happy,
Mark Kopua: it's all good.
What an example. I was just thinking that because I was looking outside the window as we were talking.
I could see over on a lower tree how the OT of the winds just, it is just caressing the tree. And the tree is born from the OT of the forest and the wind over there just out here is just caressing the tree. So it's a nice gentle touch. But then further up over there, I [00:43:00] can see the tr the trees are nearly bending over, so it's a little bit more of an aggressive touch.
And so that's the, of the winds over here being gentle, but over there being a little bit more aggressive. And so for me that's how they, our interact with each other and you see some pretty good stuff and then you see some not so good stuff that type.
Diana Kopua: Categorizing your distress. And I know someone asked about A DHD and autism, but I, those are categorizations that belong to a Western paradigm.
They do not denote the struggle that you have in your story, but you don't have them. You aren't them. If you are an indigenous person, you are of your ancestors and some other system has come along and described your distress using their categorization, your system. And it matters, right? 'cause if that system works for you, hold it.
But what we are [00:44:00] saying is we need to dial down on the Western paradigm and how they understand and describe and name. The exploitation, the extraction exploitation came with naming. And you have to remember your names and the names of your ancestors. But one of the, and Tina talks about three threads that impact.
Doctrine of Christian Discovery and how they impact your personal story. And you talked about, we think our ancestors were either good or bad. Christianity was all, it was a tool used to make us feel this way. The Christianity itself wasn't a bad thing. But it was used as a tool to make us as indigenous people feel either good in the congregation or bad not in the congregation.
So as a non-Christian, I must be bad. So what does that do to my psyche? The second thread is about intelligence. [00:45:00] All of the institutions in the world, universities hold knowledge that is racist. White old professors who bring into the system and teach you whatever they want to teach you, it's not a mark.
He's not in those systems. If you want to connect with experts of the world connected to history and genealogy and the universe, you have to search outside of those meritocratic systems that give you certificates and then have you under their social control and order. The third thread she talks about is wealth.
It's like we say it to our children, get a job so you've got money and then you won't feel so bad. It's like money is wealth. The big house with the white picket fence is wealth, not wealth of connection to all these concepts we are talking about in our stories and being able to go back to our land and have a connection with it.
Those threads matter. Sorry Tina, that's your story.
Okay. Good boy. Carry [00:46:00] on. Carry on. On a roll. You're on a roll.
It really matters because the very people who have big hearts for our indigenous people who are indigenous, go to and help their people, and so they have. A university to get a certificate, so they, oh, I was gonna swear. You get indoctrinated. Indoctrinated all over again and they come out with a certificate and it says, now I can help my people because I have the tools to help them.
They are literally blinded to what, how they are perpetuating racism and likely to screw over and contribute to the poor outcomes of our indigenous people across the world. It's really important that when you go into these spaces, and even if you're gonna trip over your world, words like you may as well just YouTube what Tina says, and that's the beginning story so that they understand, oh, it's not about [00:47:00] something genetically wrong with me.
It's about history and how it shaped culture and politics and society as a whole, and it's hurting all of us indigenous and non-indigenous people and. We are the solution by understanding that creating space to be aware and c our people or people is the first step.
Tina Ngata: Yeah. Can I, and just on what was just saying there the indoctrination processes, and this is not to disrespect anybody who has gone through the hard slog of going to university as an indigenous person.
It is difficult, but there is still very little support and attention paid to the way in which education and an intellectual tradition born upon the doctrine of discovery. Our current intellectual frameworks within Western Society grow out of [00:48:00] the doctrine of discovery. And this is what you are forced to consume and internalize and then put out again and again through the academic system as you ascend your pathway through an academic hierarchy.
And so there are impacts for that. And we need to be really deliberate around countering those and being conc ties to those impacts if you choose to interact in that system. Otherwise, you may revisit some of what you've consumed and internalized upon the communities that you go out to. And yeah, there are those three vessels and one of those vessels is intellectualism as well.
But to get back to one of your questions, zaya around around, the binary and the dualism of good and bad that is inherent in Christianization. That is another way that stops us from collectivizing, right? 'cause when you have these ideas of good and bad and you revile the bad, and you don't ever wanna be the bad, and you can't [00:49:00] possibly see the bad in you because you want to be the good person, you want to be the hero in this.
Story, then you are never going to confront how racism and these very harmful mentalities have actually been internalized within you. Nobody gets to come out of this innocent because it surrounds us. It's in our media, it's in our education, it's in our laws. It's communicated to us by the very policies that we engage in, from the moment you open your eyes, which is why as soon as people say, oh, I'm not political, I go, whoa, okay.
Yep. That's another corridor. And that's another discussion for us to have because everybody is subject to these forces. And so the good, bad binary the black, white binary, the good, evil binary and the way in which that is reinforced first through Christianization, but also through inte, intellectual frameworks and media as well.
That is something that [00:50:00] stops us from connecting to each other because as soon as we identify somebody else as being bad, then we want to. Cut them off. We don't really see them as a complex, multidimensional, multifaceted being as a father, a parent, a mother or somebody else who is loved. We just can characterize them as someone bad and we put them over there and that inhibits our ability to collectivize and work together.
So it's a deliberate political strategy as well as being a religious doctrine. It's a very effective political strategy. And the gift of Whakapapa, was what Uncle Mark is that it enables us to reconnect, it enables us to see the multiplicity of who we are, those stories of who our ancestors are.
Both our nature ancestors and us are stories that are not built on dualities and binaries. Who, the person who carries out [00:51:00] harm. And one story is that is actually a savior and another story, and they're one and the same. As well. So it enables us to have another way to see the world that enables for multiplicity, that enables us, for us to see that, that we have multiple ways of being and doing and can still connect through that.
And then the other gift of this cord or whakapapa is that the connection doesn't just happen to nature. The connection doesn't just happen to us interpersonally as a community. The connection happens across time. So we are able to connect to ourselves as our ancestors going all the way back to when we were nature.
And then we can see that actually. We still are nature. So as Kerin says in the film, we are living on the planet, not with the planet. But when you understand your role in Whakapapa, you very much realize that from a genealogical [00:52:00] perspective, you are living with and subject to nature. And so it's a connection across time.
And when you look back that, this is a counter move to the great chain of being, the Christian chain of being, which is a vertical hierarchy, which says that the, your source of sacredness is a white man on a throne in the sky. And the closer you are to being that white man in the sky, the more sacred you are.
And the further away from that, the less sacred you are. So what does that make? An indigenous woman?
Yeah. That's
connected to the earth. And it gets us to connect across time as well and connect to our future generations.
Zaya Benazzo: Yes. Wow. We have maybe just a few minutes left and I want to bring something and maybe we close with that.
Something mark said when we met we asked you about decolonizing and you were like, it's not about decolonizing, it's about [00:53:00] indigenizing.
Maurizio Benazzo: Indigenize yourself to,
Zaya Benazzo: For Māori people, but also for those of us that are not indigenous. We have been all indigenous to some land at some point, but those have been disconnected thousands of years ago because of Christianity.
What would it mean to indigenize our ways
Maurizio Benazzo: and how can, what's the next step to help?
Zaya Benazzo: I hate how to question
Mark Kopua: but that, yeah. One step at a time, really. It's it's maybe change the, changing the language to reintroduce yourself to your indigenous language at a pace that you can consume it and understand it and take it on board.
You could, we had people that were just changing the radio station to listen to more indigenous music so that they would bring their, not just their conscious mind into [00:54:00] the language of indigenous music, but also their spirit there into the vibe of indigenous music. So it's a slow process, but you could decorate externally.
You could decorate your environment with the, with indigenous art which would help you stimulate conversation. People your visitors might wanna know, what is this about? And then you get the opportunity when that happens, to dive into the history and the story that's held and contained within that piece of art.
Those are just a couple of ideas that I have for a slow starter.
Diana Kopua: My my, there's so many different ways. I think we've named some of them in this conversation. Tina talked about returning from land.
Yeah.
But the other thing is, whose land are you on right now? Who are the indigenous peoples land that you are living in?
What happened to those people and the land [00:55:00] where you are living now? Do you understand the doctrine of Christian discovery? It would pay to learn about it. All of those ways create space for your curiosity, the for you to move through it. And if you aren't on your indigenous land and you are able to spend time with indigenous people, which is what a Scottish person said to us when they spent time in our space, while we were sharing stories, they were loving it.
And what happened to them is that they started hearing the call of their Scottish ancestors. That created a there potential hope and they started getting more curious about themselves and here we were able to tell stories or what were my stories? There it is right there. What were my stories? The rest, oh my gosh.
You could probably ask chat GPT what stories they were. You could go onto YouTube, you could find someone like Tina Nata, who's from your [00:56:00] indigenous lands. And even though it's thousands of years, you can trace it back. I'm not talking about that. genealogy.com either. I'm not talking about that.
Whatever. Ancestry, ancestry.com. Yeah. Not talking about that. But yeah, there are so many different ways for you to create space and I guess when we are talking about decolonizing, we are talking about creating space. Give it slow down, get curious, accept if that you've been taught wherever you are.
Question it. Is where I was.
Tina Ngata: Wow.
Diana Kopua: Wow.
Tina Ngata: I would say. You know when we talk about turning our back on decolonization in favor of re indigenization, again, we are operating upon an idea of a duality, right? We are saying that bad this good, we shouldn't do that. We should do this. There is a place for decolonization.
Absolutely there's a place for decolonization, but it is one small tool and it [00:57:00] is pointless. If you focus on decolonization without having re indigenization, and the way that I talk about it is that decolonization is pulling out the pest species from your garden. Re indigenization is planting the native species to flourish and grow in your garden.
And if you only ever weed and you don't plant, you are not going to get much out of it. And if you don't plant and look after the wellbeing of those plants as well, then those you are not really looking after those plants. And so decolonization for me is actually a way of re indigenizing the concept of justice.
So when we look back with our indigenous lens on the story of injustice, then we point the finger and we expose the colonial harm. That is an indigenous vision of our history of injustice. And an indigenous vision of our future justice pathway comes from [00:58:00] an understanding of that history. So that is how I would talk about re indigenization and and decolonization.
I.
Maurizio Benazzo: Wow. Beautiful. Oh my God, yes. You's such a gift that three of you. And then this,
Zaya Benazzo: we need to keep Yeah. Shedding all those structures we've inherited on every level. Labels, labels out ways of narrowing existence to, to digestible bits.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yes. Thank you so much.
Zaya Benazzo: Thank you so much for everything you've shared, all the gifts you've shared with us and to be continued this relationship. I really look forward to. And I
Maurizio Benazzo: need
Zaya Benazzo: more ink.
Maurizio Benazzo: No, seriously. It's such a, every time I look at it, you're like, it's
Tina Ngata: addictive. It's addictive.
Maurizio Benazzo: My first ever tattoo, I want more
It the best kind of addiction.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. [00:59:00] Thank you so much.
Alright.
