In countries like New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States, a gap remains between those who arrived relatively recently, in historical terms, and those who were already there. Traditionally, we have spoken of the former as settlers, colonizers, and immigrants, while the latter have been given a variety of names, many of which refer specifically to being there first: aboriginal, native, native.

There is an awkwardness to these terms stemming from the dark history of colonialism and the continuing imbalance of power between the two. No matter how much such terms may seem to recognize the precedence of the original inhabitants, in practice they have often signaled otherness and marginality.

But what if the term used to capture this distinction came from the language of the original inhabitants and not from that of the upstarts? This is how things are in New Zealand, where the Maori – the indigenous Polynesians who have been there since around 1200 AD and who were the first to reach the islands – are known as tangata whenua, this which means “people of the earth”.

In countries like New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States, a gap remains between those who arrived relatively recently, in historical terms, and those who were already there. Traditionally, we have spoken of the former as settlers, colonizers, and immigrants, while the latter have been given a variety of names, many of which refer specifically to being there first: aboriginal, native, native.

There is an awkwardness to these terms stemming from the dark history of colonialism and the continuing imbalance of power between the two. No matter how much such terms may seem to recognize the precedence of the original inhabitants, in practice they have often signaled otherness and marginality.

But what if the term used to capture this distinction came from the language of the original inhabitants and not from that of the upstarts? This is how things are in New Zealand, where the Maori – the indigenous Polynesians who have been there since around 1200 AD and who were the first to reach the islands – are known as tangata whenua, this which means “people of the earth”.

Tangata is an old word meaning “man”, “person” or “human”. It has relatives all over Oceania, a clear measure of its antiquity, and an indication that it was spread throughout the region by Austronesian travelers who first discovered the distant Pacific islands in a series. extraordinary migrations between around 1500 BC and 1200 AD.

Whenua (pronounced fe’-nu-ah) is also a word whose roots can be traced along this ancient flyway, from the Admiralty and the north coast of Papua New Guinea to the Solomons, New Caledonia. , in Fiji, and throughout Polynesia Triangle, from Samoa and Tonga to Tahiti, Hawaii and finally New Zealand.

Whenua is a word with a rich range of meanings. In its first known incarnation, it refers to inhabited territory, the place where people have their gardens and homes and where they keep their belongings. In different Oceanic languages, it can mean a land, a village, a settlement, a house, a garden, an island, even the land or the whole visible world. It often means “land, not sea” – an important distinction in Oceania, where there is much more of the latter than the former, and it can, by extension, mean not only the land but the people who inhabit it.

In New Zealand, as in many Polynesian cultures, the word “whenua” is also used as a word for “placenta”. There is an old custom, widespread throughout Polynesia and shared by many other peoples of the world, of burying the placenta of a newborn baby in a place of importance. The aim is clearly to strengthen the bond between the child and the land to which he belongs. And here, I think, a glimpse is visible of how Maori and other Polynesians conceptualize their relationship to land.

Early European visitors to Polynesia were often unsure whether the people they met on the islands “owned” their land in the way Europeans understood this notion. And I think it’s fair to say that they didn’t. This is not to say that the Polynesians did not identify with the land or feel that it belonged to them in a significant way, but rather that their relationship with the land they inhabited was not one. domination but affinity. It was intrinsic, genealogical and indissoluble.

When Maori describe themselves as tangata whenua, they invoke a worldview in which their attachment to the land is primarily family, a bond not unlike that of mother and child. They are tangata whenua not (or not only) because they were the first to arrive in New Zealand or because for a very long time they were the only ones there but because, according to their cosmology, they descend in the literal sense of the earth itself.

A traditional Maori genealogy, which is a fundamental affirmation of authority, responsibility and rights, traces a person’s ancestry not only through the familiar generations of the recent past, but through centuries of tribal history, legendary figures and founders of tribes with heroes, demigods and divinities of myth to finally arrive at the origins of humanity and the primordial couple: a male incarnation of heaven and a female incarnation of earth.

But tangata whenua is not just a metaphysical concept. In New Zealand, where relations between those who have arrived and those already there are governed by a formal treaty, the term effectively functions as a concept in law. In the words of constitutional scholar JGA Pocock, this “is based on a metaphor: that is, a poetic, rhetorical or dramatic statement that there is a close and rich relationship between the meanings of land and birth, and that there can be an equally rich relationship between a people and its land, which can serve as a basis for a claim of rights.

In practice, Maori authority has always been explicitly linked to place. Tribes have territories and individuals have rights, status, and social and political power in a particular place. A few years ago, a warning article appeared in the New Zealand press reminding the Maori that they were not tangata whenua in Australia and that they should not expect to receive the rights and privileges reserved for the native population there. Likewise, other Pasifika peoples, including the many Samoans and Tongans who emigrated to New Zealand for education and work and who share a good deal of culture with the Maori, are not tangata whenua in New Zealand. . They have their own ties to their own whenua, where their own ancestors were born.

Many people, maybe all, are attached to where they came from. But everyone’s relationship to this place is not enshrined in their ideology at this point. One thing about this case that has always struck me as interesting, however, is that, until about 800 years ago, the Polynesians (or their Austronesian ancestors) were one of the great migratory peoples of the world.

We know from many different sources – archeology, linguistics, molecular biology – that from around 3000 BC they began to make their way from Taiwan to the islands of the Philippines and Indonesia. A branch of this great exodus went northeast to the islands of Micronesia; another took an epic trip to southwestern Madagascar. A third took the path through New Guinea that took them to the middle of the Pacific, reaching east to Rapa Nui, or Easter Island.

The distances are phenomenal. That’s nearly 5,000 miles as the crow flies from Indonesia to Madagascar and over 7,000 from Papua New Guinea to Easter Island. The Polynesian Triangle alone, which is only a subset of this territory, encompasses an area of ​​over 10 million square miles. It is a people on the move, in constant search of new territories, finding and regulating everything in its path.

Some have argued that it was precisely this oceanic experience – the vast expanses of water, the terrible scarcity of land – that spawned a philosophy in which the earth itself could be counted among its ancestors, where the physical soil was literally. an extension of oneself. . Perhaps, for the ocean traveler, the land has taken on a meaning that could never be matched in the cosmology of a continental people. But that may be too literal reasoning; after all, Pacific Islanders aren’t the only ones claiming this kind of kinship with their land.

Sometimes this kinship can be difficult for others to understand. At the start of the pandemic, like many people, I decided to update my will. Reflecting on the division of our property, my Maori husband and I concluded that the house, which I had inherited from my parents, should pass directly to our children, ignoring it if I was to die first.

The lawyer I spoke to felt there was something fishy about this. He wanted to make sure he wasn’t involved in a situation where I was cheating on my husband with what was rightfully his.

“He doesn’t want it,” I told him. “He doesn’t feel like it’s his. I tried to explain that my husband, who is Maori, didn’t think the land here in New England could really belong to him. (I’m not sure he thinks that should be mine either.) His land, the land he belongs to, is in New Zealand, where he is tangata whenua.

“He doesn’t feel the same about ownership,” I told the lawyer. “He doesn’t really think you can own him. He just has a different relationship to the earth.

“Oh,” he said with slowly dawning appreciation. “I’m still going to have to talk to him.” “