This mini-essay is a response to the prompt "The Māori worldview declares that things in the world are interconnected."

In what follows I will agree with the statement that “The Māori worldview declares that things in the world are interconnected.” I will contrast it against the colonising worldview, then look at how these worldviews interact and some of the impacts of their interaction.

The Māori worldview does indeed see things in the world as being interconnected, with Stewart-Harawira affirming that “the interrelationship between all forms of existence is fundamental to Maori [sic] cosmology and ontology” (2005, p. 40). This is evidenced by two key Māori concepts, whakapapa and mauri. Stewart-Harawira goes on to write that interconnectedness “is inscribed within Maori [sic] stories of origin and genealogies. It … governs Maori understandings of and relationships to the physical world and to the world of meta-physics” (2005, p. 40). This brings up the concept of whakapapa, in that it is most often translated as ‘genealogy’ but incapsulates so many more interconnections; not just those of relatives (that is, the colonisers’ idea of relatives), but those of the environment and of meta-physical beings, as Stewart-Harawira (2005) has mentioned. As for mauri (life-force), something pertaining to more than just ‘animate’ things (as seen from the colonisers’ perspective), Mika has written that it “accounts for the idea that the human self is no more or less important than other things in the world and that, taken as a whole (that is, as an aggregate of all things), the world takes priority over humanity” (2021, p. 8). From the two concepts of whakapapa and mauri, we can see that interconnectedness has a profound effect on how one relates to the world and takes their place within it.

The importance of interconnectedness to the Māori worldview becomes even clearer when compared to the colonising worldview. This worldview is characterised by what Mika (2021) terms ‘fragmentation’. Where the Māori worldview sees all things as related through whakapapa, “conventional Western disciplines create a separation between things in the world” (Mika, 2021, p. 1). Additionally, while the Māori worldview sees humans as equal to other things imbued with mauri such as the environment, “there is a disconnection in Western thought and practice between the human self and the natural environment” (Mika, 2021, p. 3).

So how do these two worldviews interact? One common ‘battlefield’ is social policy documents, as analysed by Green (2018). Somewhat unsurprisingly, she found that the worldview of the colonisers was the dominant one, and that it could negatively affect the Māori worldview in three main ways: ‘proximity’, ‘concealing and revealing’, and ‘hardening and flattening’ (Green, 2018, pp. 237-238). As the dominant worldview, the colonisers’ perspective is seen as the norm, while everything else is ‘other’ and used only for embellishment. The Māori worldview is twisted and weakened, with the interconnections of Māori words being severed until they mirror the English equivalent.

The domination of the colonising worldview has many impacts, but here I will discuss just a few. One of the most glaringly obvious impacts is that fragmentation promotes disconnection from the environment. There is no longer the relation to Papatūānuku, no longer any mauri residing in the land. This fragmentation is represented linguistically through the words ‘wai’ and ‘whenua’ being separated in English – ‘who’/’water’ and ‘placenta’/’land’ respectively. This disconnection places kaitiakitanga in a vulnerable position. Secondly, fragmentation encourages the adoption of anthropocentrism – the idea that humans are the ‘main characters’ of the world, the most powerful and most important. Mika (2021, p. 2) argues that such Western worldviews “entrap humanity into self-assertion and confidence” by denying supernatural concepts like mauri. This further endangers the rest of the world by promoting the idea that it is all simply there ‘at our service’ and that we owe it nothing in return. Finally, Deloria and Wildcat (2001) see testing and assessment in education as another form of fragmentation where “measurement extracts a particular phenomenon from its natural realm and examines it, discounting its relationship with all other things to arrive at a (rationally) acceptable conclusion” (cited in Mika, 2021, p. 4).

To conclude, I have explored the statement “The Māori worldview declares that things in the world are interconnected” by linking it with the concepts of whakapapa and mauri. I then contrasted this with the colonising worldview. A discussion of their interaction followed, which took cues from Green’s (2018) work. Finally I looked at some of the impacts of this interaction of worldviews, namely disconnection from the environment, anthropocentrism, and measurement in education.

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