New Zealand and Alaska may be on the other side of the globe from each other, but their Indigenous peoples have a lot in common.
Dr. Ihi Heke says both have a long history of “talking and listening” to the land, knowledge that can help the world adapt to climate change.
That was Heke’s message, when he was in Alaska recently for the National Tribal and Indigenous Climate Conference.
Ihi is actually his nickname, short for Ihirangi, which in his Māori language means “Seize the day.”
Heke has a face you won’t forget, covered with traditional Māori tattoos. During his presentation at the conference, he was the picture of a mountaineer with a powerful presence. With an axe in hand, he stood firmly on the stage, as if to defend his culture’s ancient tradition of talking to the land.
“When I talk to a group like this today, in their blood, they remember this,” he said, looking across a room filled with young Indigenous leaders from all over the country.
Heke’s mission is to stir those genetic memories, to recall a time when Indigenous peoples had a kinship with creation, when they saw the land, the mountains and the trees, not as property, but as respected relatives.
Heke is of Tainui-Waikato descent, raised in mountains near Queensland.
He earned a doctorate in population health and later studied environmental management. He’s also built a career helping athletes, both ordinary and elite, achieve their goals. Beyond sports psychology, he uses physical activity to help adolescents fight drug and alcohol addiction, as well as diabetes. A big part of that work is reconnecting his people to the land.
Heke is known to take students and visitors on hikes to teach them how to talk to the mountains.
“And the mountain asks them questions,” Heke said. “Who are you? Where have you been? What are you doing on me?”
Heke leads them almost to the top of the mountain, but always stops about a 100-feet from the summit.
“I say you don’t need to go to the top. You don’t need to stand on the head of your ancestor and say, ‘There, I beat you,’” he said. “Because this fellow is going to be here when you’re gone, so who won? You can make it to 80, but this man’s going to carry on.”
“It’s arrogant for you to think that you conquered a mountain,” he said.
Whether they lived near mountains, forests or along the water, Heke believes all Indigenous peoples once knew how to talk with the land, because it’s how they survived.
He says as today’s world struggles to adapt to climate change, the tradition of treating the land like family is needed more than ever.
“We’ve got a saying at home, Toitū te whenua. The land is forever. People are temporary. We come through and we leave, but you want to make sure you are going to leave it in a state that all your kids are going to be able to survive, and their kids will survive,” Heke said. “We have to move back into a way of knowing, so that we can sustain it. We all used to practice this as Indigenous people.”
Heke says when he hunts, hikes, bikes or snowboards on mountains, it’s as if he’s in conversation with some old friends.
“It’s because when I go into that mountain, they’ve usually worked me over. You know, I come out of there ruined,” he said. “But after a day or so in recovery, I think it was the mountain that caused that. I thank them for it, because they’ve given me opportunities to grow.”
Heke says he also has conversations with the trees.
“When I talk to a tree, I tell my mates about what the tree said back to me,” he said.
“The word hauto, ‘hau’ is the wind and ‘to’ is a particular tree that will only move when the wind is above ten knots, because the foliage is stiff,” he said. “If I use that word, the listener knows that it’s windy today, because it moved that tree, and the tree told me that.”
And streams tell Heke things, when they flow over rocks.
“It burbles, and it’s a conversation about how deep the water is and how big the rock is, and whether I can get across it,” he says. “It’s just not produced with your vocal cords to communicate an idea. It’s still communication. It’s just a different way of hearing it.”
Heke says these conversations taught Indigenous people to always put the land first, but after contact with Western culture, those traditions fell out of practice.
He says there was a time when the Māori could tell what part of the country someone came from, based on how they moved.
“Our old people used to know that, and they could tell before I even spoke where I was from by how I moved,” said Heke, who wonders if the same holds true in Alaska. “Those ones that are out on the ice versus those that have trees, they act differently, and they move differently, because that’s required for them to survive.”
Heke’s a believer in reaching out to other Indigenous cultures to get new ideas, like when he traveled to the North Slope fifteen years ago and met an Inupiaq elder who inspired him to develop an educational program for young people, based on the blanket toss as a model for community and connection.
Heke says he loved the idea of how a group of people would hold a seal or walrus skin together to form a human trampoline.
“They would put a kid in the middle, and they'd bounce in them,” he said, “but each person that was holding the skin was a representative of a different piece of knowledge all the way around.”
“For the kid, it was just pure joy bouncing in the air,” he said.
And there was much Alaskans wanted to find out from Heke, like why he carried an axe everywhere he went. When asked, he was proud to show off his toki and its wooden handle, which has whakairo, or intricate carvings, that Heke says are just as important as the blade.
“I place my hand in a different spot to remember different pieces of information,” Heke says. “When I travel, I point it at whoever is speaking with my hand in a different place on the toki.”
“When I go home, I put my hand in the same place, and it prompts me to remember what was said. Our people used to do this,” he said. “It's an early version of a computer, because it records information for me, just in a different form, through these carvings.”
Dr. Heke teaches courses at universities all over the world, based on what he calls Attua Matua. Attua means Māori environmental knowledge and Mattua means connection to the environment.
Heke says Indigenous people need to walk backwards to the future to regain their ancestral knowledge and use it.
“We've stopped because we've been trying to pursue a model that's not ours, which is to be self-centered and try and get everything for yourself,” he said, “and the planet can't sustain that. We can't do that. it's not how we used to survive.”
Heke says it’s time that Indigenous people to relearn this knowledge and then share it with the world.
“In some locations,” he said, “there’s 80,000 years worth of information that we've never shared.”
Heke has taken part in cultural exchanges with the Blackfeet Tribe through Montana State University, where the Center for American Indian and Rural Health Equity (CAIRHE) is based.
CAIRE will hold its second Climate Change, Indigenous Knowledge and Human Health Summit next June, hosted by the Blackfeet reservation. The first summit was held last March in Rotorua, New Zealand, or Aotearoa in the Māori language. The gathering will focus on Indigenous ways of knowing, thinking and being – and looks at how to engage with the natural world as relatives and not only for its resources. Most of the summit will be held outdoors at Glacier National Park, to learn from the land and waters of the Blackfeet Nation. Organizers say the summit is by invitation only.
