4. Kete o Te Wānanga

The grandfather of western philosophy 16th century german Immanuel Kant said "Science is the organisation of knowledge, wisdom is the organisation of daily life" thereby shaping the minds of western society's greatest scholars and it's universities.

With the imposition of colonial states, indigenous bodies of knowledge became supplanted by western philosophy, indigenous knowledge theory and ideas appropriated and incorporated into western knowledge thereby contributing and expanding it.

Māori and indigenous people worldwide now became dispossessed - not only of their knowledge, but their claims to knowledge itself, their knowledge now labelled as 'information' and they themselves now re-labelled as 'wise' or 'people with wisdom' but never having any notions of science let alone information or knowledge management systems.

Even when Io said to Tāne 'kia mau ki ō ringa ngā Kete o Te Wānanga' (hold fast to the Baskets of Knowledge) - words which have been sung, woven, and spoken of over many hundreds of years to Māori and non-Māori alike, there has been the pervading assumption that Māori do not have knowledge nor ways of organising it.

What is even more concerning though is our own reliance on western philosophy, on the way we contribute to the further development and expansion of it, and the prejudice and contempt we ourselves have for our own knowledge.

With relative ease we will employ western methodology to study Māori subject matter albeit with an outcome ameliorating Māori economic, social or political life, but in doing so we re-affirm the place and importance of western tools of enquiry over our own, we substantiate it's place of importance, and contribute to it's growth through the innovative use of it's methods.

So what were the methods or ways of attaining knowledge and what is the place of rituals like tauparapara, waere and karakia? We currently see karakia used in all sorts of situations so I suspect one of the next major steps will be establishing which karakia or kawa and tikanga are used with each specific practice enabling a person to become enlightened. After that, we might as well have a look and see if there are any commonalities which run right across them pointing us to a set of 'conditions' or 'ways of knowing'.

Insurmountable task? Nah - not really. If we just jump across to 'the other camp' i.e western philosophy, we see the derivation of all the disciplines from a core set of principles or even one singular truth - measurement; Arts and Humanties from the Social Sciences, Social Sciences from Science, Science from Mathematics.

Could all Māori knowledge be descended from one singular principle itself? Watch this space....

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