You can be indigenous and also a vegan

Friday, 11 February 2022

Joel Maxwell is a former Stuff senior writer, now working for the New Zealand Nurses’ Organisation.

OPINION: I have to admit I’m self-conscious about being a Māori vegan.

Given our stereotypical public image as a fierce indigenous people, I should be chomping through wild pork like it’s wads of cookie dough.

Joel Maxwell: ‘’We have a duty in these times of climate change to consider our meat-eating habits.’’

I mean, life for Māori is apparently a meaty, turducken sandwich. Our kuia carry mussels in their handbags to dab brows of fretful mokopuna; rangatahi decorate their bedroom walls with posters of beef jerky; steaming boil-up is ladled fresh from the hāngi at every Māori home.

* Beef to Leaf: How hard is it to stick with a vegan diet?

* Beef to Leaf - Part 3: The animal question

* Beef to Leaf: The challenges of learning to eat like a vegan

* Is plant-based fast food really enough for vegans?

Well, I eat various pulses, and legumes.

Has veganism ever been cool? The answer is emphatically no.

Joel Maxwell: “If using karakia is part of being Māori, then to stop someone expressing that is to attempt to deny their Māori-hood.”

Nevertheless we have a duty in these times of climate change to consider our meat-eating habits.

It seems to be a commonly held view that veganism runs counter to the rights of indigenous people – that it is a privileged Pākehā viewpoint that would change and diminish our culture.

I say large-scale agriculture runs counter to our culture. And I would ask Māori to consider where our land went, and why – through confiscation and shonky lawmaking – it was taken, till we collectively owned a single-figure percentage of whenua we once occupied completely.

I can tell you it wasn’t taken for the vast Aotearoa tofu plantations. Nope, it was systemically broken, cleared and turned into farmland. Gone forever. Steadfast colonists let off an environmental nuke over this unique ecosystem, which for so long sat alone as a taonga, separate from the world.

Nowadays, to even consider replanting with native bush, or recreating wetlands, is seen by a few panicked farmers as a waste of ‘’productive’’ land.

Like we’re going to run out of cows any time soon.

I agree no vegans should ever tell indigenous people what they can and can't eat. It smacks of entitlement.

Our culture was irreparably damaged by these attitudes – by generations physically assaulted at school for speaking our reo, by swaths of our people forced to chase jobs away from our homes: leaving behind diminishing numbers to burn the home fires.

Now, many of us live in cities, disconnected from our marae and the bush and sea and rivers that once sustained us.

Nō reira, e noho tawhiti ana te nuinga o tātou - Ngāi Māori – mai i ōu tātou haukāinga: nā te pēhitanga o ngā ture, ngā tāhae whenua o Ngāti Pākehā/tauiwi rānei.

(And so, we live distant from our homeland, through the theft of land, and laws of Pākehā.)

I’m not going to tell people to be vegan. I’m not your mum or dad, ordering you to finish your veges – and that goes double for Māori, many of whom are just scraping by with weekly grocery bills set alight by inflation.

But, perhaps some Māori – if they are doing OK, and could afford it – might try plant-based eating. If only to reclaim autonomy from landowners who have in their own ways colonised our thinking about what is important, necessary, in our own whenua.

Farmers are not the ‘’backbone’’ of this country; they alone don’t embody its natural spirit.

You do. You always did.

This land was taken from your ancestors, and their – your – loss paved the way for others’ profit.

I don’t eat meat because I couldn’t kill that animal myself. I just couldn’t. I wouldn’t pay for someone else to get blood on their hands to do it for me, either. That might make me a weak person, I don’t know.

I do know that it doesn’t make me a weak Māori person. My whakapapa is intact, even as our ideas about how to live evolve in this ao hurihuri (everchanging world).