This essay was guest-edited by Gillian Joseph as part of their Full Stop Editorial Fellowship project, Reclaiming Horror. Additional contributions from this series will be published later this week.
Editor’s Note
When developing the call for submissions to this guest-edited series two years ago, I remember struggling to find the right words. I couldn’t think of a succinct definition for “Indigenous Horror,” or a best way to describe all of the possible ways Indigenous folks might want to engage with the topic. So, I approached it from a place of expansiveness. I wanted to invite Indigenous people to share how Indigeneity shapes horror—not just as a genre, but also as an experience and expression of fear.
The contributors to the Reclaiming Horror series show us that horror can be a place where Indigenous people explore historical and intergenerational trauma; interrogate and imagine the contemporary manifestations of colonialism on our selves and our communities; pass on traditional teachings; and forge new stories and spaces to connect with each other in the present and future.
I’m honored to share Hana Pera Aoake’s essay as the first piece in the Reclaiming Horror series. Hana takes us across geographies, times, and mediums to better understand how Indigenous struggles against colonialism are inextricably linked. Genocide, ecological crises, displacement, and exploitation are the ongoing realities for so many Indigenous peoples and lands globally. And simultaneously there is hope, resistance, and kinship that carries us forward, past horror and into a thriving future of Indigenous self-determination.
Gillian Joseph
In his book The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (1988), Stuart Hall offers a useful explanation of crisis: “Crises occur when the social formation can no longer be reproduced on the basis of the preexisting system of social relations.” For my generation—born in the wake of the vast global neoliberal reforms of the late 1980s and early 1990s—we have been a witness to the failure of our preexisting social relations, namely as the geographer and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore has eloquently said, “Capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it.”
Our world has been shaped by extractive violence and the money that generates. Many of the crises of our time are not new, and we can chart the histories of social movements around the world in defiance of the ruling elite. These movements continue in different forms to try and push towards a better world. These are best understood as rehearsals towards a new world. But as CLR James reminds us, “In politics all abstract terms conceal treachery.”
I often wonder about how to reduce harm in our communities without the police and without prisons and without installing CCTV cameras to protect private property. My mind has sat sharply between thinking about the assumed criminality of young Māori boys in Kawerau, and the incomprehensibly painful and horrific news emerging out of Rafah, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, and in the occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank. I try my best not to be a pessimist. I have to hold hope for my child and her children, and I believe we all have a responsibility to share in acts of solidarity with all oppressed people. We are all bearing witness to the incomprehensible savagery of a genocide in Gaza, mediated through our phones, but we are always sharing in another moment where the empires built up and around and through our sacred places and violently governing our people might completely collapse. We have seen our worlds destroyed many times, so what might we learn from different tūpuna (ancestors) who had to negotiate rapid changes to their ways of life?
One such person who lived through a time of immense and devastating changes in Aotearoa (which must have felt apocalyptic) was the tōhunga (priest, healer) and historian Hāmiora Tumutara Te Tihi-o-te-whenua Pio from the Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Tūwharetoa tribes. Tumutara had a Pākehā (European/Non-Māori) father and a Māori mother, and navigated being between these two very different worlds. He also had to negotiate the tension between his Christian faith and the traditional oral knowledge and histories that were passed down to him from his Māori ancestors. Prior to the New Zealand Land Wars which started in the 1860s, Tumutara was active within the Catholic church and worked as a travelling teacher. During the Land Wars, his commitment to the church began to wane. In the 1880s, during a time of mass confiscation, theft, and snapping up of Māori land, Tumutara was instrumental in ensuring the traditions and histories of his people and their connection to their land remained. Through a number of oral submissions he made at the Native Land Court in Whakatāne in the 1880s and his thirty plus notebooks, Tumutara’s descendants are able to maintain an unbroken connection to the past. During this time, he added the title “Te Tihi-o-te-whenua,” or “the summit of the land,” to his name as a representation of the number of court battles he undertook. It was also in the 1880s that a priest asked him to rejoin the church, to which Tumutara responded, “I have an ancestor of my own. You keep to your ancestor and I will keep to mine. . . . Rangi is my ancestor, the origin of the Māori people. Your ancestor is money.”
Tumutara lived through a time where he was able to witness the dispossession of Māori land through a process Marx described as primitive accumulation. This process entailed taking land, enclosing it, expelling a resident population to create a landless proletariat, and then releasing that land into a privatized sphere of capital accumulation. Through dodgy land court deals, the confiscation of 1.3 million hectares of Māori land across large parts of the North island, and a number of pieces of legislation, settlers in New Zealand and the Crown were able to dispossess Māori of huge swaths of their land. Under the New Zealand Settlements Act of 1863, the Crown could confiscate the land of any iwi “engaged in rebellion” against the government. Below is a list of other pieces of legislation that have been designed to alienate traditional relationships to land through the development of property law, where possession is the basis of ownership.
- Native Land Act 1862 and 1865: Established Native Land Court. Introduced individual land titles to replace customary communal titles.
- New Zealand Settlements Act 1863: Stated that the land of any tribe “engaged in rebellion: against the government could be confiscated.
- Native Lands Rating Act 1882: Introduced rates on Māori land and allowed for land to be seized if rates were not paid.
- Public Works Act 1864: Deemed that Māori land could be taken for government projects such as roads.
- Native Land Act 1909: Prevented the Crown from buying Māori land unless a meeting of all owners had agreed to accept the offer.
- Native Trustee Act 1920: Established Native Trustee and Native Trustee Office. Aimed to help Māori better manage remaining land.
- Maori Affairs Act 1953: Instructed the trustee to convert uneconomic shares in multiply-owned lands (shares valued at less than £25) for sale to other owners or the government.
- 1967 amendment to Māori Purposes Act: Stated that if there were fewer than four owners of a piece of Māori land, it would be converted to general land.
Not unlike other British colonies, the introduction to land titling systems in Aotearoa diminished ways of relating to land that were not informed by capitalism. Once imposed, this was intended to destroy Indigenous relationships to land which are based upon reciprocal kinship to all living beings, rather than productivity and land use value. Capitalism is intrinsically expansionary, and wherever it settles it becomes a dominant system that absorbs and strangles everything like a virus. A Māori worldview posits that the environment is an interacting network of interrelated elements, where everything has a relation to each other. The creation of “New Zealand” into a capitalist economic system, based largely on pastoralism, was only possible through the dispossession of Māori. For Māori, land and its produce are more than economic resources that require protection and conservation; the land is the source of all life.
A key tenet of a Māori worldview is that we are all interconnected via whakapapa. We belong to the land and the land is the source of all life. It is a web of connections to all life forms, but also to each other. According to the late Ngā Puhi academic, Cleve Barlow, “whakapapa is to lay one thing on another.” The land is the Earth mother Papatūānuku, which all Māori have a sacred relationship with, and thereby have an obligation of care to her.
Losing our land was a process in which we lost access to not only cultural and spiritual bases, but also our economic base that enabled us to sustain ourselves and our families. The effect of land losses to his Ngāti Awa iwi in the 1860s was described by Hāmiora Tumutara Pio as,
Koia tēnei: ko te Toroa noho au, i tangi ana ki tona kainga, e mihi ana
This is a fact; I live like the albatross, crying out to its nesting place and greeting you (in sorrow).
In this turn of phrase, Pio registered that Ngāti Awa would become dispossessed not only from their land, but also from the cultural, economic, and spiritual dimensions associated with well-being as a people. These words provide a stark reminder of what the current situation is for Māori communities whose disconnection and displacement from their land reverberates.
I live in an area that has been occupied by Māori communities for millennia. But Kawerau, the town we live in, was itself built to accommodate the post–World War Two forestry industry boom, namely the building of the Tasman Pulp and Paper Mill in the early to mid 1950s. Kawerau is close to a number of state-owned sites, including Kāingaroa forest and other state and private owned blocks lining both sides of State Highway 1 between Taupō and Tirau, which are blanketed in pinus radiata (pine trees). The origins of this industry began after settlers almost exhausted the natural resource of native trees. From 1901 onwards, the New Zealand government made use of another Crown asset: the labor of incarcerated people. Large parts of the exotic forests that fueled the forestry industry were originally planted and raised by prisoners. In 1920, the prisoners were replaced by Māori labor force. The town Kawerau was established in the mid 1950s after the land was bought from Māori landholders (under unequal circumstances) to build the Tasman pulp and paper mill to process logs from the pine forests planted by prisoners. Alongside investment from the government, who hastily passed the Tasman Pulp and Paper Company Enabling Act (1954) in order for the mill to become operational, the site was chosen because of geothermal activity in the area that could be harnessed as energy to run the mill. Tasman Mill was both a private company (owned and operated by the Fletcher company) and state owned, and was named after the Dutch colonizer Abel Tasman, who “discovered” Aotearoa in 1642 and whose ship “Zeehaen” served as the company’s logo. New Zealand was named by Tasman after another Dutch place that already had this name—specifically, Zeeland in the south-west of the Netherlands. Forts in modern-day Taiwan and Guyana were also called Zeelandia by early Dutch explorers. When James Cook arrived in 1769, Nieuw Zeeland was anglicized to New Zealand, as can be seen in his famous 1770 map. To me, the visual reminder of this colonial history through Abel Tasman speaks to the complicated relationship Kawerau still has to the mill, which has since closed down, but many living in the town still fondly refer to as “Uncle Tasman.” At one point, Kawerau was the wealthiest town in the country, but now it is one of the poorest.
Much like the internal conflict that Tumutara grappled with, the Māori landholders who sold the block of land that built Tasman Mill wanted the best for their people while also being forced to engage with capitalism. They saw the development of industry on their land as something that could potentially lift their people out of poverty. At the time, the effects of building a factory of this size on the environment and people wasn’t as well understood as it would be today. Utilizing the Tasman Pulp and Paper Company Enabling Act, the mill was able to legally dump untreated waste into the nearby Tarawera River, pump poison into the air with impunity and take large tracts of land, even land held in Māori title. Close to the mill was once a lake called Rotoitipaku on land known as Te Kete Poutama, where the Ngāti Tūwharetoa ki Kawerau iwi had lived and thrived for close to a thousand years. It was a sacred site, rich in biodiversity and the home of the sixteenth century warrior rangatira (chief) Tūwharetoa, from whom the iwi gets its name. The lake no longer exists because it has been filled with over half a million cubic meters of contaminated waste. For three decades, Rotoitipaku was the dump for the mill. Although it was Māori reservation land, the Crown took it in the early 1950s, deeming it wasteland. Even as late as 1997, the mill and other sources in the areas were legally allowed to discharge an estimated 160 million liters of industrial waste a day into the Tarawera River. This gave the river the nickname of “Black Drain.” Although there were a number of studies investigating the health effects caused by the Tasman Mill in surrounding communities during the early 1990s, it’s hard to say whether these effects are ongoing.
In the video work Kawerau Driveby (2008) by the Māori artist Natalie Robertson (Ngāti Porou), who grew up in Kawerau, the viewer is taken on a tour of the neighborhood where Robertson grew up and places she remembers. Shown in the exhibition Dateline (2008) at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth on a television screen with headphones, Robertson’s commentary recalls memories she has of different neighbors, friends, and local histories. Street after street, she pauses before reflecting upon different people, some who were friends from school, who have passed away from cancer. Robertson indirectly asks if these deaths are somehow linked to exposure to the pollution dumped by the Tasman Pulp and Paper Mill.
In Michelangelo Antonioni’s first color film, Red Desert (1964), we see a tension between industry and progress, with shots that cascade between the toxic factories and an acute loneliness that is elucidated both in the soundtrack and evident in the lead character, Giuliana (played by Monica Vitti). Giuliana is the wife of a neglectful engineer who works at a petrochemical factory in the Italian port city of Ravenna. Having just recently left the hospital after a suicide attempt, Giuliana struggles to regain her composure or sense of self, which is marked by a constant look of dread. Even an affair with her husband’s boss does little to quell the catatonic, blank dread etched all over her face. We watch as orange smog is chugging into the air, as a festering score rises and falls with the fog (smog) that takes over the bodies of everyone on the screen while Giuliana’s mental state rapidly deteriorates. It’s a sensuous horror film in which the pollution acts as a main character that contrasts the natural landscape and threatens to subsume Giuliana’s body. Red Desert continues to raise questions around our reliance on industry and the very real fears we all hold about the ecological state of our world, particularly given the ongoing crises we are faced with.
When we imagine industrial disaster and pollution, they often register as alien or as an apocalyptic space where we motionlessly wander like Giuliana in Red Desert, vignette to vignette, powerless and catatonic. This kind of psychological dissonance is not what experiencing ecological disaster is really like; it is in fact more subtle, and always covered by the appearance of a corporation and/or a government’s logical explanation. Air pollution is a silent and often slow killer. In the words of writer David Wallace-Wells, “Everything we burn, we breathe.” Mount Maunganui, which is around an hour and a half drive north of Kawerau, is one of the worst sites for air pollution in the country. On the surface, it is a picturesque beachside community with some of the most expensive residential areas in the country. But, the air that you breathe there contains toxic chemicals from the industrial area that are blown across kindergartens, schools, gardens, retirement villages, and football fields. These chemicals are known as “particulate matter,” a dust that is so fine it’s impossible to see. Its invisibility belies the fact that once it enters into the respiratory tract it can cause breathing and other health complications. The air pollution comes not only from three bitumen factories, but also from the chemicals produced by around eight hundred businesses along the country’s biggest port that make everything from resin to fertilizer. A recent environmental report by the Institute of Environmental Science and Research commissioned by the Bay of Plenty’s public health office, Toi Te Ora, found that heavy industry was causing at least thirteen additional premature deaths in Mount Maunganui per year. It is estimated that around 3,300 New Zealanders die prematurely every year due to air pollution.
Concerns around the effects of air pollution were first raised by local Māori (Ngāti Kuku and Ngāi Tūkairangi) from the Whareroa marae (meeting house). The marae wharenui sits on a traditional pā (Māori village) site on the harbor. Built in 1873, it predates all the industry enclosed around it, which includes around one hundred residents, a kōhanga reo (pre-school), and housing for their elders. The industrial area and port were established on land that was confiscated from Whareroa marae. This heavy industry is in turn forcing this community off of their traditional lands, and one of the oldest marae in the country. Once a quiet place where food was abundant and where you could raise a family, it’s now surrounded by heavy industry: fuel tanks, waste storage, a major port, and an airport. According to Whareroa Marae environment spokesperson Joel Ngatuere, ”The two most at-risk demographics for air pollution are children and elderly and that makes up 79–80% of our community.” The regional council considers the area a “polluted zone,” where all residents are affected, but especially the people living around Whareroa marae as they are the closest residential area to these heavy industries.
Of all the industries, the one that is most worrying to Whareroa marae is Ballance Agri-Nutrients, a fertilizer plant, which is also contributing to the displacement of Indigenous people on the other side of the world: the people of occupied Western Sahara. Ballance is a cooperative owned by 19,000 Kiwi farmers and sits beside the marae on a site that used to be a playground. The plant at Mount Maunganui is used to make superphosphate fertilizer. Marae leaders have raised concerns about the fact that Ballance is importing phosphate rock—the key ingredient used in superphosphate, which is taken from Western Sahara. The region has been occupied since 1975 and it is considered by the UN to be a disputed territory. Ballance, along with Ravensdown, another cooperative based in Dunedin in the south island, imports from Phosboucraa, a Moroccan-owned mine in Western Sahara. The money received by Morocco is used to consolidate its occupation, to maintain it, to oppress the Sahawaris of Western Sahara. Aotearoa/New Zealand is now the only Western country to import phosphate from the mine. Other countries have cited ethical reasons for withdrawing.
After Whareroa marae first went to both of their governing bodies and gave the government a ten-year deadline to remove heavy industry, they’ve been increasingly frustrated by the bureaucratic flatlining. In a recent meeting with the Tauranga City Council, Whareroa Marae representatives were told that there was “no feasible pathway” to relocate many of these industries, because they have “existing user rights” under an act called the Resource Management Act. There was also a recent independent commission hearing about Tauranga City Council’s proposal to increase housing intensification, known as Plan Change 33. Allied Asphalt and Higgins Group have applied to Tauranga City Council to expand their asphalt-making factories, which may increase air emissions over the next thirty-five years. There is much pressure from industry and indeed from the government for the Port of Tauranga, which is the largest and fastest growing in the country, to expand. The Port of Tauranga has also applied to dredge 1.8 million cubic meters from the harbor floor stretching the wharf by a kilometer. All of these plans are being fought by the marae and many of their other allies within the community, including the Clean The Air Mount Maunganui coalition.
Since raising their concerns in 2020 about the pollutants and the ongoing effects on its people to the governing bodies of the Tauranga City Council and Bay of Plenty Regional Council and asking for the managed retreat of heavy industry away from their land, the marae leaders have not heard any solutions from the government body responsible for air pollution. After years of campaigning for both cleaner air and the managed retreat of the Mount Maunganui industrial area, Whareroa Marae took its fight to a United Nations panel earlier this year, where they spoke on what’s known as the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. There they laid out how the marae and their people have been affected by the industries that surround them. It was also there that they asked the United Nations panel for an immediate cessation of chemical violence on the marae communities, as well as stopping the granting of consents and giving existing land use rights to corporate industries, whose presence superseded the existing land use rights of the mana whenua who belong to Whareroa marae. Although Whareroa went to the UN and outlined their grievances, there has been no resolution, beyond mana whenua being given space to be heard. It brings into question the relevance of the UN as a governing body, as it has been unable to do anything meaningful even after the United Nations Declaration on the rights of Indigenous people was adopted by the UN general assembly. The document—which Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States voted against—is essentially a list of basic human rights Indigenous peoples have under international law, such as the right to self determination and participation in decision making processes. However, the inability of the UN council to uphold any international laws or have meaningful impact is best demonstrated by their failure to halt the invasion of Israel into both Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). In September, the general assembly voted overwhelmingly to direct Israel to leave the OPT within a year. But this vote is non-binding despite the fact that it upholds the historic advisory ruling this past July by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which called for Israel to end “its unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territory as soon as possible and stop all settlement activity there immediately.” The ruling is merely symbolic. It’s important that we remind ourselves of the Lebanese Marxist Mahdi Amel’s words in 1982: “As long as we resist we are not defeated.”
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The ecological crises in both Mount Maunganui and Kawerau were created by deliberate decisions taken in the 1950s to build industries around Māori communities. Much of what fueled the building up of the Port of Tauranga and the industries that surround it was the constant and steady flow of newsprint and pulp coming from Tasman Mill, as well as the many logs streaming in from forestry businesses around the Eastern Bay of Plenty and the central plateau. In fact, when you begin thinking through how these parasitic symbiotic relationships began, it almost always reveals the same historical figures and their companies, whose exploitation of Papatūānuku was built on stolen land and around dispossessed impoverished Indigenous communities trying to come out from the other side of decades of colonial trauma. It’s exhausting, but drawing the connection between these two communities locates a pain that exists across so many communities: one of loss and of trying to find different courses of action. Whether those actions lead to political or legal solutions . . . Only time will tell.
The future for us and our children feels fraught, unstable and terrifying, particularly in the ecological apocalypse of climate disaster which is steadily unfolding every year. Right now on the other side of the world, we are bearing witness to the most horrifying violence we could ever imagine through our screens, a genocide on a scale that is sometimes hard to comprehend. At night I often hold my own child and think of the children I’ve seen in Instagram videos from Gaza, dead and being held in the arms of their screaming mothers or siblings. I think of those who are maimed, having lost their entire families. I think of the air they might be breathing, the smell of decay and of loved ones dying under rubble, the constant sound of bombardment, how hungry they must be and how thirsty they must be. I wonder also about the land in Gaza, poisoned by Israel detonating 25,000 tons of explosives (the equivalent to two nuclear bombs) across the Gaza strip. How do we heal not only those people and especially those children, but also their land so that olive trees might grow there once again? Mostly what I think of is the resistance, strength, and mana of the Palestinian people, who in this moment continue to imagine and fight for a world in which Palestine is free from borders, apartheid, and all forms of violence and oppression. It’s easy to feel as though we have collectively failed the people of Gaza, and certainly our leaders across the west are complicit in the murder of over 11,000 people by the state of Israel. But failure doesn’t always mean we have lost or that we can’t live in a world where Palestine is free, where the Congo is free, where Hawai’i is free, where West Papua is free, and where Western Sahara is free. Freedom is a material place where all Indigenous people can assert self determination, whether that’s the ability to shape the way their lands are cared for, to have meaningful work that doesn’t exploit the lands we live and work on, or the rejection of capitalism as the be all and end all system for how this world works. Everything is broken, but it doesn’t mean that the horror our ancestors experienced or that we continue to bear witness to cannot be healed.
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In his book If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, the American author Vincent Bevis reminds us that failure is always an option, but that possibility is always the hope for the future. He writes, “When trying to do something as difficult as changing society, there are no guarantees that anything will go as it should.” It’s similar to what CLR James said when he asserted that, “Revolutions happen because people wait and wait and try every little thing.” For Indigenous people, we have to remind ourselves of what our ancestors have survived and remember the words of Toni Morrison, who in an interview in 1977 recalled that, “It’s not possible to hold on to crisis. You have to have love and you have to have magic. That’s also life.” Indigenous people are amongst the first to face the direct consequences of climate disaster, due to our dependence upon and close relationship with our lands and its resources. But as the Gunai/Kurnai, Gunditjmara, Wiradjuri, and Yorta Yorta writer Nayuka Gorrie has said on the resilience of our cousins in Te Whenua Moemoeā (the land of dreaming, so-called Australia), “Colonisation was our apocalypse, and we are already living in a dystopian future, so we are ahead of the game.”
I often think about the similarity between the expression Ka whawhai tonu mātou—meaning “We will fight forever”—and A luta continua—meaning “The struggle continues.” The latter was a rallying call by the FRELIMO movement in the fight for independence against the Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique. Its full phrase is often used A luta continua; vitória é certa, meaning “The struggle continues; victory is certain.” The former Ka whawhai tonu mātou was a whakataukī (proverb) spoken by the Māori chief Rewi Maniapoto as they met British troops invading Ōrākau Pā in Kihikihi on April 2, 1864. Both phrases used in different parts of the world speak to the struggles for self determination for Indigenous people globally, and despite the thought that these struggles might continue indefinitely, they can’t, not as long as we continue to draw connections between them, write about them, and organize around them. Our cause is one that spans generations and one where vitória é certa, because we are fighting for more than just ourselves, but for every living being. The real horror would be to stop fighting.
Notes on terminology:
I use the term Aotearoa to describe the place I live in before colonization.
I use the term New Zealand to describe the country as it was seen by settlers and the British crown.
I use the term Aotearoa/New Zealand to describe the contemporary country after colonization.
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Hana Pera Aoake (Ngāti Hinerangi, Ngāti Mahuta, Waikato/Tainui, Tauranga Moana) is an artist and writer based in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Cassandra Wolfe (she/they) is a Two-Spirit Métis artist from Winnipeg, Manitoba, born in 1989. In 2019 she graduated with a BA in Conflict Resolution Studies from the University of Winnipeg and Canadian Mennonite University. She is a mixed media artist who works with collage, assemblage, and acrylics. For Cassandra, Indigenous art, human rights, political issues, and mental health are all linked together, and are expressed often simultaneously in their art. Themes such as biology, nature, cosmology, and Indigenous spirituality, and how people fit into society – or don’t – are other topics they focus on. Their work can be interpreted on a microcosmic personal level, or a macrocosmic societal level. Her work can be found on Instagram @casswolfeart
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