Naming to Own Place Names as Indicators of Human Interaction with the Environment

Abstract

In New Zealand there is ongoing tension between how indigenous Māori (native to New Zealand) people and non-Māori New Zealanders speak about the ways in which they occupy their space on the landscape. The ways that different groups identify their relationships with the landscape often conflict rather than complement each other, which has consequences for overall resource and environmental management plans. Using an environmental literacy framework—that is, how people ‘read’, ‘see’ and understand their relationships with the landscape—this paper will focus on the way that distinct groups use their own languages to explain how they, in the fullest sense, know themselves to occupy it. This paper accepts as a ‘given’ that there are a number of theorists who acknowledge the importance of language in defining the landscape, and the influence that language has on people's perceptions of what it is they are perceiving. However, this paper is based on a body of knowledge that legitimates the Māori world view and understanding as a valid process of knowing the world. More specifically, contemporary Māori theorists have developed a mātauranga Māori (traditional Māori knowledge) framework, which stems from a tradition-based value system. This paper seeks to apply this knowledge base to the conceptual framework of how the geography of Aotearoa/New Zealand is viewed and understood through different cultural lenses.

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