## Metadata - Author: [[Nadine Hura]] - Full Title: Slowing the Sun - Category: #books ## Highlights - Restoration is needed on a hyper-local, hectare-by-hectare, community-by-community basis. This is true in every place where ahi kā are defending their land – whether in Kanaky or Manu Kea or Palestine or Aotearoa. ([Location 534](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=534)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - In Te Tairāwhiti, a core element of climate adaptation research has involved helping whānau to follow the trail of slash from Cyclone Gabrielle to Bola to the burning of forests for farming in the early 1900s. This exercise, by researchers from Te Weu Tairāwhiti, paints New Zealand’s Emissions Trading Scheme, or ‘the next big thing to make money from land’, in a new light.2 In Whanganui, the ultimate intergenerational climate strategy is as simple and delicious as finding a way for kids to fall in love with home again. ([Location 543](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=543)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - Given that marae are the first to open their doors when there’s a national disaster, it’s difficult to imagine why anyone would begrudge marae receiving every kind of support they need. Rebuilding and strengthening papakāinga is peak climate adaptation. It means that hapū will be able to continue to do in the future what they have always done: take care of people. If there’s anyone to be feared, it’s those calling for profit and progress to get ‘back on track’. Environmentally and socially, we are still reaping the disastrous consequences of that ‘track’, pioneered by the likes of the New Zealand Company and Governor Grey’s gang of redcoats, who surely invented the crime of ram-raiding way back in the 1840s. ([Location 550](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=550)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - there are two types of hope: the one you sit around waiting for, and the one you set about creating. ([Location 556](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=556)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - I know why people want to hold on to ‘hope’, because what else is stopping us from curling up in the foetal position? But if climate adaptation is about healing, then responsibility has to be taken. Physical abuse of the land is as unacceptable as physical abuse of a body. ([Location 565](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=565)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - Some losses will never be recovered; this has to be felt to be understood. Stones cannot be peeled off the roads and reformed into mountains, native forests cannot be put back in a single lifetime, beaches that once used to heave with kaimoana now heave with supermarkets full of kai so expensive many cannot afford to eat. ([Location 567](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=567)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - The energy of those who live on their ancestral lands smoulders in the puku, and no amount of white froth will ever extinguish it. ([Location 576](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=576)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - The most critical lesson for Aotearoa to accept is that things would never have reached this point, environmentally, socially or politically, if the rights of hapū promised in Te Tiriti o Waitangi had been protected, and the vision of equality for all our descendants pursued with integrity. ([Location 579](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=579)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - the phrase ‘land back’ is poetically synonymous with climate action. More concretely, it is an invitation to have faith in something we can see, like smoke from a long-burning fire drifting slow across the sky. ([Location 584](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=584)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - For 250 years, colonial systems have sought to undermine our relationship to the whenua by removing us from it – our very resource base – in order to fund colonisation. People think of climate change as an environmental issue, but it’s a human one that has become manifest in the external world. Human-induced climate injustice has been enacted on my tīpuna for centuries. Climate change to me represents the progressive erosion of our whakapapa, from the very first glimpses of colonisation, which wiped out tens of thousands of ancestors. Then came urbanisation when we were moved into the city and became disconnected from our traditional knowledge systems. Even within the context of our homes we have dysfunctional family relationships and poor relationships with our own individual tinana and wairua. All these things have facilitated the gradual disconnection of individuals from their whakapapa. The climate, or Ranginui as he is known within our creation stories, is almost the last frontier – the last potential point of disconnect. ([Location 626](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=626)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - Ultimately there is going to have to be a lot of letting go of power, even within climate movements, in order for us to come to a real solution. The solution needs to focus first (not secondly) on decolonisation. That looks like decolonising farming processes and restoring animal ecosystems. That looks like returning land to Indigenous peoples. That looks like food sovereignty. That looks like honouring Te Tiriti. Anything less will not suffice. ([Location 660](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=660)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - In my mind, I could see my father getting up in the dark and stepping barefoot around the kitchen quietly so as not to wake our whāngai great-grand-moko sleeping in the cot down the hallway. Every morning he lets himself out the front door and lights a smoke on the porch and slips into his boots before puffing his way down to the truck. He’s worked his entire life in jobs that census data would define as ‘unskilled’. He lost his hearing to heavy machinery and his native language to shame. He wasn’t rewarded in wealth or status by the forces that drove him from his papakāinga in the north to help build Auckland’s motorways and bridges and tunnels. ([Location 975](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=975)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - According to attachment theory, a person’s ability to tell their life story in a way that makes sense to them is one of the most significant predictors of mental health. Shit happens. But if you can connect one thing to another in a story that makes sense to you, odds-on, you’ll be fine. This sounds a lot like whakapapa: the ability to derive meaning and purpose from our life and relationships and experiences. ([Location 2486](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=2486)) - Barry sourced clay from the surrounding hills, shaped pots, fired them in his purpose-built kilns and then sold them to wealthy Aucklanders. But his guiding principle was art, not profit. He likened money to a parasite that feeds on itself. The circular process he instigated was more positive: ‘[A]n alternative energy system powered by a belief in the natural world and an almost religious respect for human labour.’ ([Location 2718](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=2718)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - balance must be restored when people and places have been abused and mistreated. ([Location 2731](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=2731)) - Each seedling represents a defiant and mammoth stroke upstream. ([Location 2732](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=2732)) - Its function was to serve the studio by transporting raw materials and fuel, but its form is relational. ([Location 2737](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=2737)) - ‘I’m not proud of anything I’ve done. It’s not finished, for a start.’ ([Location 2852](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=2852)) - ‘I think the history of colonisation damages the soul, most especially because it takes away a people’s faith in themselves – faith in our right to once again govern ourselves, to determine our own destinies, and to tell our own stories. In our case I think it was coupled with a fear-filled belief that it was safer for our people to be silent.’2 ([Location 2909](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=2909)) - but in the rugged terrain of relationships love grows wild. ([Location 2997](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=2997)) - And it’s funny how, without necessarily realising it, some people give us permission to have another go. To attempt to be who we might have been in different circumstances. ([Location 3013](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=3013)) - Whakamomori is the acceptance of death, but it isn’t actually death. It is a state of desperation and darkness so intense that a person becomes convinced that it is not possible to stay in the world of light. Whakamomori means to mourn or fret or yearn – and yearning can be a kind of madness. People can be afraid, desperate, anxious, hear voices, or appear to be acted upon by outside forces. They might look for relief in drugs and alcohol and other forms of escape, pushing people away and lashing out, which can have the effect of compounding rather than alleviating the symptoms of distress. ([Location 3139](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=3139)) - During the day, when our bodies and minds are active, our wairua is contained within our bodies. When we sleep, our wairua is free to roam.6 The mind and muscles shut down and Hinenuitepō takes us into her protection, replenishing and restoring our bodies until our wairua returns. ([Location 3154](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=3154)) - often think that addressing the climate crisis could be as simple as healing the mental, emotional and spiritual disconnection within people, whānau and communities. ([Location 3598](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=3598)) - speak te reo Māori is climate action. Learning the names and the stories of the mountains and rivers we live beside is climate action. Paying attention to the ancestral knowledge that is revealed with each new retelling of pūrākau is climate action. Protecting the integrity of mātauranga Māori from misuse and appropriation is climate action. Not being embarrassed to ask the people who live and breathe the science and data and policy of climate change to explain things in a language that makes sense is climate action. ([Location 3599](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=3599)) - if colonisation is the forced disconnection between land and people, and capitalism actively profits from that disconnection, then anything we do to restore that connection has the potential to be transformative. ([Location 3610](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0FX1ZVV3N&location=3610))