Professor Carl Mika explores Māori philosophy, examining how colonisation altered Māori views of reality and highlighting indigenous concepts of interconnectedness and being.
Mika is the head of Aotahi, the School of Māori and Indigenous Studies at the University of Canterbury, and hails from Tuhourangi, Ngāti Whanaunga.
In 2024, he won the UC Research Medal and the UC Faculty of Arts Kairangahau Māori Award for research in Māori philosophies — both traditional and contemporary — and Māori methodologies.
Asked if te reo Māori was needed to understand Māori philosophy, Mika said there were very capable thinkers who didn’t use te reo Māori but were nevertheless philosophising about Māori existence.
“I think how you use te reo has a lot to do with that.”
Mika said it was really useful to draw upon Māori terms.
He grew frustrated while practising Treaty of Waitangi law in how Māori concepts were handled and reduced to simplified forms that failed to capture their essence.
“We see that time and time again in policy and law, the translation of one term for another into English,” Mika said.
“There is an argument that there’s something about the life force of te reo which resists, that there’s something inherent to the reo.
“If that’s the case, then one of our duties or responsibilities is to hear that call of the language and to honour the way we use it.
The colonisation of world view
Mika said a strong counter-colonial attitude within philosophy had to be the disposition when encountering terms or whakataukī.
He said there had been many Māori scholars who had used a critical lens, which was not necessarily one handed down from the [ancient] Greeks but from “our own critical view, our own critical practice”.
A pre-colonial perception of reality, Mika said, was that everything in the world was one, that there was no separation.
He said his research aimed to restore indigenous ways of understanding the connections between people and the natural world.
In response to whether whakawhanaungatanga represents the interconnectedness he speaks of, Mika said it was a possible interpretation of interconnection but it didn’t cover all the bases.
“Human beings, rocks, mountains, te kore are interconnected but it’s the nature of that interconnection which is fascinating and needs more theorising,” Mika said.
“I think whakawhanaungatanga still talks about a kind of separability.”
“If your view of interconnection is that everything in the world is one, whakawhanaungatanga would be ‘everything in the world is one’, not everything in the world is related.”
Asked if kotahitanga could be used to describe this. he agreed, and also said pūtahitanga was another kupu that could be used to describe it.
What Māori bring to philosophy
“I think Māori have at our fingertips something which some Western philosophers have been trying to deal with,” Mika said.
“This is the idea of breaking down the subject and the object, the self and the thing being talked about, for instance.”
He said in that respect Māori had language and thought to bring to the table, though it had to be done carefully to protect that knoweledge.
