Taonga: Indigenous environmental sociologist Melanie Mark-Shadbolt unlocks her library

Melanie Mark-Shadbolt, head of Te Tira Whakamātaki, by one wall of the extensive library at her home in Rangiora. Photo / Peter Meech

Indigenous environmental sociologist Melanie Mark-Shadbolt believes the secret to saving the world may lie in her library.

When I think of the word taonga, I don't think of material things. For me, knowledge and language — te reo — are taonga. Books, and especially our old books, represent people who acknowledge the importance of that.

Technically this is my library but with Covid, I moved in, so it's also my office at the moment. As an academic, I'm kind of anally retentive, so I have my own coding system and I know where everything is.

My mum was a book collector as well and her stuff is down one end; there's a lot of poetry and she's a proud Irish Catholic, so there's also lots of Bibles and religious books, which is not so much for me. But I do have a wee fetish for old "ladies' handbooks" that tell you how to be a good woman and a good wife. They're so hilarious; I read from one at my wedding.

There's a whole section of biographies and autobiographies, which are again from my mum. The other side of the room is all fiction. Then I have the academic books, textbooks and the like. The biggest collection, of course, is Māori and New Zealand history and literature.

There are some books I think every Māori — ideally, every New Zealander — should read; books I make my kids read, especially when they go to university. My favourite is Mason Durie's "Te Mana, Te Kawanatanga: The Politics of Maori Self-Determination", which I absolutely adore. I used it almost every single year of university and it's covered in pencil and notes.

Lately, I've spent a lot of time reading books about my iwi, as I try to reconnect to my ancestors and help our kids understand their connections, too. I also collect books in the environmental space, about rongoā [traditional Māori healing practices] and the traditional uses of plants.

I walk in both worlds, as a proud wahine toa and also as a scientist who tries to work in a Māori space. I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about how to merge those world views and break down the barriers between mātauranga [indigenous knowledge] and Western science. Hopefully at the nexus of all those ideas, we'll find the sweet spot that helps give us solutions to the complex problems the world is facing.

The largest collection in Melanie Mark-Shadbolt's extensive home library is Māori and New Zealand history and literature. Photo / Peter Meech

No one discipline or one knowledge set will solve things like climate change or biodiversity loss. So we need to be open to all ways of learning. Indigenous knowledge is based on years of observation, and we'd be foolish to ignore those experiences of living in an environment and watching it change.

The loss of te reo has been really significant in the diversity of language around our plants. At Te Tira Whakamātaki, we believe some of the solutions to our biggest challenges are already encoded in our lexicon. When you break it down, you start to see that coding and knowledge in the way our ancestors describe plants or talk about birds.

For me, that's what books represent — holding on to that knowledge to ensure we don't lose it, and so we can reconnect to our culture and what it means to be tangata whenua, people of the land.

As told to Joanna Wane

Melanie Mark-Shadbolt (Ngāti Kahungunu ki Wairararapa, Ngāti Porou, Te Arawa, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Tuwharetoa, Te Atiawa, Clans Macintosh and Gunn) is co-founder and CEO of Te Tira Whakamātaki, the Māori Biosecurity Network. She is also Director Māori at New Zealand's Biological Heritage National Science Challenge, which is developing a Māori seed conservation strategy to protect biodiversity in taonga species and combat diseases such as myrtle rust and kauri dieback.