The turning point for me was coming to understand we're all products of our environment and a lot of the choices people make are a result of their experiences and their conditioning and their unfortunateness to be in the situations they are raised in, which is not their doing.
I was one of those that said, "Come on, you've got the same opportunities as everyone else. Why don't you just pick yourself up and get on with it?" But through working for a Māori health organisation and also becoming an activist and advocate, I started to notice, for example, big industries and the sort of propaganda they put out. I saw that this was creating further discrimination and deprivation for Māori, particularly in the environmental space. The intensification of industrial farming would harm, for example, waterways - sources of sustenance for rural communities, which by and large are usually Māori communities.
When you think of Aotearoa, you now think of either cows or sheep or - let's give it some credit -The Lord of the Rings. But we're really well known for cows and sheep. Pre-colonisation, they weren't even here. We hear a lot of talk about being a patriot: "It's your patriotic duty to defend this industry." But for me as Māori, it's my duty to point out they were never a part of our identity. All this talk about how this land was made for dairy farming, farming is in our blood, it's in our ID: For some of us it's in our blood, but not all of us.
This is a colonised land, a land where we're driven by marketing and propaganda and the want to sell not just our products but our country. But we are trapped between two forces at the moment: This drive for more capital but also an awakening in terms of the colonial harms that have been caused. We're seeing people who are starting to understand the inherent worth in indigenous knowledge. We're seeing a lot of people with the desire to downsize and throw away the typical western aspirations of wanting to own X, Y, Z - wanting to really get back in touch with nature, and simpler, softer, less impactful ways of relating to the land.
We've got a lot of really strong industries that are leading us in the wrong direction but the people here - Māori, Pākehā, whoever - we're pretty incredible people, so if there's any country that's going to be able to break away from this colonial hold on driving for more GDP versus a softer, less impactful, indigenous way of relating to the world, I think Aotearoa has a very good chance of achieving that.
Chris Huriwai's new documentary, Milked, opens in Dunedin on November 7 as part of the New Zealand International Film Festival.
