Whakapapa as a knowledge system

Whakapapa comes first as the  base or ground on which the other Māori concepts are built.

The concept of whakapapa is mentioned repeatedly by our Māori animal practitioners as underpinning a sense of respect for animals that is part of their personal understanding of a Māori world view.

For example, behavioural ecologist Dr Leilani Walker explains how she has been brought up to understand that whakapapa affords mana to all animals, thus making them deserving of being treated with respect – an ethical dimension in Māori knowledge of animals that is absent from evolutionary theory.

Whakapapa is an expansive, generative concept and an important locus of difference between Western/scientific and Māori/indigenous thinking. The concept of whakapapa goes beyond genealogy, with which it is normally associated, in the sense of collections of ancestor names, specific lineages and family histories.

As a concept, whakapapa is a way of organising complex arrays of information likened to a mind map, a folk taxonomy and a cognitive gestalt.

Whakapapa in this more conceptual sense of organising information relates to the nature narratives, which collectively act as an indigenous paradigm to explain the world and how it came to be.

Whakapapa in this way fills a similar role for Māori knowledge systems as does the theory and philosophy of science in Western knowledge.

Whakapapa as a knowledge system explains how the world came to be, structures empirical knowledge about the natural world and guides ethical action in the Māori world.

The concept of whakapapa provides a basis for understanding human-animal relationships, which acts as a rationale for humans to respect the animals with whom we share our homelands and world.

The other concepts build on from whakapapa. Tapu and mana are basic ontological concepts that operate on whakapapa, and pono, tika and aroha are triadic ethical concepts to guide right behaviour towards other people and all living and non-living elements of the natural world.

Illustration by Isobel Te Aho-White from Connected article Te tapa ingoa by Priscilla Wehi and Hēmi Whaanga.