This month we have another guest blog, and a slightly longer read than usual, so get yourself a cup of coffee and take a moment. We are deeply appreciative of Dr Jean Hera for sharing her reflections and wisdom with us in this blog. Jean is a long time colleague of ours, and someone with mana and esteem in our local community. Her thoughts here, on reclaiming the commons and looking forward to the Aotearoa we wish to be is both timely and inspirational. Thanks Jean
My Journey:
Over thirty years ago I completed my BSW (First Class Honours) and found myself unexpectedly beginning PhD studies. This was an exciting new student journey, a way to move off the Domestic Purposes Benefit as a solo parent and into receiving a slightly higher income as an independent Postgraduate Universities PhD Scholar. My chosen PhD topic was prompted by my father’s death a few years earlier, my first close experience of death, and a typical Pākehā after-death experience at this time. This Pākehā after-death ‘culture’ did not sit well with me. On a deep, gut, feeling level I wanted my father to be at home and wanted an empowered after-death experience. I was left questioning after-death practices and started exploring requirements and choices relating to this. It also prompted me to think about the capitalist takeover of death, colonisation/decolonisation theory and alternative community not for profit after-death approaches and related services. This was a personal and spiritual, as well as academic calling to study after-death choices, the social policy of death, homedeath practices and women’s and community experiences. My background, along with being a social work student and a parent, was in community work and social justice activism. This strongly influenced my PhD research approach. My involvement in the homebirth and the women’s health movements, along with my awareness of Māori cultural after-death practices, were particularly important influences. I knew that my Cockney great grandmother Annie-Lizzie had laid out her son, my grandfather, at home in London in the 1940s and that women used to lay out the dead in their communities, and that these old ways had disappeared. I became more conscious of the fact that women used to lay out the dead for no or little payment, and the importance of this women’s history and the social policy influencing this. This traditional knowledge and skill was shared and passed on as part of a ‘commons’ approach. My PhD ‘calling’ culminated in my ecofeminist thesis ‘Reclaiming the Last Rites (Rights) Women and After-death Policies, Practices and Beliefs in Aotearoa New Zealand’ (Hera, 1995).
I continued my community involvements in women’s health as paid work after completing my PhD along with later developing a small part-time private practice in supervision. I am now 67, mainly retired, and back on a ‘benefit’ receiving government superannuation. I find myself more easily in a space to reflect, ponder and research once again. I have also become more and more drawn to community activism and involvements that address the climate and biodiversity emergency we are facing. This has led me again to consider how to advocate for reclaiming the commons, but this time in a broader sense, as a mindset, as a paradigm, and as community development movements for degrowth, circular economies, sharing, biodiversity protection, and sustainability. The commons is an ancient indigenous wisdom that can be linked to all cultures (some more recently than others), as well as the more recent developing decolonisation and commoner movements. The history of the enclosure of the commons, along with the witch burning times experienced by European ancestors, is something I first significantly learned about during my PhD studies, and here I am again picking up this story in a different way and making the links with community development as I try to contribute to a hopeful future and just transitions as we seek solutions and action to address the climate and biodiversity emergencies. This is something that can and should ally with Māori activism for decolonisation and tino rangatiratanga, along with other indigenous decolonisation and sustainability movements around the world.
An Introduction to the Commons and the Commons Paradigm
From my experience most social workers are unaware of the concept of the commons, and the importance of reclaiming this. ‘The commons’ can be described as an early community sharing based economic system, a normal way of life seen throughout the world. In Aotearoa, the Māori traditional systems of whānau, hapu, and iwi were based on a commons system of communal living and shared economic ownership. As we know tangata whenua means people of the land and the people were, and are, spiritually connected to their tribal lands, their maunga, awa and moana. It is part of tribal and personal identity. The land and the people are intertwined and prior to British colonisation their traditional economic base did not include private ownership. In England, pagan similarly meant people of the land, and heathen, people of the heath. People were part of, not separate to nature. This was a sustainable way of life as the people cared for the sustainability of the lands and waterways they lived on, and by. The commons is specifically an English term for the shared land and waterways that were in public ownership and not owned by anyone. This was once the norm. The commons was an open-field system, based on common rights and responsibilities, and open-field village co-operation that prevailed throughout Britain varying forms. It was called run-rig in Scotland and rundale in Ireland. It was based on production for subsistence, not market and followed the economic principle of use rather than gain. (Hera, 1995, pg 151-154)
The enclosure of the common lands was a social and economic policy. The beginnings of this was in the 15th century in England. It was imposed upon the people which continued over many years and into the present day. Enclosure referred to surrounding pieces of land with hedges, ditches, fences or walls as a barrier to the free passage of people and animals, a mark of exclusive individual ownership and the moves to conversion to pasture. It was instigated by the lords, legislators and landowner farmers and enforced by the lord through vestry meeting, decrees and Acts of Parliament. It developed alongside the industrial revolution and capitalism. The churches became caught up in this and the growth of capitalism and the Christian work ethic sought to undermine the pagan ways and force peasants into labouring every day of the year. It imposed terrible hardships that led to riots, occupations, violence, imprisonment and executions, grief, despair and social disintegration (Hera, 1995, pg 151-154). There are still some commons remaining thanks to early and more recent conservationists. Foraging still occurs and appears to be having a revival. In England there is a Countryside Act that allows for foraging of fruit, foliage, flora and fungus and the right to roam which means anyone can explore and harvest from this land (Lehndorf, 2023, pg 81-82). We can compare this British and wider European colonisation experience with the colonisation experience of Māori in Aotearoa. I think of Bastion Point, the Raglan golfcourse, and Ihumātoa occupations and all of Te Tiriti o Waitangi settlement claims which has seen some protection and restoration of lands, and waterway rights. These can all be described in terms of decolonisation activism, movements and achievements. Perhaps alongside this we can also see this in terms of reclaiming the commons. Although the commons were enclosed and taken into private ownership, vestiges of ‘commons’ thinking and being ‘neighbourly’ have also continued on (Lehndorf, 2023, pg 20-25) and can still be seen today on the marae, and as people and communities share and help each other out.
There is a potentially significant modern day groundswell occurring to protect and grow the commons. This year Indian ecofemininst Vandana Shiva was invited by tangata whenua to speak at He Whenua Rongo: Soil and Food Sovereignty Symposium 2024 at Tamaki Makaurau. She was invited to critique capitalist patriarchy, the role of colonisation in food and farming and the power of nature. Shiva (2024) argues that ‘we need to substitute capitalism with community’ and rebuild the commons based on protection of the natural environment, the cycle of life that we depend on. She strongly articulates the indigenous wisdom that everything is connected.
In her work Shiva outlines the battles of indigenous communities to preserve the commons as a public asset, and to protect it from privatisation by the wealthy elite and from what she names as piracy by authoritarian corporate powers trying to patent organisms such as genetically modified plant seed. She argues that it is about the struggle between two paradigms – the age old systems of local community common rights (most notably food and agriculture), and the take over by global corporations. Much of her book Reclaiming the Commons relates to resisting the legal attempts of multinationals trying to control seed and in effect also indigenous farming communities through GMO seed production patenting. The activism she has been involved in is about protecting both the biological and intellectual commons, and protecting biological and cultural diversity from control by multinationals (Shiva, 2020). She has worked to support organic regenerative food farming and land use rather than GMO genetically modified agriculture, and has argued that “the ‘enclosure of biodiversity and biodiversity related knowledge through patents and intellectual property rights’ is the final step in the series of enclosures of the commons that began with the rise of colonialism.” (Shiva, 2020, pg 9)
The Social, Economic and Environmental Impact of Losing the Commons
The historical impact and significance of losing the commons is not well recognised. Once the common people of England and Europe could support themselves and their families from nearby lands through carefully managed shared use, a subsistence and community co-operative lifestyle. Enclosure took these lands away from the commoners and reserved them for the already wealthy few. The commons enabled people to live freely without oppression or exploitation. The loss of the commons was the origin of the job market which has required people to work to survive, and for someone else to profit from this labour. With enclosure, people were forced into servitude or tenancy, dependent on someone who was a superior to them for employment or a lease on land. The capitalist system grew out of this and this system was brought to Aotearoa NZ through colonisation. It can be argued that the injustices of today for both Māori and non-Māori are the legacy of this destruction of the commons, and the interconnected community shared values of sustainability, common rights and responsibilities.
Reclaiming the Commons as a Social and Environmental Good, and Community Development Projects to Reclaim and Develop the Commons
In consciously reclaiming the commons we can learn from distant history and indigenous wisdom to help inform modern, sustainable community development work of the future. Reclaiming the age old local commons paradigm (Shiva, 2020) is an act of resistance, of decolonisation, that can help us to rebuild and develop communities and society in new ways. It links us to traditional mātauranga Māori in Aotearoa, and to the indigenous wisdom from many cultures, including the old culture from European societies. It is a cultural legacy of indigenous wisdom in various forms that belongs to, and connects us all. Naming, exploring and learning from this can become a theory and practice knowledge base to inform our need to address colonisation and capitalism in all its destructive forms. This can inform action to address the climate emergency, conserve biodiversity and protect the integrity of species and ecosystems, and connect us with the importance of learning about local biodiversity and the passing on of this knowledge. This is an opportunity to work collectively to recover and reclaim the commons both locally and internationally, and challenge the cancerous excesses of the capitalist system, of neoliberalism, and the biopiracy by multinational corporations who are involved in the removal of resources from the commons. It is an important area of community development theory and practice that can take us away from being caught up with the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff to instead focus on new/old ways of being and doing for rebuilding the commons and focusing on the common good.
Many ways of reclaiming old forms and creating new forms of social co-operation are happening which involve sharing, and developments for the common good (Shiva, 2020, pg 253-243). These include māra kai/community gardens; pātaka kai/community sharing pantries; crop swaps; community seed banks; breast milk banks; time banks; local currencies; community creative commons. The World Wide Web was put into the public domain, a global commons by Tim Berners-Lee who convinced research organisation CERN to release this to all of us for free, a form of commons. The commons can also be linked to conservation initiatives, conservation land that belongs to all and that seeks to improve biodiversity and create safe havens for native wildlife, such as bringing the kiwi back to areas it no longer inhabits. All of these examples involve an activism of decolonisation from, and resistance to, the dominant ‘for profit’ capitalist Western neoliberal model which exploits people and nature and involves continual growth of product, and of shopping and sales of new and latest ‘things’, much of which has no real use or needed purpose and which usually have a short life before they are worn out/broken and thrown away.
I live in Papaioea, Palmerston North. Te Marae o Hine our city square (The Square) was gifted by Rangitāne rangatira Te Peeti Te Awe Awe on behalf of mana whenua as a meeting place for the people, a commons. Our city council which is involved in owning and overseeing land belonging to the city has become involved with projects such as the planting of māra kai/community gardens and assisting community groups to do this. Recently our PNCC agreed to make it easier for community gardens to establish without so much red tape which will hopefully ensure ‘guerilla gardeners’ are supported by, rather than battling with, Council. Fruit trees are being planted on common land. Schools are involved in developing gardens and pātaka kai (community pantries), along with other parts of our communities. I see this as all part of developing the commons. My most recent community work involvement is with Environment Network Manawatū (ENM). It is wonderful to see the community development happening here which involves projects such as environmental advocacy, food resilience action, community composting, clearing plastic pollution, repairing, recycling and biodiversity protection, including preparing to return kiwi to the Ruahines. ENM works alongside environmentally linked community groups and projects by providing support, advocacy, funding and resources. ENM has recently helped support a working group I am involved with to form which is working to establish a natural burial ground in the Manawatū.
There is so much we can do to reclaim the commons and create alternatives to the capitalist greed and excesses that surround us. I finished writing this piece at Matariki/Puanga, Māori New Year 2024. This is a time to ask Hiwa-i-te-rangi, the wishing star, to bless our aspirations for the coming year. I wish to be part of a vibrant, growing movement to reclaim the commons, and to change our ways so that we are more connected to, and in tune with, nature (and we are nature too). We need to protect the earth, the communities we love, and work to ensure a healthy future for the generations to come.
Dr Jean Hera
References:
Hera, Jean, 1995. Reclaiming the Last Rites (Rights) Women and After-death Policies, Practices and Beliefs, in Aotearoa/New Zealand, PhD Thesis, Palmerston North, Department of Social Policy and Social Work, Massey University. https://mro.massey.ac.nz/server/api/core/bitstreams/52ed033e-225d-4ab4-b543-b39073afa7c5/content
Lehndorf, Helen, 2023. A Forager’s Life. Finding my heart and home in nature, Auckland, Harper Collins Publishers (NZ) Ltd.
Shiva, Vandana, 2020. Reclaiming the Commons. Santa Fe & London, Synergetic Press.
Shiva, Vandana, 2024. Speech and Q&A, He Whenua Rongo: Soil and Food Sovereignty Symposium 2024, Tamaki Makaurau, Aotearoa/NZ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY3QaDXOPoE
