Donna Frost

Chapter 3 66 1993 ; Lear, 2006 ; Puebla, 2015 ), for example, also share ideas of connectedness and community (Archibald, 2008 ), being-in-the-world and reciprocity or balance (Gobo, 2011 ). Suchworld views often pay explicit attention, for example, to a spiritual connection to the land and nature, and the role of the natural world in helping us to change perspective, develop and reveal insights and locate ourselves and our being in the world (Bishop, 1998 ; Walker, Eketone & Gibbs, 2006 ; eg. Benterrak, Muecke & Roe, 2014 ; ten Hoopen, 2015 ). Indigenous peoples’ communities, experiences, viewpoints and struggles, internal or external, are not, of course, homogenous (Smith, 2005 , 2015 ), and their belief systems and philosophy are not set in stone (Kovach, 2015 ). Taken collectively, Indigenous philosophy has been described as “ an ancient, but ever evolving, set of beliefs and practices arising from tribal cultures. […] Such beliefs include the acknowledgement of process, wholeness, and the collective ” (Kovach, 2015 , p. 381 ). My experience with and understandings of philosophical traditions outside my own remains limited. Those ideas that have inspired me, or lead me to new insights with respect to giving form to this research, are discussed here. My introduction to philosophy outside the western tradition was Māori 2 philosophy, as I am a Pākehā 3 woman. As a child I was attracted to the creation stories and sense of community, as a teen, to the importance of ritual, the symbolism of art forms and integration of spirituality into daily life. At school, Māori literature (Patricia Grace, Witi Ihimaera, Keri Hulme) was included on our reading lists and discussion of the themes it presented encouraged by a forward thinking, person-centred and critically creative teacher. In these stories I discovered a new perspective and was exposed to experience different frommy own: injustice, institutionalised racism, the transformational potential of connectedness to place, history, language, land and community – and the devastating effects of disconnection. I did not yet see myself as having benefitted from the disconnection and misappropriation: I identified myself with the protagonists in the stories, not with the hegemonic context in which they took place. 2 Māori are the indigenous people of Aotearoa /New Zealand. ( Aotearoa is the Māori name for New Zealand, generally translated as, ‘The land of the long white cloud’.) 3 A Pākehā is a New Zealander of European descent.