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By Root 1161 0

experience. Nor does it mean I cannot help bring to a final halt the pervasive destructiveness of our culture. On the contrary, it seems traditional indigenous people generally have their hands full maintaining their cultures under the social, ecological, economic, religious, and military stresses placed on them by our culture, which means it falls primarily to those of us born in the dominant culture, those of us who know it most intimately, to eat away at it from inside, to break it down, and ultimately to destroy it before it takes down with it the rest of the planet in its final act of other- and self-consumption. Our culture has created this mess, and it seems only appropriate that in attempting to rectify it we begin by looking inside.

I wasn't thinking about this when Witi walked away. Instead, I was both intimidated and put off by this first major interaction with a Maori person, and was thinking that I faced a long and trying week.

But not all Maoris were like Witi, and having once been interrogated I seemed to vanish from his notice. Other Maoris made me feel welcome. Having witnessed my discomfort, several came to make conversation, and later, during a reading, an elder poet pointedly brought his eyes to meet mine whenever he spoke of family, greeting, community, and love.

One of the people who made me feel most welcome was Bruce Stewart. He is a large man, with round belly and wide white beard. His long hair is pulled back in a topknot. He is stunningly gentle, and just as stunningly honest. He's the only writer I've encountered who has been able to fashion a story about a fart into a piece of literature: in his story Thunderbox a teacher asks her students to write a paragraph about honesty, and instead of giving the teacher the platitudes she'll reward ("My father is the most honest person I know. He donates money to the poor every Christmas. And God knows, and God blesses him abundantly and he is very rich"), the story's protagonist is starkly honest ("When I let off a good loud fart everyone knows who it belongs to"), and for this he gets into trouble. I felt a certain kinship to Bruce and his fictional characters. Often when I speak out at public meetings, my comments—as at the debate between candidates for Commissioner of Public Lands—often have the same effect as an explosive fart at a genteel dinner party: noses wrinkle, people look and lean away, and nearly everyone tries to ignore the deep breach of etiquette.

Bruce welcomed me with a warm hug and by bringing his nose to touch mine in a traditional Maori greeting. We talked, about the marae, a beautiful huge house built almost entirely from discarded materials, about his work running a nursery for endangered plants, and about what it will take for us to survive. But he was too busy for us to talk extensively then, and he, Jeannette, and I agreed to talk later in the week.

Jeannette and I stayed a few nights at another marae in Wellington, and when we returned to Tapu Te Ranga it was nearly empty: Bruce was there, and his wife, their many children, her sister, and perhaps a dozen others. One of his children, a tiny boy, wandered in and out during our conversation.

I asked Bruce, "What will it take for us to survive?"

He motioned us to follow, and led us outside to a beautiful vine reaching out to shade a planked walkway. Large white flowers hid in the recesses of the foliage. He said, "This vine no longer has a name. Our Maori name has been lost, so we'll have to find another. Only one of this plant remained in the world, living on a goat-infested island. The plant could go any day. So I got a seed and planted it here. The vine has grown, and although it normally takes twenty years to bloom, this one is blooming after seven."

He continued, "If we are to survive, each of us must become kaitiaki, which to me is the most important concept in my own Maori culture. We must become caretakers, guardians, trustees, nurturers. In the old days each whanau, or family, used to look after a specific piece of terrain. One family might look after a river from