Claudia Peña and Erin Matariki Carr on Reconnecting with the Earth and Each Other
Bioneers | Published: June 5, 2024 IndigeneityNature, Culture and SpiritRestoring Ecosystems Video
Through colonization, hyper capitalism, and unaddressed trauma, many of us have forgotten how to play our part in the orchestra of the natural world. Join a conversation between two remarkable activists and legal practitioners from different continents, working in different communities, but who happen to share a belief in the power of creative expression help us reconnect to the entire web of life. They discuss interdependence, forgotten ways of relating to each other and all species, and how well-harmonized songs can bring delight and balance to the human spirit, to trees and plants and to our fellow fauna.
This talk was delivered at the 2024 Bioneers Conference.
Erin Matariki Carr, of Ngāi Tūhoe and Ngāti Awa descent, lives in her traditional homelands in Aotearoa/New Zealand and works in law and policy, with a focus on the interface between Indigenous and Western legal systems and methodologies. She previously worked as Manager of Planning & Design to create and implement policies under the world-first legislation conferring legal personhood to the Te Urewera rainforest. Matariki is currently a project lead at RIVER, where she focuses on the constitutional transformation movement in Aotearoa with a number of other teams, including Tūmanako Consultants and Te Kuaka NZA.
Claudia Peña, Executive Director of For Freedoms, an artist collective that centers art and creativity as a catalyst for transformative connection and collective liberation, serves on the faculty at UCLA School of Law and in that school’s Gender Studies Department. She is also the founding Co-Director of the Center for Justice at UCLA, home of the Prison Education Program, which creates innovative courses that enable faculty and students to learn from and alongside currently incarcerated participants. Claudia has devoted her life to justice work through community organizing, transformative and restorative justice, consciousness-raising across silos, coalition-building, teaching, advocacy through law and policy, and the arts.
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Erin Matariki Carr – The Resurgence of Māori Law: The Constitutional Transformation Movement in Aotearoa NZ
Erin Matariki Carr is from the Māori tribal nations of Ngāi Tūhoe and Ngāti Awa, and lives in Tāneatua in the east of the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. Matariki is a member of RIVER and a lawyer working within the inter-generational movement of Māori resistance that is now surging towards constitutional transformation in honour of the treaty Te Tiriti o Waitangi 1840 between the British Crown and sovereign hapū Māori. An important story in this movement has been the granting of legal personality to Te Urewera rainforest, the homelands of Ngāi Tūhoe. Here, Tūhoe aims to “disrupt the false notion of human superiority over the land” by removing human ownership and management, and providing a new kawa (or law) that starts with “human management for the benefit of the land”.
Claudia Peña – Abolition as Amends to Mother
Like so many of our other industries, the enormous mass incarceration system has wreaked havoc on our society. Our desire for punishment, and the profits made by the incarceration of millions of human beings, consequences be damned, lead to the destruction of the social fabric of countless communities in the short term, and contribute to the ravaging of the larger global environment in the longer term. Our only path forward is to make amends with the land, water and air, one harmful industry at a time, including abolition of the prison industrial complex as we know it.