Jessica Hutchings, Ph.D., (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Gujarati) is nationally (in New Zealand) and internationally recognized as a leader and researcher in Indigenous food systems and Māori food and soil sovereignty. A founding trustee of the Papawhakaritorito Charitable Trust that works to uplift Māori food and soil sovereignty, she is herself a food grower and has been a member of Te Waka Kai Ora (the Māori Organics Authority) for 20+ years. A widely published author on food sovereignty issues, Jessica has been working at the crossroads of Indigenous knowledge, environmental wellbeing, and Indigenous social justice, organic farming and self-determination for 30+ years.

Jessica spoke with Bioneers Senior Producer Stephanie Welch about her work at the 2024 Bioneers Conference.

Transcript

Part 1: Papawhakaritorito Farm

My earliest connection to farming is before I was born. My ancestors were farmers and were growing food, so on my Indian side, I’m from Gujarat in India, from a little village called Matwad down near Dandi Beach, and my grandfather and his parents, and the generations beyond that all lived a subsistence lifestyle off the land. So before I even appeared in this form in this lifetime, it was already kind of manifesting itself. 

Then on the other side of what we call our whakapapa in our culture in New Zealand, in Aotearoa, I come from Ngāi Tahu, from Ngāti Huirapa, which is a big tribe on the South island. And my people down there, we’re not so much farmers, but we had a practice of mahinga kai, which is what we describe as our food gathering. So we would live on the coast in the warmer months of the year and have shellfish and what we call kaimoana, seafood, and then in the colder months, we’d move into the interior inland, and we’d have us some foraged food and find our food sources in there. 

My ancestors on both sides of my genealogy have been hunting and gathering and growing food forever. But I think the beautiful thing is on my Indian side, there’s such diversity in the food that was grown. And so a lot of the grains that my ancestors grew are grains that are not really around these days. They’re not part of a mainstream food system, you know, like all of the different varieties of ragi, of millets, all the different varieties of beans, of rice. You know? We don’t see any of that around. 

Somewhere inside me there’s this kind of call to bring back the diversity in our food system, and that’s what we’re really trying to do on our little farm—Papawhakaritorito—just north of Wellington in Aotearoa.

I live on 12 acres. It’s all women-run. I live there with my wife and my mom. I’ve been there for 20 years now. So I’ve been tending that soil or Hineahuone, who’s our soil deity, for 20 years—no pesticides, no chemicals, working and being with those natural rhythms of the land.

We do research. We’re in charge of our own Indigenous knowledge production. I do not have to publish in academic journals if I don’t want to. We do practice. We run courses. We run online courses, and people come up to the farm and we have traditional gatherings and workshops, how to make compost, how to work with the soil in a way which really enhances the soil microbes. So we’re very much about how can we feed the bacteria and the fungi and the nematodes and the protozoa; what’s the relationship between all of those entities, which we describe as our grandchildren of our soil deity, so the mokopuna of Hineahuone, and trying to teach a different way of food and farming, which doesn’t do harm to the soil, which actually replenishes and puts back.

The major part of our week is getting out into the māra or the garden, tending to the soil, growing the food, making sure we understand what we need to sow in order to have succession crops coming on, and then make sure that we’ve got good distribution so that nothing is wasted, so that food actually reaches—In the first instance, we feed our extended family. It’s all about feeding our extended community and helping our people get off the global capitalist food system back into the Indigenous foodways.

We’re all about providing I suppose hope and alternate futures for Indigenous communities in New Zealand, to move them on a pathway from conventional farming to organics, or what we call Hua Parakore, Māori organics. 

Then the third part of the trust is about evidence based Indigenous storytelling. I’ve been involved as a lead presenter, writer and collaborator in an eight-part TV series for our Indigenous broadcaster on Māori organics and ‘fixing’ the broken food system through returning to Indigenous knowledge and right relationship with the Earth. Indigenous led storytelling is something I have always had a deep passion for. It is important that we as Indigenous peoples set the narrative and the frame and show there’s a different way to produce food, without pouring pesticides and chemicals on our lands to be able to grow food. 

We can’t negate the impact that colonization has had on Indigenous farming. So the land that Māori communities or our tribes were able to retain, which has all been stripped of forests, has been farmed conventionally for generations. And so it’s just having pesticides and chemicals thrown on it. There’s a lot of work, like there is everywhere at this time across all these kind of complex layers to decolonize food and farming and agriculture for our own people in New Zealand. 

We just hold space for a little period of time where there is a beacon of hope, a beacon of light of what could be achieved. People might just need to touch and connect with us for a very short period of time, and then they can bounce back to their own communities and take the bits of knowledge and then start to grow their own food or create their own models for self-empowerment. 

It’s hard work, but it’s heart work, and there’s a whole process of grief in that, because a lot of the Indigenous farmers in New Zealand who are farming conventionally, you know, they’re bringing a dividend back from the commodities market, back to their people and back to their tribes. And that’s really important for our people. For a lot of people, that’s where their bread and butter is from. So we need to do it with a really loving heart. 

If you don’t know about the soil food web from a biological standpoint, but you’ve only understood the soil from a chemical analysis of it, and then a farm advisor or chemical company said, well, your soil’s lacking in this chemical here, let’s pour it on, then you’re not going to have any understanding about microbes and bacteria and the relationship between bacteria and fungi. So we need to recreate this world for our Indigenous farmers to come into it. 

We have a beautiful saying in our language—Me aro koe ki te ha o Hineahuone—Pay heed to the dignity of women. Not only was Hineahuone the first human to be formed in our creation stories, she is also the deity of our soil, so right now at this time, as Indigenous women we are calling out that it’s time to return to right relationships with our soils.

Part 2: Six values of hua parakore, Māori organics

Let’s start with a really foundational value, which is whakapapa, we understand it as genealogy, but really when we think about whakapapa, I think about the whakapapa, my genealogy of who I am as a farmer, on whose land do I stand. So although I’m Indigenous, my tribe is in the south island and I live in the north island. So I’m farming as a guest on somebody else’s tribal area, on The Ātiawa’s tribal area, although we own the land in private Western ownership. 

But it’s about having that understanding. And a lot of farmers don’t have that understanding, and a lot of organic farmers don’t even have that understanding, on whose Indigenous land are you standing. So whakapapa, what’s your genealogy; where are you standing? Then it’s also, too, about the whakapapa or the genealogy of the seed. Where does the seed come from? And then it’s also, too, about the whakapapa or the genealogy of the inputs. What’s going into your farming system? 

So these are things that we’d think about in organics anyway, but when you wrap it up and talk about that in our own cultural frameworks in terms of whakapapa, then our people understand it. It’s not something that’s, “oh, organics, that’s for white people; that’s not for me”. It’s like, no actually, that is for you; let’s talk about it in terms of this Indigenous value of whakapapa.

The next value is mauri. And it’s about vibration. And we use it as an environmental performance indicator. We understand the health of our waterways or the health of our forests in relation to this value of mauri. And mauri could be understood as vibration, as chi, as prana, as energy, as resonance. And so if we have a high resonance, then we’re going to have wellbeing. And if we have a low resonance, then we’re unwell and we need to do something to lift our vibration. Think of composting. You know, mauri rich, life-giving compost doesn’t smell anaerobic. We rub it between our fingers and it leaves a nice black color in between our fingers. 

And it’s about soil health. In Western terms you might understand it as, at harvest time, you would test vegetables and fruit around the Brix level, having high sugars or low sugars. So high sugars is high mauri. So there’s a correlation there. You know? We’re all talking about the same thing. 

Another value in our organic system is mana. We think about mana in our organic system as the health and safety and the wellbeing of the people who are on the farm as well. So it’s not just about the farm itself and the environment, but it’s also, too, about the people.

We describe ourselves as Indigenous people in New Zealand as tangata whenua. So tangata meaning “people ” and whenua meaning “land”. We’re people of the land. So you can’t separate us from the land. It’s how we know ourselves. 

Tribally, we describe ourselves as mana whenua, so mana, this value that I’ve just described, mana whenua is the people who have the authority over that tribal area. 

Another value in the Māori organic system is wairua, “two waters” may be one way to understand it. Spirit is another way to understand it. How can we bring spirit, how can we bring spirituality, how can we bring ceremony into our practices? One of the things we do on our farm is we have what we call pou atua – or it’s a post in the ground, but it’s a representation, a manifestation of our deity, of our atua. And so that brings spirit into our garden. We say prayer before we harvest. We say prayer before we turn compost. And these are not Christian prayers from the colonizer, these are prayers which reach into our godly landscapes, our earthly landscapes. 

Te Ao Tūroa, which is the natural world, is another value and another principle. And that’s about our interconnected Indigenous woven universe. And I love to think about that as a farmer is – from the microbes in the soil reaching all the way up to the starry realms. The microbes are just that reflection of what’s happening in the starry realms in the cosmos. So Te Ao Tūroa reminds us that everything is always interconnected. It really pushes quite hard against the reductionist, mechanistic way that Western agriculture—chemicals and pesticides—claim a falsity around like glyphosate, you know, saying well we’re only going to spray—It’s okay, it’s only going to kill this, this, and this, not this. In Te Ao Tūroa, everything is connected. 

And the last value, which I just adore, and as I’m getting older is really coming forth for me, is this value of Māramatanga, higher consciousness and awareness. And so when we grow food, as a Hua Parakore producer, as a Māori organic farmer, we describe it as growing what we call kai atua, kai being “food” and atua being “deity”. We’re growing it in the godly landscapes and the landscapes of our deity. We’re growing food in our godly landscapes, fit for us, as manifestations of our deity ourselves. And so when we do that, we’re actually eating and consuming at elevated consciousness.

So when we have all of those six values in operation at the same time, we produce what we describe as a Hua Parakore or a Māori organic product. So it’s much more than organics. And this is what our old people, our ancestors, this is what they were eating every day. This is what feeds culture. This is what feeds wellbeing. We are truly guests in the magic of the life of soil.