Hearing grass, thinking grass: Post Colonialism and Ecology in Aotearoa - New Zealand By Michèle D. Dominy

Definitely something to ponder on whilst at Shapeshifter this weekend.

A passage from Monday's Warriors by Maurice Shadbolt

Titokowaru tries to teach Booth how little, how differently, and how deliberately he chooses to perceive:

Booth put on a patient expression. Silence grew around them. Birds fluted and chimed overhead.

‘ You hear?’ Titoko asked. ‘ You hear the bird in the tree?’

‘ Just so,’ Booth agreed.

‘ Listen longer,’ Titoko asked. ‘ What do you hear now?’

Booth was brief ly si lent. ‘The same,’ he confessed.

‘ Not the tree in the bird?’

‘ It fai ls to make itself apparent,’ Booth said, rather baffled.

‘ That is your problem, Mr. Booth. You hear us as but the bird in the tree. You are deaf to the

tree in the bird.’ (43)

Titokowaru’s nature is a concept, a cultural relationship, and not a fact. The ‘ tree in the bird’ speaks more to achieving a bodily and social knowledge of the world that derives from physicalexperience; it is a form of empirical knowl edge. Titokowaru’ s understanding of the tree in the bird evokes the ki nd of understanding that Roderick Neumann characterizes as that of a practical, rather than an aesthetic, engagement with l andscape, where the insider travels in landscape rather than through landscape. Booth’s surveyors travel through it . Titokowaru and his Demon travel in it.

Dedication to the tree.