Befriending our wild disagreements

 

Live the questions now. Perhaps you then may gradually,
without noticing, one day in the future, live into the answers. 

— Rainer Maria Rilke.

‘We’re doing really good, actually’

Late last year, our family hosted our annual garden party to celebrate another year of life, another year of community. We put on some food and drinks and had a bit of an open mic. Friends and neighbours shared taonga pūoro, poems and pūrākau, songs, dances and tricks with an eager crowd in our suburban backyard. It was a beautiful day filled with lashings of gratitude and silliness.

And it was at this frivolous party, that I had a conversation with a neighbour that has stuck to the sides of my rib cage ever since.

He’d arrived with his wife, a bit later than most, dressed in chinos, a crisp shirt and a jumper laid over his shoulders. As the sun was going down, he bowled over, stood close and asked me if I knew the exact number of parliamentary laws in which Māori get special rights.

It was a hell of a way to start a conversation, and it floored me. I stammered and stuttered that I didn’t know any numbers associated with any laws off the top of my head, before asking him what he was alluding to.

As he began talking about the divisiveness of the Treaty, I wondered to myself if the “Together for Te Tiriti” sign we had at the front gate had whipped up his fervour. I decided it probably had.

But as he continued to speak animatedly about unfairness and his experience of growing up in New Zealand, I realised this was a chance to really listen, and perhaps get some sense of clarity around what someone at the opposite end of the political spectrum was feeling.

So I listened just as hard as I could. All ears. I held my tongue as he said many things I disagreed with. I listened and listened. And I began to notice a huge chasm of disagreement growing between our feet.

He stopped talking and asked me what I thought. I didn’t want to pretend that we were aligned, that the yawning chasm didn’t exist. But I also had no hankering for an argument with him. I just didn’t. So I stiltedly offered something like:

“I want you to know, before I respond with how I feel about Te Tiriti, that we see the same issue differently. And that’s okay.”

His shoulders dropped a little, his tension easing. I carried on.

“You are a whole person, informed by your life, and I am a whole person, informed by my life. And here in the middle is how we feel about Te Tiriti. And we feel differently about what it is and what it could be. I would love to tell you what I think, but please know that I don’t expect this to change how you feel.”

“Thank you,” he said. I could see his entire body soften. And I will never forget his next words.

“I get so tired of people trying to tell me how I should feel.”

We began talking again, this time much more easily. We went from standing face to face to sitting down, side by side, on the couch on the deck. I spoke from my heart, undoubtedly with my eyes alight, about how I get excited by a future Aotearoa where tangata whenua are honoured, where we might be able to demonstrate to the world an ethic of restoration. That enacting Te Tiriti isn’t a burden or a folly — but a commitment and a portal to a beautiful future. If we could just find collective courage.

And as we took turns listening to each other, we found a few things in common.

We both have a deep abiding love for being able to call this place home.

We both yearn for a clean, thriving, biodiverse taiao.

We both hope for a future for our grandchildren.

At one point, his wife came over, perhaps to check that there wasn’t a storm brewing.

“We’re doing really good, actually,” he said, perhaps surprised.

The chasm between our feet had all but disappeared.

James Baldwin wrote: “We can disagree and still love each other, unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression.”

So I write this story, predominantly to and for Pākehā. Regardless of our political persuasion, it’s our duty and responsibility to have these conversations with our people. As Tina Ngata so clearly wrote in a blog I have returned to countless times: “There is an important space for Tangata Tiriti right now, and it’s not teaching Māori — it’s working with each other on how to reckon with the historical injustice of their establishment, and what to do about that, now.”

I don’t kid myself that through that one conversation his feelings about Te Tiriti changed. I know my politics surely didn’t. But I do know that I softened towards “people like him” a great deal, and I hope he softened, just a little, to “woke folx” like me. In that space in which our bodies could relax, we both had a chance to truly listen to each other. In not ostracising each other, we came a little closer to calling each other home.

And I’m beginning to notice how much this all matters.

Webbed companions in this thing called life

“We are a lot more porous than our stated or unstated convictions, a lot more compromised than what we say we believe.” — The lines that whisper us, by Dr Bayo Akomolafe.

One of the features of our current systems is the adversarial nature of opposition. Debates, submissions, protests, declarations, hot takes and clickbait are all fundamentally designed for participating in a democracy that centres binary rivalries. It’s “us” versus “them”. Left versus right.

But when I listen to te taiao and notice the flow states of ecology, it becomes so abundantly clear to me that truly life-giving systems are not constructed with opposition at the centre.

Each part of the forest garden that I’m looking out at now — a late summer eddy of kōwhai, passionfruit, karaka, mandarin, banana, kawakawa, lemon, tī kouka, gooseberry and ginger — are individual parts of a whole. They are reliant on each other and the unseen biome that exists above and below.

They are in no way individual or self-sufficient. They are collaborative and contribute to each other’s health. They don’t police each other’s shape or state or bloom. They are abundantly disobedient. A verdant wellbeing comes from the conditions within which they grow.

When I use this analogy for understanding Pākehā-ness, it allows for some softness, some curiosity. The questions that arise in me become less focused on the individual “plant” and what I might think is wrong with their form.

Instead, I wonder what the conditions were to grow some of us into such misshapen human trees that we might not care for the collective or the rights of others. The same depleted conditions that grew our leaders, grew us all.

So pretending that we are in any way separate from those we disagree with only reflects the hyper-individual worldview that is truly part of the problem. As David Dean, a political writer in America so powerfully states, in Roots deeper than Whiteness,

“We are people — or, more accurately, peoples — whose identity and cultural center has been manipulated to serve a very specific function within capitalism. When we understand this story, we can more easily divest ourselves of the dysfunctional role we have been manipulated to play, and join with people of color in the creation of a life-sustaining society.”

There was a time, before I had turned to deep ecology, and the wisdom of those that hold indigeneity, where I would have responded differently to that man on that night.

I would have decided early on and unilaterally, that we were binary opposites. I would have heard him as the voice of conquest and assumed he had an unwavering commitment to growth, efficiency, individual achievement and acquisition.

And while all of that could indeed be true, I would have wanted to convince him that his ideas were certainly wrong, and that mine were certainly right. I would have thought finding common ground was somewhat abhorrent.

Of course, in doing all of this, I would have been insufferable company. I also would have entrenched our division. I would have used the patterns of oppression that exist in our shared cultural soil, to cement our differences.

Right now, in Aotearoa and globally, we’re seeing alarmingly destructive repetitions of this pattern. I fervently wish for new ways to move that don’t involve binary positions or an either-or mentality. Slowly, I’m experimenting with this more diagonal, awkward work.

Perhaps we don’t all need to stand in opposition.

Perhaps there are ways to try and befriend our wild disagreements.

Maybe we can come to a place where we softly realise that we’re not here, in this moment or on this land, in any way on our own.

It’s easy, in these violent days of oligarchs and kleptocrats, algorithms and shadow lobbyists, to think that tending to ourselves and each other with radical love is somehow too soft.

But don’t be fooled. A love ethic is an orientation informed by a long, robust legacy. Indigenous knowledge the world over remind us of what love looks like in practice:  reverence, connection, community, collaboration and solidarity.

We’ve become so accustomed to systems, policies and practices that are devoid of love that we now no longer expect to find it. But this absence of love for the collective is the anomaly, not the other way around.

For me, tending to Te Tiriti justice is just a part of this larger story of planetary healing. Because like the garden, we too are nature in a system. We too are in ecology. As Rebecca Sinclair, co-lead of The Pākehā Project, so eloquently states: “We are each other’s habitat.”

Finding home 

In February, as part of The Tīpuna Project, we held a gathering at Kōtare, north of Auckland, for Pākehā committed to ancestral sensing as part of the decolonial journey towards Matike Mai.

We called on those now gone. Shared piecemeal practices and yearnings. Laughed heartily. Made art. Cried with each other. Listened to stories around flames. Ate with gusto. Grappled with political realities. Breathed deep breaths. Sat with enduring colonial violence. Sang tunes and danced some dances, known and unknown. Cared for each other and our children. We felt the steadiness of being in a collective, held by many pairs of safe hands. We stood in the integrity of our unknowing. We hugged deeply as we said farewell.

I drove away noticing the beauty in this mess. And I wondered why we don’t sing so much anymore, why we don’t dance so much anymore.

Last week, our family travelled to the finals of Te Matatini o Te Kāhui Maunga in Taranaki. I could feel the spiral of time as we walked into Pukekura Park, knowing that, 180 years ago, William Spain, as Land Claims Commissioner, had taken this land unjustly from mana whenua. The sun shone down on a sold-out crowd, here to celebrate and witness permanent, enduring Māoritanga. There was perhaps some temporary reconciliation, in knowing that past and then looking at this now.

We retreated to the shade early on and watched from under some colonial pines in the park. Despite everything my people have tried, and continue to try to do, to undermine what it is to be Māori, it was clear at Te Matatini that what it is to be Māori is potent and alive and enduring. Story and history and politics were stridently told through whakaeke, poi, waiata-ā-ringa, haka and whakawātea.

Kereama Wright, one of the kaihaka for Ngāti Whakaue, told the Rotorua Daily Post that the key message they wanted to deliver through their winning Matatini performance on stage was poua te aroha: to give love.

The proximity of these two experiences illuminated even further the work that we Pākehā must do. Not just so that tino rangatiratanga can be practised by hapū and iwi, but so that, as Pākehā, we might learn a little more about what it is to be truly at home, to be loving humans in our bodies in relation to each other and to this land that we stand on.

Growing from here 

If I imagine what it is to be growing as Pākehā “trees” at the moment, we clearly need some tending. We are on unfamiliar land, full of imperfections and amnesias, untended, but somehow still committed to life.

Perhaps old branches, that used to serve us, have passed their best. They are still fruiting, but more of us can see that the harvest is small and shrivelled. At the centre, though, is verdant new leaf growth trying to come through. There are tangata Tiriti activists emerging almost everywhere I look. Perhaps you are one yourself. Bright. Optimistic. Fresh.

I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but maybe it’s this very uncertainty that can liberate us. I am trying to listen to the wild thoughts within me, that are in you too.

No matter what happens, being committed to love will be worth it.

 

Sarah Alice Hopkinson is a māmā, an education consultant, urban farmer and advocate of Te Tiriti. Alongside her work, Sarah farms regeneratively at The Green Garden, a suburban farm on Te Ātiawa ki Kāpiti land, growing nutrient-dense food for her family and community, is in her final year of her Hua Parakore certificationand is a co-researcher in the participatory action research project, The Tipuna Project.

www.sarahalicehopkinson.com

www.instagram.com/thegreengardennz/

If you’d like to join Moko Morris, Rebecca Sinclair and Sarah Hopkinson in a co-facilitated day-long workshop exploring emergent strategy in Aotearoa through mātauranga Māori, microbiology and deep systems thinking, go to their Humanatix page, https://events.humanitix.com/love-and-compost-wayfaring-from-the-more-than-human-world

E-Tangata, 2025