Indigenous
Peoples Specialty Group Selected Sponsored sessions, |
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Chris Castagna, University of Hawai‘i "Separating Nature from the Maori Cultural Landscape: An Analysis of Texts Dealing with Urewera National Park, New Zealand" Throughout the world, there are many struggles over resource definition and use; the Urewera National Forest within the North Island of New Zealand is a site of such contestation. Issues regarding National Park lands are usually framed in terms of commercial exploitation versus preservation, often to the exclusion of cultural connections to the land: indigenous people and their culture are separated from Nature. This paper will examine selected texts that deal with Urewera National Park to address the ongoing debate of whether the dichotomization of nature and culture is one of the lasting influences of the colonization process. I argue that environmental rhetoric and land management plans reflect colonial ways of thinking about nature as separate from culture and that by doing so, they continue to ignore the ways that native peoples see themselves in Nature. email: castagna (at) hawaii.edu
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