Aboriginal Ways of Knowing:
Saluting the Grandmother’s Peace Circles of the World
by Raymond Te korako Ruka
Waitaha do not ever forget that the greatness
of a Nation is held in the hands of both the male
and female, yet, in our general patters of thought and practice
we are a nation that follows the Grandmother teachings.
We follow the teaching of the Matriarchs.
Sisters and Brothers, prior to leaving my homeland of Aotearoa, New Zealand, and returning to my second home of America, a brother and I had sat with a group of about twenty Waitaha Grandmothers and their attendants. We had gathered at one of the grandmother’s isolated coastal beach retreats in the northwestern part of the North Island.
A call was made by the Matriarch of our Nation of Waitaha, for the Grandmothers to gather for a three-day retreat, to meet with my elder Brother Te Porohau and myself. My Brother Te Porohau is the last remaining Tohunga, or Wisdom Holder of Waitaha. Our late brother Mackie was the other. Porohau is also a Buddhist Monk with the Tendai Shu Buddhist Group.. Like myself, Porohau spends time in the world and two or three months of the summertime at home in New Zealand.
Myself. I am simply another servant of our Nation of People who wanders around extolling the virtues of its tenets of peaceful co-habitation. If I’m favored by the day, I get called to have a prayer for the Sacred Mother, as I was privileged to do at the water opening ceremony and if I wish upon a double rainbow, sometimes, I get granted precious time to spend with precious people. Elementary kids, high school kids, prison’s kids and best of all, us kids.
My son’s jealously guard the short time that I am able to spend in New Zealand with them and my grandchildren, but they acquiesce to the wishes of their beloved aunts and grandmothers because retreats such as these are time spent with their generation of students learning our customs and traditional protocols. The parts of the retreat I’ve always preferred however usually happen when that’s all done! When everyone’s been taken care of.
Then it’s my time.
Ideally it’s always, early morning, a rising swell with white caps on the surface of an outgoing ocean tide and a very small group of trusted old friends.
One of the founding beliefs of Waitaha is that Energy of Water is Feminine, so I quickly rid myself of the surfboard I’ve paddled out past the breakers on (otherwise it’s a hopeless task for me) and thankfully lose myself in the bliss of love. As a paraplegic, to be alone in the face of such incredible power. Time and space merge.
Contrary to what western science has determined, our ancestors unequivocally believe water holds a memory. All information is contained therein. From the earliest teachings handed down there are stories of those women and men, holding special qualities, who would ritually prepare themselves, then quietly go down to their streams, rivers, or waterways, immerse themselves and ask their questions.
The companionship of dolphin and the songs of seagull waken me. As promised, my friends have left me completely alone with the Mother. I soon realize the small inflatable is here to tow me home.
I know there must be an easier way to do this. But since I was a child this has been the way it has always been. Of course, the “incident” in 1985 and the resulting paraplegia hasn’t exactly helped improve the family anxiety levels, whenever I visit with the mother ocean. There must have been so much relief when the Grandmothers and Grandfathers realized Ohio was a landlocked State. Or maybe – that’s why they sent me here!
Beloved, there is a beautiful African proverb that says:
Until the Lions have historians of their own
The history of the hunt
Will always glorify the Hunter
I would like to speak to you as an authentic Waitaha Lion because for too long, we have remained silent while the hunter and others dressed up in the lion suits have spoken for us. Some we have trusted and had that trust breached and others have come to our Waitaha Schools of learning in New Zealand for a time, under the guise of friendship and gone out into the world offering themselves to be learned in the various Waitaha spiritual fields for profit or for some self-appointed role. And even to those who have chosen different trails, we maintain and extend our codes of love, friendship, and respect.
Metaphorically speaking, Waitaha’s messengers in the world are “spiderlings” and are forever attached to, Te Taurahere o Pungawerere, the silken thread of Spider that stretches back to the Grandmothers and Grandfathers.
Authentic Waitaha will never come among you, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters professing otherwise. For among you sit the generation of my own venerated teachers. Mystics, shaman, healers, and wisdom holders yourselves. We would never dare to step across those understandings.
So what about Aboriginal Ways of Knowing.
Let me begin with Sacred Ceremonies. In the grandest temple, the most humble home. In the most affluent societies, in a darkened alleyway, off of that same society, a candle and a prayer burns for a consciousness of its participants. Sacred Ceremonies raises the consciousness.
Sacred Ceremonies, my teachings tell me, are a means to awaken and raise the consciousness of its participants. Sacred ceremonies are a meaningful way of ushering in Peace to our World.
Beloved, Waitaha with the permission of its grandmother and grandfather councils have begun the process of releasing a lot of their sacred information as a way of connecting with their more distant relations.
In 1996 it began with the release of the Book, Song of Waitaha, Histories of a Nation, The Grandfather Stories and that was followed in 2006 by: Whispers of Waitaha, Traditions of a Nation, The Grandmother Stories.
The Inner World of the Ancestors.
Our ancestors were a people who loved the challenges of life and molded it around the natural world of their Gods and Goddesses. They had many named essential elemental beings, all being subject to the command of the Co-Creators of the Universe.
Those ancients understood the very foundation of the sciences of the atomic structures of the Natural World. To them, those structures were all understood and considered with deliberate thought and faith.
The basic forms of the single cell structures were called Korowini and Korowana. Thus the single cell containing all of the substance of the animal, mineral, vegetable cell was called Korowini and the nucleus was the Korowana. The word form of wini and wana being the sum total of the single cell structure which made good sense to our wisdom holders.
Diagram to show single cell structure as understood by our Ancient Elder Teachers and Grandparents.
Korowini
Korowana
In this understanding and pattern a boiled egg would constitute a wonderful example of their simple understanding to which my grandpa Pere often made reference to test the memory of the structure.
The word wini being body or form, and the word wana being the core control to the body form. The word form Koro denoting of the Gods, of the Creation, being both
Matua and Kunenga, where the creative forms of the single cell have the tika or right to help regenerate or to create.
This basic format of belief for our ancestors according to our Grandfathers and Grandmothers led to the thesis of multi-cellular creativity. And the firm belief in ensuring that our lines of Genealogy were looked after with strict care and attention.
All of these considerations were taken care of in the Wananga of the Rainbow which was the combination of the Grandmother and Grandfather Wananga.
Wananga were our higher schools of learning. Similar to the western University levels.
~
THE SYSTEMS CALLED TE WHAKAPONO (BELIEF)
In the great gifting of the Ritenga (Rights) and Tikanga (Lore), our ancestors made us aware of the common denominator between species, between animal, mineral, and vegetable when they added the spiritual, the cosmic, the infinite mind song of the Gods and Goddesses.
They believed with all their hearts, minds, and spirit that we were all bound with one covenant and that was, YEARNING OF IO I TE KUNENGA AND IO MATUA KORE. To rejoice in life and to enable and empower everything and everyone to live to the fullness of their life pattern, without any threat of destruction or deprivation of their needs.
According to our Grandfather, Wiremu we knew of copper, brass, tin, steel, and other supposed modern things and that our ancestors had voluntarily given away the practice of the materials because of the stress on our Grandmother Earth.
They also knew of the huge quantum of mindless killing attributed to this knowledge form; so they went back into nature to survive in the Southern Pacific.
It became a world of natural dependency and cultural and traditional richness for them, and their yearning and a hope that we would follow them by applying these fundamental practices to ensure safety for the universe around us.
~
Now let us go into the discussions of the finite structures that our people contemplated and worked out to keep a sense of the greater world of our Creators.
They surmised that when we as composite thinkers have a boundary to think within we become stuck in a rut, so they perfected the language base so that we could drift in and out of the known boundaries of other traditions and beliefs so that we can see the commonalities and structures that have come and gone in the histories and mysteries of human development.
OUR language inside of the realm of the spirit and gods, begin with these words:
* KA meaning the unseen power
* KE meaning the known power
* KI meaning the essence of life
* KO meaning the great infinite (space and time)
* KU meaning the next plane, known as transformation
The KA factor to our Ancient teachers was the spark of life, known yet not able to be seen. Known because of the life force that surrounds and inhabits the individual, animal, vegetable, mineral, or spirit.
The KE factor was the force and the physical power that we witness in motion, noise, etc., that relates to the very world we live in, we accept these forms and forces yet no longer have to categorize them for our own individual knowing, because we’re accustomed to the noise of thunder, the power of lightening and the rest of the present forms of power around us.
The Ki factor is the essential things that we need to sustain our life here on this plane. We have inside us, an essence that we cannot see, yet if we have the arts of concentration and gentle thinking in meditation we are able to bring this essence into our lives to make our experiences within ourselves to reach into the very god and goddess force and give us healing and strength to achieve miraculous deeds. This is where your multicolored Songbird dwells.
The Ko factor is our Ancient Teachers knowledge of infinite time and space that we can relate to inside the wonder of finite belief and increased personal experience inside and outside of ourselves. This very factor enabled our Ancient ones to create miracles like mapping the world, creating known and now no longer known great cities, and engineering works that we can only dream of. The Pyramids, Machu Picchu, and Waitangi ki Roto of Easter Island, Stonehenge are some examples.
The Ku factor is the continuum of our life and death cycle. We are created within the very simple cells our Fathers and our Mothers union of single cell progenesis, that sets the pattern of the Moko (pattern) Puna (pool, spring), that continues in the great spiral of genetics.
As an example of the Ku, the keeper of the Jade Doors to the Underworld or to Hinenuitepo, he was known as Te Ku Wata Wata. He is understood to send people back who are not on his list for this time, sometimes leaving their memories of the visit and hence the memories shared of after death experiences.
These simple word forms are some of the mysteries and histories that we belong to and that belong to us as the descendants of the Great joining of our Ancestors with the Ancient Elder Teachers or Gods and Goddess’ that came to our earth and join us to them and in this joining we became the great eternal spring of the pattern and the pool, the grandchildren, the children of the Huma, and the Atua Ariki.
I invite you to follow this reading by including The Great Rainbow Reflection.