Tiki Territory

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I took this photo while traveling through New Zealand a few years ago. That was such a lovely trip. I had rented an old Japanese car with about 300,000 KM on it and all the announcement and display markers were in Japanese, but it ran perfectly. I drove it all across the North and South Island, stopping at places to sit and reflect, organize (and still now learn to let go) my thoughts, and just reflect on the beauty of the plants and the glacial lakes. I saw this Tiki in the Botanical Garden in Auckland and you have to look really closely to even find it, as it blends so perfectly in to the environs.  

The thing about tikis is that the local Maori Islanders believed they protected the land. They, like many indigenous cultures I have visited in my travels, did not have a concept of property. Agrarian cultures do and that concept of property even included humans. The Declaration of Independence in its first drafts did not read "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" but rather "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property" which of course at that time included slaves. 

At that time I had a local native guide traveling with me and, looking at the Tiki, he told me that when the British showed up on the island they partitioned the land to what was to be the locals and what was now theirs. The locals, not understanding the concepts of territory and property, could not see why having a Tiki to guard the land for one and all would be such an issue. Well, the newcomers, in whom these ideas had been engrained for generations, did and killed many of the locals over the placement of Tikis on their newly claimed land. Such has been the history of mankind. "Property" is only an idea, and it, like all ideas, has only the values we reify it with. But then ideas take on lives of their own, and become truths, and then the basis of our modern societal system of laws and finance. Land is property, obviously, but then so also are ideas themselves, and hence we have patents. I'm not against ideas or property, but sometimes we can take them a little less personally. 

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