How Indigenous Legends Are Less Superstitious And Less Mythological Than Most Realise

A Māori materialist analysis on indigenous legends and how they can help the left.

One of the biggest misconceptions about indigenous thought is that it is mostly superstitious and misguided, however it is arguably more aligned with material reality than most realise.

Western individualism insists on a strict boundary between self and environment. In contrast indigenous culture often operates from the principle that the self is an extension of the environment and vice versa. Māori and other indigenous knowledge systems are deeply materialist because they reject metaphysical dualisms and place humans within, not above, or separate from, the material world.

At the heart of Māori culture is whakapapa, which is not merely a genealogy of people but a relational structure that connects all things: land, water, animals, plants, stars, wind, even concepts like warmth and absence.

Whakapapa is a materialist framework because it does not rely on metaphysical separation but instead describes the relationships and transformations between different expressions of matter and energy.

Within western individualism reality is divided separate categories such as human versus nature, this is not a materialist view but an idealist one, because it assumes these divisions exist inherently rather than being constructs imposed upon an undivided material world.

In reality there is no discrete line where human ends and nature begins, we are simply an expression of the same planetary matter that forms rivers mountains trees and bacteria.

To believe that humans exist outside of nature is itself a superstition, a purely metaphysical belief with no empirical basis.

This superstition underpins capitalism colonialism and extractivism, allowing humans to treat the land as an object rather than a relation, yet every material fact contradicts this belief:

Breath:

Every inhale and exhale exchanges air with trees wind and the ocean there is no clear boundary where your air ends and the world's air begins.

You are indistinguishable from the atmosphere.

Food:

The molecules in your body are constantly being replaced by material from plants animals fungi and minerals every part of you was once the land and every part of you will return to it.

You are indistinguishable from the soil.

Water:

Your blood is over 80% water, drawn from rainfall rivers lakes and aquifers, the same water that flows through your veins flows through the Earth.

You are indistinguishable from the hydrosphere.

Carbon and minerals:

The elements that form your body carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus are the same elements that make up the stars, the oceans, the forests, and the rocks.

You are indistinguishable from the cosmos.

For us Māori to say “Kō au te awa kō te awa kō au” which means: “I am the river and the river is me” is not a metaphor, it is a material statement of fact. You are the river in the same way a wave as the ocean, an emergent expression of a larger continuous body of matter.

A good example of this is the story of Māui fishing up the North Island.

Te Ika-a-Māui, which means the fish of Māui is a recognition of material continuity.

If humans are the land writ small (inseparable from it) and land is humans writ large (our broader ecological body) then a fish too is just the land in another form.

The North island of Aotearoa New Zealand being called a fish is an apt description of its material reality.

It emerges from the ocean, is shaped by geological forces just as a fish does, this relational ontology contrasts sharply with western thought, where naming and categorisation often create artificial divisions between things.

In contrast, Māori culture does not see a contradiction in saying that an island is a fish because both are expressions of the same material substance. The story functions as a form of deep ecological knowledge, embedding geological and marine processes within an accessible narrative structure.

This is what the left need to adapt into their own theory and analysis, to understand that science - including scientific socialism - does not have to be crude and allergic to poetic expression, narrative abstraction, or personification, but rather to embrace these poetic descriptions of the material world.

After all, if we understand Papatūānuku (Earth Mother) is proletariat like us and simultaneously a means of production, because she is formed into a factory or tool, made to work under exploitative conditions and the surplus labour she creates is used to generate profit for capitalists, then we understand that earth liberation can only come from socialism, and likewise, socialism can only come alongside land autonomy.

This helps bridge the gap between socialists and well meaning environmentalists who still sadly view green capitalism as a viable option to stop environmental destruction, because if these environmentalists understand themselves as an extension of the Earth, and then they understand the Earth is an exploited worker then they will be more likely to come to the conclusion that socialism would be the only path to liberation, both for the land itself, and her children (us).