ABSTRACT
Māori whakapapa is an oral transmission of genealogical lines of descent in humans, animals, and plants in a densely layered cosmogony. Whakapapa offers up a radical expansion of “the human” to include our larger kinship group: the lizards, birds, and ferns; the rivers, mists, and mountains. Māori environmental scientist Mere Roberts and colleagues describe the telling of whakapapa as:
typically beginning with the origin of the universe and the primal parents, then continuing to trace the descent of living and nonliving, material and immaterial phenomena, including humans.
