ABSTRACT
This chapter considers human–whale encounters in the Anthropocene era and how they might be framed within a posthuman or more-than-human ontology before making the case for a more thorough indigenising of the Anthropocene. Attention to animism as an organising principle is echoed in Bronislaw Szerszynski's assertion of the need to expand Anthropocene imaginaries to include the ‘multiple narratives of indigenous and colonized peoples’. To address the challenge of a Maori articulation of holism, the chapter aims to consider the forests of Aotearoa New Zealand and the plight of the kari tree, following the anthropogenic spread of a deadly pathogen. A Maori approach to kauri dieback therefore exemplifies calls in posthuman and multi-species scholarship for modes of attention capable of recognising multiple networks and entanglements. The chapter argues that in approaching specific and situated applications of Indigenous ontologies in some of its grounded everyday complexity, there is the potential to open up psychology to a more radical and ethical biocentric relationality.
