Tohunga

I've known them since they were a five-year-old who was told on her first day that she couldn't play because she wasn't the right colour.

But the other kids didn't know that she was actually a witch, a direct descendant of Tohunga and had transformative powers.

And in that instance, their hex became a spell, and it changed her into an immortal thing, a jaw, a whale, a knot made from her grandmother's hair.

And in that moment, she realized that life was not going to be fair, but it could be ferocious and forming if she surrendered herself to the brown crying clay.

And then three years later, you have James Cook, Captain James Cook, who turns up on the east coast of New Zealand.

And then with him, he brings Tupaiya, who's another Tohunga from the Pacific.

And then it just ushers in the, not the first, but the major intersection between the Western world and the Maori world.

Wow.

That's sort of the more, uh, larger system at play, and I just wanna recognize that there are many indigenous and ancient cultures whose traditions have been able to keep kept alive, but then there's also so many that have been lost.

An example here is in Aotearoa, you know, with Maori being so connected to the land and the spiritual realm, um, knowing that we've got 8 to 12 NZ native species that are psychedelic, yet there is no really recorded history on how Tonga used, um, th- this medicine.

But it would be pretty silly to then, then make the assumption that they didn't know.

Um, when many Tohunga practices were kept secret, the, the Tohunga, the spiritual guides themselves, their identities were kept secret, and with the Tohunga Suppression Act, of course no one was gonna be talking about the power of these medicines.

So I really love that right now there's a revival within, um, Rongo- um, within Ma- uh, Rongoa of, okay, well based off of what we know of the Maori worldview, what would we do today with these really sacred, um, medicines? And I think we all have that potential of remembering, how would we work with this medicine? Um, guess the second layer when I think about trauma and plant medicine specifically around psychedelics is that there's a lot of research right now around, um, how psychedelics are basically treating everything.

Everything from, um, you know, really high-risk individuals of, uh, treatment-resistant depression, end of life care, um, anxiety, um, to, you know, sort of every day mood enhancement, a little bit of focus, a little bit of creativity, um, to somewhere in between.