Indigenous consultation: nice to do or important?
Cultural competency takes work. Knowing this is half of the process.
There is a fine line between appreciating a culture, and appropriating it for your enjoyment.
Not consulting indigenous people around use of their culture, is a recipe for discontent.
People often talk about colonisation in a past sense, as in “this is what happened when settlers arrived and we can’t change history so lets move on”. But colonisation is also the process of ongoing dispossession. And every instance of this, every repetition, adds to historic pain.
When you understand this, it becomes easier to understand what cultural appropriation is and why we need to take care not to cross that line.
Keeping an indigenous language alive by committing to learn and using it, is a beautiful thing to do.
Taking that language for your own use, to profit by, is another act of dispossession.
The likely hurt caused by this, can be avoided by taking the steps of consulting with indigenous people at the beginning of the thought process.
Unsure where to start?
This is a highly nuanced subject and variable depending on the culture and content we’re talking about. If you’re someone that wants to incorporate aspects of another culture into your business, then ask yourself why. Why am I doing this and who will benefit from it?
If you don’t have whakapapa (lineage) to that culture then you have no right to profit from incorporating it in your business – that’s particularly true of selling products or services that are based upon any part of this culture.
If your intent is to honour the culture, then there are right ways to go about this and it may not be what you think. Seek guidance.
In Aotearoa, the best place is with those in your rohe – mana whenua. The people of the land that speak on behalf of others in their region. If you can’t locate details for who Mana Whenua are (pro tip – use an online search engine), then your next steps can be Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori – Māori Language Commission, or Te Mātāwai
