Aotearoa New Zealand sees red - and blue and gold

NO USE FEELING BLUE ABOUT DARK-EYED, LIGHT-EYED MINGLINGS

Having written up my previous post about red-hair it seems appropriate to add a footnote on blue eyes and blondness. This is easily done by drawing on Steve Connor’s article of 31st January 2008 (UK Independent).

And the issue has a unique resonance in New Zealand where the blond and blue-eyed offspring of families that identify as Maori are known to sometimes face prejudice from within. In response, there is an online ‘Facebook’ site ‘Pale Maori Unite’ that offers peer support at: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=wall& 650174871.

A couple of illustrative entries are given below:

1. "Aww my mate's beautiful kiritea girl got told she didn't look Maori at her kura (school) the other day by some mean kids..that sucks..."

2. "My daughter is half Maori - her dad is darker than his brother and sister and he has brother who had a son who is half Pakeha and he turned out brown - so I thought my baby was going to be brown but she turned out as white as me, with hazel eyes and blondey hair but she has her dad's features (Maori nose,shape of her eyes). It is annoying though..."

So what’s the history?

Everyone with blue eyes alive today – from Angelina Jolie to Wayne Rooney – can trace their ancestry back to one person who probably lived about 10,000 years ago in the Black Sea region, a study has found. This makes it roughly contemporary with – and possibly directly linked to - the development of blond / blonde hair.

Scientists studying the genetics of eye colour have discovered that more than 99.5 per cent of blue-eyed people who volunteered to have their DNA analysed have the same tiny mutation in the gene that determines the colour of the iris.

This indicates that the mutation originated in just one person who became the ancestor of all subsequent people in the world with blue eyes, according to a study by Professor Hans Eiberg and colleagues at the University of Copenhagen.

The scientists are not sure when the mutation occurred but other evidence suggested it probably arose about 10,000 years ago when there was a rapid expansion of the human population in Europe as a result of the spread of agriculture from the Middle East.

"The mutations responsible for blue eye colour most likely originate from the north-west part of the Black Sea region, where the great agricultural migration of the northern part of Europe took place in the Neolithic periods about 6,000 to 10,000 years ago," the researchers report in the journal Human Genetics.

Professor Eiberg said that brown is the "default" colour for human eyes which results from a build-up of the dark skin pigment, melanin. However, in northern Europe a mutation arose in a gene known as OCA2 that disrupted melanin production in the iris and caused the eye colour to become blue.

"Originally, we all had brown eyes," said Professor Eiberg. "But a genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a 'switch' which literally turned off the ability to produce brown eyes."

Variations in the colour of people's eyes can be explained by the amount of melanin in the iris, but blue-eyed individuals only have a small degree of variation in the amount of melanin in their eyes, he said.

"From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor. They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA," said Professor Eiberg.

Men and women with blue eyes have almost exactly the same genetic sequence in the part of the DNA responsible for eye colour. However, brown-eyed people, by contrast, have a considerable amount of individual variation in that area of DNA.

Professor Eiberg said he has analysed the DNA of about 800 people with blue eyes, ranging from fair-skinned, blond-haired Scandinavians to dark-skinned, blue-eyed people living in Turkey and Jordan.

"All of them, apart from possibly one exception, had exactly the same DNA sequence in the region of the OCA2 gene. This to me indicates very strongly that there must have been a single, common ancestor of all these people," he said.

It is not known why blue eyes spread among the population of northern Europe and southern Russia. Explanations include the suggestions that the blue eye colour either offered some advantage in the long hours of daylight in the summer, or short hours of daylight in winter, or that the trait was deemed attractive and therefore advantageous in terms of sexual selection.

As many Northern European children also have blond hair which darkens as they mature, blonde hair in girls may have become identified with youth and fertility. Its scarcity may have also bid up its social value, as may its early associations with light and gold.

In New Zealand, the admixture of Maori and Pakeha (predominantly western European) genes has created some unusual and exciting mixtures, which include people with European features and strongly tanned freckles and blue-eyed blond(e)s with Maori features.

You can check the wide variations out at: http://www.votemenot.co.nz/thread/581681/my-lil-maori-girl/

As the inclusive Maori poetess Patricia Grace has it, it is no bad thing:-

“The wail, the lament shall not have my ear. I will pay the lonely body ache no mind. Thus I go.

I stand before my dark-eyed mother, blue-eyed father, brothers and sisters, my aunts and uncles and their children and these old ones - all the dark-eyed, light-eyed minglings of this place.

We gather. We sing and dance together for my going. We laugh and cry. We touch. We mingle tears as blood”.

Matariki - Tapu te Ranga

MAORI NEW YEAR - THE SEVEN SISTERS RISE OVER ISLAND BAY

Our birth-folk
Sky and earth
Together and apart
Grief and yearning
Heaving and strain.

Their children
The woodlands
And the seas
The winds and waves
The food stores
War and stillness.

Though the young struggle
With storms and snares,
The dark and emptiness
Are overcome by light and growth
And the sky is clothed in stars.

Get ready for the westerly
Stand fast for the southerly
It will be icy white inland
And icy cold on the shore.

May the dawn rise
Red-tipped
On snow, on frost

The breath of life!

Hearts Ease and Solastalgia

TANGATA WHENUA - THE LAND WHERE THE AFTERBIRTHS ARE BURIED

As I mentioned in my previous posting, the issue of motive in the pursuit of Family History raises another issue which touches on my commitment as an immigrant to New Zealand.

The relevant Wikipedia entry notes that the question of social identity lies at the core of identifying as Maori - the original and founding inhabitants.

While ‘European’ New Zealanders often mock the appearance of blond, blue-eyed children in Maori ceremonies and dance troupes (and the receipt of government compensation by like-complexioned adults) Maori are adamant that it is not the way you look that determines your affinity – it is your genealogy or ‘whakapapa’.

It follows that:

‘Family history needs little justification in such communitarian societies, where one's identity is defined as much by one's kin network as by individual achievement, and the question "Who are you?" would be answered by a description of father, mother, and tribe.

The recitation of whakapapa is a critical element in establishing identity - and the phrase 'Ko [enter name] au' (I am [enter name]') is in fact the personal statement that incorporates (by implication) over 25 generations of heritage.

Experts in whakapapa are able to trace and recite a lineage not only through the many generations in a linear sense, but also between such generations in a lateral sense.

Many physiological terms are also genealogical in 'nature'. For example the terms 'iwi', 'hapu', and 'whanau' (as noted above) can also be translated in order as 'bones', 'pregnant', and 'give birth'.

The prize winning Māori author, Keri Hulme, named her best known novel as The Bone People: a title linked directly to the dual meaning of the word 'iwi as both 'bone' and '[tribal] people'.

Most formal orations (or whaikorero) begin with the "nasal" expression - Tihei Mauriora! This is translated as the 'Sneeze of Life'. In effect, the orator (whose 'sneeze' reminds us of a newborn clearing his or her airways to take the first breath of life) is announcing that 'his' speech has now begun, and that his 'airways' are clear enough to give a suitable oration.

Hence, whakapapa also implies a deep connection to land and the roots of one’s ancestry. In order to trace one’s whakapapa, it is essential to identify the location where one’s ancestral heritage began, until "you can’t trace it back any further."

In this way "Whakapapa links all people back to the land and sea and sky and outer universe, therefore, the obligations of whanaungatanga extend to the physical world and all being in it."

Correspondingly, the Maori words for the lands of the people of this locality, ‘tangata whenua’, celebrate the fact that the afterbirth or placentas (whenua) of the children of the tribe are buried there – that is there is a complete identity between land and people.

IS THEIR AN ECOLOGICAL UNCONSCIOUS?

This raises the issue of what we can learn from Maori in respect of the seamlessness and continuity of people and landscape – an issue that bears on an emerging preoccupation with ‘solastalgia’.

Drawing on Daniel B. Smith’s article in the New York Times of January 27, 2010:

The term solastagia was coined nearly a decade ago by Canadian psychologist Glenn Albrecht who notes that “People have heart’s ease when they’re on their own country. If you force them off that country, if you take them away from their land, they feel the loss of heart’s ease as a kind of vertigo, a disintegration of their whole life.”

Australian aborigines, Navajos, Maori and any number of indigenous peoples have reported this sense of mournful disorientation after being displaced from their land.

And let us pause here to recognise the terrible challenges and dreadful losses that were experienced by indigenous people to the inroads of western colonisation. It is clear that, in accepting money for ‘land purchases’ the Maori chiefs had no concept of its subsequent alienation to individuals, or of the inexorable stream of immigrants that would follow, armed with more advanced technology and access to capital.

But Albrecht claims that “place pathology isn’t limited to native peoples. He has worked with the rural ‘settler’ communities of the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, Australia, who have reacted to widespread open cast coal mining and the destruction of a distinctive landscape by becoming anxious, unsettled, despairing, and depressed - just as if they had been forcibly removed from the valley. Only they hadn’t; the valley changed around them – they were suffering collectively from solastalgia.

In contrast, the communities of the Cape Region of South Western Australia have been judged to be in a state of idyllic ‘solastaphilia’ by Albrecht – at one both with their environment and themselves.

However, solastalgia in Albrecht’s estimation, is a global condition, felt to a greater or lesser degree by different people in different locations but felt increasingly, given the ongoing degradation of the environment. As our environment continues to change around us, the question Albrecht would like answered is, how deeply are our minds suffering in return?

The basic question asked is ‘even if we can establish that as we move further into an urban, technological future, we move further away from the elemental forces that shaped our minds, how do we get back in touch with them?’

As Smith notes:

‘That question preoccupied Gregory Bateson, a major influence on eco¬-psychologists and something of a lost giant of 20th-century intellectual history who published a thought-provoking book “Steps to an Ecology of Mind” in 1972.

It was Bateson’s belief that the tendency to think of mind and nature as separate indicated a flaw at the core of human consciousness. This “epistemological fallacy” led us to believe, wrongly, that mind and nature operated independently of each other.

Bateson went on to argue that nature was a recursive, mind-like system; its unit of exchange wasn’t energy, as most ecologists argued, but information. The way we thought about the world could change that world, and the world could in turn change us.

So what to do? How do you go about rebooting human consciousness? Bateson’s prescription for action was vague. We need to correct our errors of thought by achieving clarity in ourselves and encouraging it in others — reinforcing “whatever is sane in them.”

SANITY AND LANDSCAPE

But if I remember right, Bateson demonstrated very clearly from his work among different tribes in Papua New Guinea that there were extraordinarily wide variations in the cultures of different tribes in similar ecological settings.

He also postulated that the cultures, which ranged from compassionate and sane to brutal and indifferent, resulted from the influence of the personalities of dominant founding or leading individuals.

And some of the worst excesses of western societies were perpetrated during periods that we can only view in retrospect as eras of comparative social stability and ecological sustainability.

While the destruction of landscape and locality can drive people crazy, there are plenty of historical figures from unspoilt environments who were quite crazy enough to begin with (Genghis Khan is a case in point).

So it worries me that solastalgia may provide an excuse for selfishness and bigotry. And that it may be used to mask inherent conservatism that could in turn foster exclusivity and paranoia – a kind of global ‘not-in-my-back-yard’ movement which could easily lead on to an intolerance of outsiders.

And it is all too possible that the strengths of the Maori link between land and people – which have been so vital in preserving their identity – can also entrench cultural divisions and political separation – and hold back innovation and adaptation within Maori society itself.

As for me, I will always be a Cheshire Lad at heart – as they say ‘you can take the boy out of the country, you can’t take the country out of the boy’.

But I also feel affinities with a number of different landscapes, from the sugarcane fields of Cavite to the dusty plains of Outback Australia and the barren hills of central Otago. And maybe I have to become a bit more committed to safeguarding the sanity of my special 'pays'.

But perhaps there is room for a footnote: Nostalgia and Solastalgia are strange twin children.

The Cheshire of my boyhood no longer exists - except as a landscape lost to all but memory.

As Housman has it for the neighbouring county of Shropshire:

'That is the land of lost content'
I see it shining plain.
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again'.

The Past then is another Country that has its own place pathology.

Te Mihi Whanau Aotearoa

Te Mihi o Aotearoa

Ko Tapu te Ranga te maunga
Ko Raukawa te moana
Ko Ngati Hone te iwi Ingarangi
Ko Koru Rerangi te waka
Ko Hohepe (Matiu … Pita … Hami… Tio) toku ingoa

Translation of the Maori ‘Family Introduction’

The islet of Island Bay is my mountain
The waters of Cook Strait are my sea
I am from the Johnson Family of England
My ancestors travelled here by air
I am Joseph (Matthew … Peter … Sam…Theo) by name

The English Mihi

The crag at Beeston is my mountain
The waters of the Weaver are my sea
I am from the Johnson-Shorrocks-Darlington Family of Lancashire and Cheshire
We are local folk from long ages past
I am Keith (Matthew … Peter … Sam… Theo) by name

Comment

Looking at the family in retrospect, it is clear that we are descended, at least on my side, from a mixed set of wholly English ancestors (with links to the North West, Midlands, South West, East Anglia and London).

My paternal great grandfather Robert Edwin Shorrocks was born in Salford, Lancashire in 1854 (family, presumably, originally from Blackburn area) and his wife Fanny also hailed from Salford (born Fanny Eliza Mallinson 1856 - family originally from Rastrick, West Yorkshire). My paternal grandmother's father Charles D. Lubbock was born in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk c1851 and his wife Helen Rebecca Rayner was born in Finsbury, London c1861 (family originally from Cambridge).

My maternal great grandfather David Clarke was born in Weston Favell, Northampton in 1842 and his wife Sarah Kenyon was born in Oldham, Lancashire c1862. My maternal grandmother's father Joseph Salter was born in Upham, Hampshire, Wiltshire c1864 (family originally from Ottery St Mary, Devon), and his wife Mary Davis was born in Market Lavington, Wiltshire c1868.

Our connections with the North West of England are therefore the strongest through the Shorrocks and Kenyon links and our step-links to the Darlingtons. The Darlingtons are Cheshire farmers 'born and bred' ('Cheshire born and Cheshire bred; strong i'the arm and wik i'the yed' - wik means quick - not weak!). There are also farming connections through Joseph Salter (to Raxhayes Farm, Ottery St Mary) and George Kenyon, my Oldham great great great grandfather, who was a Lancashire farmer.

Most of the other families appear to have found employment in the 19th and early 20th Centuries in urban jobs, and the Shorrocks’ (Brushmanufacturing), Clarkes (Shoemaking and Accountancy), Lubbocks (Shipbuilding), and Kenyons (Cartage, Provisioning and Innkeeping) had their own businesses. Helen's father though was a 'Railway Engineer' (maybe loco driver?) with the SE Railway.

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"If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people.

To be born means that something which did not exist comes into existence. But the day we are "born" is not our beginning. It is a day of continuation. But that should not make us less happy when we celebrate our "Happy Continuation Day."

Since we are never born, how can we cease to be? This is what the Heart Sutra reveals to us. When we have a tangible experience of non-birth and non-death, we know ourselves beyond duality. The meditation on "no separate self" is one way to pass through the gate of birth and death.

Your hand proves that you have never been born and you will never die. The thread of life has never been interrupted from time without beginning until now. Previous generations, all the way back to single-celled beings, are present in your hand at this moment.

You can observe and experience this. Your hand is always available as a subject for meditation. ": 'Present Moment, Wonderful Moment' by Thich Nhat Hanh

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“Our descendants will understand many things which are hidden from us now.” :'Pre-historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages', by John Lubbock published 1865.

(John Lubbock was a famous London Banker and Natural Scientist who shares a heritage with our family – through Keith’s grandmother Constance Maud Mary Johnson (nee Lubbock))