‘The perfect sleeper decolonisation tool’: Lyric Waiwiri-Smith reviews Ngahuia Murphy’s stunning pink book, Intuitive Ritual.
My fingernail clippings are buried in the garden outside my flatmate’s window. Cut on takirau, the eighteenth moon of the maramataka, the clippings of keratin are submerged under the Earth next to a kūmara, banana, egg, nuts, three candles and a piece of paper scribbled with a karakia for Hineteiwaiwa wrapped in red thread. It is an offering, a ritual many wāhine Māori past have known, if not always in full awareness but by intuition, connects us with our environment, tūpuna and atua.
“Ritual” usually calls to mind something inherently religious – prayers on the rosary, offerings at an altar, meditation in silence – or acts tied to an important occasion, like presenting gifts at Christmas or eulogies at a funeral. Some things, like having a coffee or making the bed every morning, are so routine that they become our daily ritual. These formalities give us meaning and often are, even if you don’t recognise it, inherently spiritual.
Ngahuia Murphy’s (Ngāti Manawa, Ngāti Ruapani ki Waikaremoana, Ngāi Tuhoe, Te Arawa and Ngāti Kahungunu) latest book, Intuitive Ritual, is a guidebook to rituals long practiced by mana wāhine, but lost to the colonial re-write of Aotearoa’s history. The knowledge and practices bundled within the book reflect Murphy’s two decades as a mana wāhine scholar, whose previous achievements include the novel Te Awa Atua: Menstruation in the pre-colonial Māori world, and a PhD probing the revitalisation of indigenous women’s customs in Aotearoa, Hawai’i and Turtle Island (North America).
It would be hard to find someone more embedded in, and a kaitiaki of, this kaupapa than Murphy. In the first quarter of its 230 pages, her guidebook (re)introduces readers to the Atua Wāhine, the tikanga and role of wāhine in Māori wairuatanga and the beliefs that underpin the practices. Guidance on how to practice – whether a karakia, chant, meditation or offering – is shared in incredible detail, down to the right direction to be facing, the time of day and specific prompts for reflection.
A ritual can be as silent and solitary as immersing yourself in water as a rite of passage, or community-driven by way of a group ceremony to honour the wāhine in your whānau. The ritual can be as easy as engaging in a craft or anointing yourself in oil, or the ritual may appear simple on the surface but later beg for deep and often painful introspection: “Listen for where your No is and never feel guilty for saying it.”
Some rituals, like steaming your tara, are somewhat familiar to us but have been so warped by Western trends and perspectives that some of us can’t imagine ourselves taking on the task. But our mothers and their mothers did, they used a steam oven to heal themselves post-childbirth. Whatever the practice, the end goal is the same: to provide connection to Māori and indigenous women in a post-colonial world.
Intuitive Ritual is also so much more than a standard guidebook – illustrations bring the Atua Wāhine to life: pull-out pages examining each moon of the maramataka, full photo spreads and QR codes offering links to further readings, karakia and recorded chants. It’s an incredibly modern way to present knowledge that is hundreds of years old but still being discovered for the first time.
In order to hold so much knowledge within its pages, the book is a large pink hardback, encased in its own sturdy sleeve, but it’s still able to be carried to the garden or your beach or park (I know, I’ve tried). I’ve found its grandiose and gorgeous cover attracts curious eyes and hands ready to flip pages to anyone I show it to, making it the perfect sleeper decolonising tool.
It’s an incredibly heavy time to be Māori, especially for wāhine Māori and takatāpui. The double-edged sword of seeing our haka recognised on the world stage and the scale of the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti comes with the territory of also being exposed to an incredible amount of racism. These events both soothe the wairua and cause significant damage to our personhood. Even if you’ve never considered ritualism before, your tūpuna did – so why not attempt to find healing and reconnection the only way we knew how for hundreds of years?
Intuitive Ritual has carved out the most coveted spot a book could hope for: right next to the bed, for easy access, and to charm any visitors passing through with the presence of my big brain (though I don’t get many of those). I open it to check the maramataka, to find a karakia, to remind myself how to reconnect. Which is how my fingernails, food and candles have now also found themselves in the garden, and why Hineteiwaiwa receives whispers from me at night.