Activism framework — Extended reading

Te Pakiaka

The rhizome, lines of flight, and the underground community of place — connecting Deleuze, whakapapa, and street activism.

He kupu whakataki — Why this matters now

The colonial system is structured like a tree. There is a root — private property, Crown sovereignty, Western empiricism. There is a trunk — the state, the university, the corporation. There are branches — departments, disciplines, subsidiaries. Everything flows from the top down, from root to leaf, from general to particular.

The tree is easy to attack — and easy to defend. Cut a branch and the tree survives. The trunk is protected. The root is invisible and underground, presumed safe.

The rhizome works differently. French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, writing in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), proposed the rhizome as a counter-model. Not a tree but a root system: horizontal, multi-directional, without a centre. Every point connects to every other. There is no privileged entry point, no single root, no hierarchy of importance. Cut it anywhere and it starts up again on a new line.

This is not merely a metaphor. It is a description of how underground movements actually work — and how whakapapa already works.

Ngā mātāpono o te pakiaka — The six principles

Whakapapa hei pakiaka — Whakapapa as rhizome

Whakapapa is most commonly translated as genealogy and then represented as a family tree. This is a profound mistranslation — not linguistically but ontologically. Whakapapa is not a tree. It is a network: horizontal, multi-dimensional, with no single root and no single trunk.

You can enter whakapapa from any node — an ancestor, a place, a species, a star, an event — and it connects to everything else. The genealogy of the kūmara, the stars, the forest sits within a collapsed space-time framework that Mere Roberts describes as a network of time-space co-ordinates, not a chronological descent. This is the Deleuzian map: open, connectable, reversible, multiple entry points.

The crucial difference — and we must be precise — is that whakapapa is not merely a formal structure. It is ontological. To know one's whakapapa is not to possess information about relationships. It is to be those relationships. The Māori philosophical claim that "I am that thing, and that thing is me" carries a weight that Deleuze's secular philosophy cannot fully contain. Whakapapa does not merely resemble the rhizome. Whakapapa is a rhizomatic structure — but one embedded in cosmological and spiritual commitment that European post-structuralism approaches from the outside.

Mua, muri — Facing the past to move forward

In te ao Māori, mua means both "front" and "past." Muri means both "behind" and "future." This is the inverse of Western linear temporality. The past is in front of you — visible, present, generative. The future is behind you, unseen, unfolding. You travel backwards into the future with your eyes fixed on what you can see: your ancestors, your whenua, your whakapapa.

The colonial injunction to "move on" and "forget the past" depends entirely on the Western temporal model in which the past is behind and therefore available for erasure. The Māori temporal ontology is constitutively resistant to this move. You cannot be told to move past something that is standing directly in front of you.

For Deleuze, similarly, the past is not dead — it is co-present with the present on a plane of immanence. Memory is not recollection of something that no longer exists; it is the actualisation of something that has never stopped existing. Wā — the Māori term that means both time and space simultaneously — is the lived version of this. The past is not archived. It is here.

Raina rere — Lines of flight

The most politically charged concept in Deleuzian thought is the ligne de fuite — line of flight. A line of flight is not a retreat. It is a vector of deterritorialisation: movement away from the dominant order that creates new terrain as it moves.

Te reo Māori is a line of flight. Colonialism attempted to suppress it. The rhizome started up again — in kōhanga reo, in wānanga, in Discord servers where young Māori play video games in te reo, in the hip-hop of Maisey Rika, in WhatsApp groups between cousins in different cities. Every new node of te reo is a line of flight from the colonial arborescence.

A sticker on a lamppost is a line of flight. A wheatpaste poster in a colonial streetscape is deterritorialisation of visual space — the reclamation of a surface that has been striated by advertising and state signage, smoothed back into a commons for a moment.

Data sovereignty is a line of flight. The centralised internet — owned by five corporations in three American states — is arborescent. Te Mana Raraunga's six principles, the CARE principles for Indigenous data, tikanga-governed Fediverse instances — these are lines of flight from the data tree.

Toi akoranga — Art as rhizomatic pedagogy

Paulo Freire's conscientização — the process of developing critical consciousness through education — is rhizomatic. It begins not with the teacher's curriculum but with the student's lived reality. The "generative themes" emerge from the community's own experience. There is no single authorised entry point. Knowledge moves horizontally between learners, not vertically from expert to pupil.

Joseph Beuys called this "social sculpture" — the idea that everyone is an artist, that the shaping of society is itself an art form, that the materials of political life (language, gesture, space, community) are sculptural materials. Every paste-up, every wānanga, every data sovereignty workshop is a social sculpture.

The zine — the samizdat — is the most rhizomatic of all forms. It costs almost nothing to reproduce, it has no authorised version, it spreads through networks of care rather than commercial distribution, and every reproduction transforms it. The sticker is the smallest possible zine. The meme is the digital zine. The wānanga is the embodied one.

Graeber's "everyday communism" — the baseline of mutual aid that underlies all human sociality — is what allows rhizomatic networks to function. People share food, share knowledge, share space, share risk. This is not utopian. It is already happening. The task is to make it visible and deliberate.

Ngā rawa — Eight tools for the underground

Concrete applications of rhizome theory to te reo Māori, Māori data sovereignty, and street activism.

He pātai whakaaro — Questions for reflection

• Where are the existing rhizomatic networks in your community — the informal ones, the non-institutional ones? How might they connect to data sovereignty work?
• What is your own whakapapa of data? Who has collected data about you, your whānau, your iwi — and what did they do with it?
• Where in your city or town is Māori whakapapa invisible? What would it take to make it visible — a QR code, a sticker, an audio recording, a painted wall?
• What does a line of flight look like in your specific context? What is the existing territory, and where are the escape routes?
• If you were to design a rhizomatic learning experience — no single entry point, no hierarchy of modules, knowledge moving horizontally — what would it look like?

Ngā kupu matua — Key concepts

Ngā puna — Sources

• Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1980). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.
• Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books / University of Otago Press.
• Roberts, M. (2013). "Ways of seeing: Whakapapa." Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies.
• Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Herder and Herder.
• Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House.
• Kropotkin, P. (1902). Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. McClure Phillips.
• Te Mana Raraunga — Māori Data Sovereignty Network principles.
• CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance — Global Indigenous Data Alliance.
• Situationist International (1958). "Theory of the Dérive." Internationale Situationniste, No. 2.
• The Kiwi Dialectic — kiwidialectic.com.