For a Māori healer, returning the placenta to the earth is the first debt owed to the Mother

For Māori healer Awhitia Mihaere, the first act of gratitude toward the earth happens at birth: the placenta, called whenua kura, is returned to the soil as the first food offered back to Papatūānuku, the New Zealand earth deity. It is from that practice that she builds, in the video, a broader reflection on the state of the oceans.

The video was published by the World Tribal Alliance as part of a series of conversations between indigenous elders and guests connected to environmental conservation — in this case, South African filmmaker and naturalist Craig Foster, co-director of "My Octopus Teacher" (2020), winner of the 2021 Academy Award for best documentary feature. In the available footage, it is Mihaere who speaks; Foster's lines do not appear.

A cord that never breaks

Mihaere explains that, in Māori cosmology, Papatūānuku (Earth) and Ranginui (Sky) are the primordial parents, and that the human umbilical cord is a symbolic extension of that bond. That is why the placenta goes back into the ground — sometimes together with seaweed, when the family lives near the sea, to give the child, from the start, a connection to the ocean.

Whales, kelp and deep-sea mining

She links the depletion of kelp forests — the giant seaweed that forms coastal ecosystems — to the decline of whales, dolphins and rays in the region. She describes deep-sea mining as a threat she compares, in her own terms, to war: "it's very destroying like, you know, how the bombing is happening." It is a symbolic reading of the loss of marine megafauna, not a technical survey, though the link between large marine mammals and the health of kelp forests is, in fact, studied by marine science through other means.

A tattoo banned, then revived

Mihaere also discusses the moko kauae, the facial tattoo that marks a person's place in Māori genealogy. The practice was suppressed under the Tohunga Suppression Act, a New Zealand law from 1907, and was only taught again at a tertiary institution in the country in 2015, she says.

The octopus as a symbol

She also cites the fiki, the octopus, as a central figure in a family tradition: an aunt of hers, she says, wrote a book on the meaning of each of the animal's tentacles — a reference that, whether by coincidence or not, echoes the theme of her conversation partner's award-winning documentary.

Claims about the spiritual link between marine mammals, kelp and human well-being express Mihaere's Māori worldview, with no biological data cited in the video. The exact place and date of the elders' gathering she refers to are not detailed; the context suggests the Origins gathering held by the World Tribal Alliance in South Africa. What remains from the conversation is Mihaere's closing image: facing elders from other continents, with no possible translation between languages, a look alone was enough to recognize the same vibration.