Richard LittauerThis morning I woke up early. I put on my running shoes and ran to the top of the hill behind my house, my calves protesting the hundreds of stairs. All around me, birds were singing — thrushes, starlings, house sparrows. At the top, I sat on a bench with a view and looked out on the dawn rising.
The hill wasn’t Hubbard Park. And the thrushes singing weren’t American robins, but blackbirds. The sparrows and starlings were the same, but the tuis, silvereyes, and gray gerygones sang their own, unfamiliar songs.
Where the vast forests of Vermont used to stretch out beneath me, now I could see the curved line of the horizon, a fishing boat leaving Island Bay and motoring past Tapu Te Ranga Island out to sea. It was a beautiful morning in Wellington, New Zealand, today.
I moved here this summer. I never quite left academia, and after years of thinking about it, I found an advisor and a university department that would allow me the freedom I wanted to pursue a doctorate. I’m extraordinarily privileged, as my career and finances made moving to New Zealand relatively easy.
This isn’t my first time living abroad. Some Montpelierites remember me arriving in a snowy November, five years ago, from Montréal, where I had lived for two years.
Before that, I lived in Europe for most of my 20s. Since I graduated high school, I haven’t been back to the area where I grew up; a friend of mine said he, too, was a “victim of Connecticut.” I nodded my condolences. Being abroad is more familiar to me than living at home.
As I’ve grown older, my view on being an American abroad has changed immensely. Once, I felt isolated from the ills of either my home country or the one I was visiting. I was too far away to effect change in America, and as a non-citizen and a student, not the right person to effect change wherever I was.
Morally disconnected from either country, I considered myself responsible for my own actions and for my own immediate networks, but answerable to no one. Where there was a language barrier, this was even easier. What responsibility did I have for Maltese politics? For Quebecois rights? Little.
My time in Montpelier reversed my view on this entirely. My internal discussion around this has grown much richer since moving to Pōneke, Aotearoa. Those are the te reo Māori names for where I live, and I’ve learned them since learning that Vermont is not only Vermont, but also Ndakinna. The birds I heard this morning weren’t just birds, either, but tūī, tauhou, and riroriro.
The park I ran in wasn’t just a park, but a reserve, one of several run by Wellington City Council. I know the names — English, te reo Māori, and Latin — of most of the plants in the reserve, since I frequently upload them to iNaturalist.org, which I learned how to do in Vermont.
One of the plants, Cook Straight Māhoe, is likely endangered, and I’m hoping to do some planting work with a local charity to cultivate specimens near seabird burrows.
Learning the te reo Māori names isn’t an affectation or a linguistic curiosity. It’s a necessary part of engaging with Te Ao Māori, the Maori world. I’m not just an immigrant to New Zealand; I’m an immigrant to Aotearoa. I’ve learned quickly that they’re not identical.
What Aotearoa New Zealand means depends on who you ask. The viral video of Māori MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke ripping up a proposed treaties bill from a reactive, colonialist government, and then performing a haka in Parliament, made the rounds a few weeks ago.
The bill would redefine one of the central documents to Aotearoa New Zealand: Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the Treaty of Waitangi, which was signed between Māori chiefs and the Crown, allowing Europeans to live here. The bill hasn’t gone over well with Māori, nor some immigrant groups. Reading about it made me realize that Te Tiriti allows me to live here, too.
A few weeks ago, I attended the last stages of the hīkoi, a massive, peaceful protest march from the northernmost part of Aotearoa New Zealand to Wellington. Forty-two thousand others were also in the crowd, a seeming majority of them Māori.
I shared with my niece, visiting from Vermont, that I felt odd being there — me, a white descendant of the genocidal colonialist William Bradford, a 17th-generation American. Her response stuck with me: “That line stops with you. You can change that narrative.”
I’m slowly learning to engage from that perspective — decolonialist, nature-centric, respectful, and open-minded. I’m not an expert, certainly not on New Zealand, or Te Ao Māori, no more than I am on anything Wabanaki.
But my work here –- from researching how to mitigate avian bird flu from affecting endemic species, to simply noticing the local flora and learning the te reo name — is exactly the same as the work that needs doing in Vermont. My passport status has nothing to do with it.
After resting on the bench mid-run, I ran down to the beach. I took off my shoes and swam out to the floating dock in the bay. The water was cool, welcoming, and calm. Running home, I considered this obvious difference between Pōneke Wellington and Montpelier, which hasn’t had an ocean since the last ice age. But sweat is salt water too, isn’t it?
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