AOTEAROA, NEW ZEALAND (2020-2025)

Kaitiakitanga is the Māori concept of guardianship over the natural world. It is not stewardship in the Western sense. It is kinship.

Molly spent five years doing ethnobotanical research in Aotearoa (New Zealand), working in the Waikato region to understand how kaitiakitanga shapes the relationship between Māori communities and the plants they have lived alongside for generations. Her MSc dissertation at the University of Kent was built from this fieldwork.

Using participant observation, plant identification, and careful listening, she found that for Māori, the connection to plants is not separate from connections to ancestors, to place, and to the continuity of cultural knowledge. The plants carry the memory. Protecting them is protecting the lineage.

This research underpins everything that followed. The questions about biopiracy and consent in Gabon, the sacred medicine work in Brazil, the wildfire and land grief in Malibu. They all come back to the same root: what is the relationship between humans and the living world, and what breaks when we forget it.