SIX NATIONS — Nearly in unison with the world premiere of Blood Tides, the collaborative work of Santee Smith and Ngahuia Murphy came forth again this past weekend through a workshop dedicated to indigenous women of all walks of life held at the Talking Earth Pottery Studio.
The workshop, Recovering the Female Altar: Menstruation, the Wise Blood of the Womb seen over 30 indigenous women of different backgrounds and was opened for them to share their voices, cultural perspectives and knowledge in a space full of exploration and healing.
“[This workshop] is a part of looking back to our ancestors and finding how we came to the body, how we came to our female deities, stories, the importance of the female body, the reproductive body and menstruation and the connection to the moon and cycles — and how to bring back power to all of that in our daily lives,” said Smith.
“This workshop is a space for indigenous women to gather and share knowledge, especially with Ngahuia because she has been studying pre-colonial ways of Maoiri women,” she said.
Murphy, who is of the Ngati Manawa, Ngati Ruapani Ki Waikaremoana and Tuhoe, is an academic from New Zealand who utilizes her research to empower and fuel self-esteem in indigenous women of Maori descent and beyond. In 2016, she was one of twenty recipients of a PhD research scholarship and her knowledge brought the workshop to life.
“What I’m here to share really is the culmination of my research journey so far,” said Murphy. “So I did my masters thesis a few years ago and I looked at some of the pre-colonial Maori stories around how our ancestors saw menstruation, because today menstruation is seen in Aotearua is seen as something dirty, something unclean, something spiritually defiling and the source of female inferiority. And I didn’t believe that that’s what our ancestors thought because it completely contradicts some of our philosophies around the womb,” she said.
In Maori, the term for womb that is used is ‘te whare tangata’ (teh far-ray tun-ah-ta) which translates to ‘the house of humanity.’ Understanding this, Murphy set out to find where the sullying of women came from by sifting through Maori chants, songs, histories and stories and comparing them to the writings of colonial ethnographers and historians.
“The two were very, very different and what I found actually is that menstruation in our world comes from our pantheon of deities,” she said. “The significance of menstrual blood is a medium of ancestors and descendants that connects us back to our own pantheon of deities and is a medium that was celebrated traditionally.”
“And it was celebrated because it ensured the continuation of our tribal nations, of our family lines,” she said.
As she continues to work on her PhD, Murphy explained that her work really focuses on decolonizing and “stripping away” what indigenous women have been led to believe about themselves in todays day and age. She utilized both a projector and her voice to share her research with the group, in hopes that they would find healing and freedom in the knowledge.
“I actually really believe that the solutions to our challenges today, the solutions can be found in our traditional values, traditional practices and philosophies — I really believe that,” she said.
