He Mokopuna, He Tūpuna: Reworlding Ourselves as Beloved and Loving Descendants

This conceptual article introduces mokopuna (grandchild, descendant) reworlding, a theorising of Indigenous cultural identity grounded in the position every person occupies within whakapapa (genealogy): he mokopuna, he tūpuna (ancestors). Each of us is a beloved descendant, held within a circulation of aroha (love, compassion) flowing from tūpuna, Ranginui (the sky father), Papatūānuku (the earth mother), and our earth sky kin. To love is to be loved: when adult attention turns toward mokopuna, we enact the posture the living world has always held toward us, and the tūpuna position occurs of itself as the current passes onward. From here, colonisation is reread not as a force that severed whakapapa, which was never within its power, but as one that worked, structurally and deliberately, to loosen our attention from a current that never ceased flowing. The remedy is therefore not a fight but a return: he mauri tuku, he mauri ora (a released life force is a living life force). Reworlding names this attunement, through which ordinary acts of loving children become sites of cosmological and political restoration. The article contributes an Indigenous framework in which self-determination is expressed through mauritau, the settled state of a people who know themselves loved, and offers the Indigicene, an ever-present epoch coined and declined here, as evidence that whakapapa accumulates rather than periodises.