Pink magnolias, placentas and land...

 

It's been some 21 years since I first planted this pink magnolia outside our house. Buried beneath it is the placenta of our eldest which is a cultural practice that was lost when many Pasifika people first came to NZ and hospital nurses would take them to be destroyed.

Nowadays, it's common practice for Indigenous women to ask for them, often to take to places where they will be buried. For some Maori women it's about take it back to their whenua (land) where they are from or like me it is buried where they now call home.

I know that this used to be a common practice in Samoa many, many years ago. I don't hear about it often but I do know that the word fanua (land) in Samoan is that same as the word for placenta which is also fanua. This is similar in the Maori te reo (language) in which they are the same word with a different meaning i.e. homonyms. (I can't help it as I used to be a high school English teacher).

It was interesting because last week, I went driving with my children and my eldest saw a beautiful large tree with large pink flowers from a distance that we were driving towards. I reminded her that it was the pink magnolia tree that we had outside our house and that her placenta had been buried under that she had quite forgotten about. 

I then reminded her of the pink cherry blossom tree and the red camellia tree that also had placentas of my other two children buried beneath them. It was good to talk about as now that two of them are adults with one still at high school, it will be a cultural practice that they can decide to do with their families with the understanding of the important unbreakable bond, of old, between the whenua, fanua, land and the placenta of people...