Tansi-thank you for being here.
I didn’t start this Substack to repeat what’s already out there. I started it because there’s a way of seeing the world — rooted in Indigenous knowledge, language, and truth — that almost never makes it into the mainstream, and when it does, it’s usually filtered through someone else’s lens. Not here.
Every piece I write, I write from an Indigenous worldview, on my own terms, connecting the dots between what’s happening now and the wisdom that’s been here all along. That’s not something an algorithm can generate or a newsroom can assign. It’s something only I can give you.
If that’s the kind of perspective you want more of in your life, I’d be honoured to have you with me as a paid subscriber.
I was scrolling my feed, bracing for the usual — another pipeline, another flood, another headline about what’s dying — when a different kind of story stopped me. A word. Not a disaster, not a policy, not a body count. A single Māori word, named the most beautiful in the world.
Kaitiakitanga.
Say it slow. Let it sit in your mouth. It means guardianship — the responsibility to care for the land, water, and living things, for the people not yet born. And at a time when the planet is being strip-mined for profit while we watch the water rise and the forests burn, this feels like more than a linguistic honour. It feels like a message arriving right when we need it most.
Hiy hiy to the Māori people, to te reo Māori, and to every hand that has kept this word — and the responsibility inside it — alive.
How It Was Chosen, and Why
The honour came from Babbel, the language-learning platform, which set out to find the world’s most beautiful word by combing through thousands of conversations across online communities, including Reddit and TikTok, where people talk about the words they love most and the ones that resist translation into any other tongue. That search produced a shortlist of 223 words pulled from 75 languages. From there, an international jury of linguists, writers, and cultural experts weighed each word on its sound, its meaning, its cultural depth, and its relevance to this moment in time.
Kaitiakitanga won on every count. Babbel’s language expert Esteban Touma Portilla said the word speaks directly to a theme defining our era: the responsible stewardship of the environment for the generations who come after us. Babbel linguist Maren Pauli explained that a word becomes truly extraordinary when its sound, meaning, cultural context, and timeliness all arrive together — and that kaitiakitanga does exactly that, opening a new perspective on how we might live differently on this earth.
It’s not hard to see why the judges landed here. While much of the world is still arguing over whether the climate crisis is real, te reo Māori already has a word — has always had a word — for the answer.
Rooted in a Worldview, Not Just a Word
To understand kaitiakitanga, you have to understand tangata whenua — people of the land. In the Māori worldview, a group holds authority in a place because of their ancestors’ relationship to it, not because they own it. Humans and the land are seen as one. People are not above nature; they are part of its fabric. The natural world can “speak” to humans, offering knowledge and understanding, and a good life means aligning yourself with it rather than dominating it.
The word itself is built from tiaki — to guard, preserve, foster, protect, shelter — with the prefix kai, denoting someone who carries out an action. A kaitiaki is a guardian: a person, a group, or a being who cares for and protects. Traditionally, the original kaitiaki were the atua, the gods of the natural world themselves — Tāne, guardian of the forest, being one. Every human kaitiaki since has been carrying on that lineage of care.
And beneath all of it sits something deeply spiritual. Kaitiakitanga is described as an inherited commitment — a duty passed down, not chosen — that links mana atua, mana tangata, and mana whenua: the authority and dignity of the spiritual realm, the human world, and the land itself. It binds the sacred to the everyday, holding the gods, the people, and the earth together as one continuous relationship of mana. To be a kaitiaki, then, isn’t just an environmental role. It’s a spiritual inheritance — a sacred trust carried in the blood and the breath, connecting the living to the ancestors and to the atua who shaped the world in the first place.
This wasn’t an abstract philosophy. It shaped daily life. If a river ran murky or a harbour grew empty of fish, it wasn’t treated as bad luck — it was read as a sign something was out of balance between the people and the land, because the health of a community and the health of its environment were understood as reflections of one another. Practices grew out of that belief: tohunga laying mauri stones in gardens and speaking karakia over them to protect the harvest, snaring birds only outside their breeding season, tribes fishing communal nets just once a year to let the waters replenish. Guardianship wasn’t a sentiment. It was a system — sustainable resource management built directly into the language and the law of the people, generations before “sustainability” was ever a word the rest of the world needed.
Kaitiakitanga Today
That system didn’t stay in the past. Kaitiakitanga is written into New Zealand law today — the Resource Management Act defines it as the exercise of guardianship by tangata whenua over natural and physical resources, including the ethic of stewardship, and it appears again in the Foreshore and Seabed Act. Iwi have used these openings to reassert their authority over the rivers, forests, and coastlines their ancestors always cared for, pushing kaitiakitanga back into conservation, freshwater management, and biodiversity policy across the country.
It hasn’t been simple. Practitioners have to hold traditional concepts like mana, tapu, and mauri alongside modern bureaucracy, negotiating with local authorities who don’t always share the same worldview. But the through-line hasn’t broken: Māori communities are rediscovering and restoring both the land and the knowledge of how to care for it, allowing today’s generation to meet the responsibilities their ancestors carried before them — and offering everyone else, Indigenous or not, a chance to reconsider what kinship with nature could look like on a planet running out of time.
Kairangahau Mãori Jade Hyslop and Manaaki Whenua researchers take part in a Rangitâne iwi/hapü cultural monitoring wananga on the Manawatu River. Photo credit: Toroa Creative.
An Inspiration for All of Us
I keep coming back to what makes this different from every other climate headline. This isn’t a warning. It isn’t a body count. It’s a word that already holds the answer — has held it for generations — while the rest of the world scrambles to invent new frameworks for something Indigenous peoples never stopped practising.
Kaitiakitanga isn’t nostalgia. It’s a blueprint. It says that we are not separate from the water, the forest, the fish, or each other — that our worth is measured not by what we extract, but by what we protect for those who haven’t been born yet. Imagine if every government contract, every pipeline approval, every extraction license had to pass through that lens first: not what can we take, but what are we guarding for the next seven generations?
The world just called this word beautiful. Now it’s time the world lived like it believes that.
Hiy hiy to the guardians — past, present, and the ones still to come.
Brandi Morin is a multi-award-winning Cree/Iroquois/French journalist from Treaty 6 territory in Alberta. She is the founder of Indigenous Insider on Substack and the author of the national bestselling memoir Our Voice of Fire.
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Sources:
- [Māori word ‘kaitiakitanga’ named world’s most beautiful by language app | RNZ](https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/te-ao-maori/729863/maori-word-kaitiakitanga-named-world-s-most-beautiful-by-language-app)
- [Māori word kaitiakitanga named world’s most beautiful word by language app Babbel | NEWS WIRE](https://newswire.co.nz/2026/07/maori-word-kaitiakitanga-named-worlds-most-beautiful-word/)
- [Māori word named world’s most beautiful by language app | 1News](https://www.1news.co.nz/2026/07/17/maori-word-named-worlds-most-beautiful-by-language-app/)
- [Understanding kaitiakitanga | Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand](https://teara.govt.nz/en/kaitiakitanga-guardianship-and-conservation/page-1)
- [Traditional kaitiakitanga | Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand](https://teara.govt.nz/en/kaitiakitanga-guardianship-and-conservation/page-3)
- [Kaitiaki – guardians | Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand](https://teara.govt.nz/en/kaitiakitanga-guardianship-and-conservation/page-4)
- [Kaitiakitanga today | Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand](https://teara.govt.nz/en/kaitiakitanga-guardianship-and-conservation/page-7)
In te ao Māori, kaitiakitanga carries a responsibility to care for the land, waters, living beings, people, knowledge and resources entrusted to us - not because we own them, but because we belong within an ongoing relationship with them. It includes protecting their mauri, or life force, and preserving them for generations yet to come. Te Ara describes it as environmental management grounded in a traditional Māori worldview.
A kaitiaki is a guardian or protector; kaitiakitanga is the principle and practice of fulfilling that responsibility. It involves reciprocity: the earth sustains us, so we owe care and restraint in return. It is like I have said before, you only take as much as will feed your family, not anymore.
Aotearoa id a beautiful place with 2 completely different Islands and 2 completely different sceneries. Lush and green, with beautiful snow capped mountains and then a beautiful ski resort down in Queenstown, the Milford track which is well worth walking if your a hiker, both in the South Island, also the high country where a lot of sheep grazing is done.
The North Island is very different, still has snow capped mountains but it's scenery is very different to the South Island, Wellington, which is hilly, built around a harbour and is windy, really windy. Then you have Lake Taupo with it's trout fishing and just up the road, Rotorua, the geothermal area of New Zealand, which also has trout fishing, Move on up to Auckland and all you can see round the bays of Auckland is about 30 islands dotted round the coast, all easily reachable by boat or ferry. Then right at the top of the North Island is 90 mile beach - and yes, it is 90 miles long.
I love and miss my home country, the first thing I notice when I fly home, is the verdant green everywhere. That is where I am going when I finally leave this earth, to be buried with my whenau.
Beautiful. Thank you for sharing this.