With Racel Petero having just signed the Indigenous Women in Industry agreement to co-host the 2026 Gathering in Vancouver, this milestone made me pause and to think about how we, as Indigenous women, do business differently. Our industry begins not in boardrooms or spreadsheets, but in whenua - in relationship, reciprocity, and responsibility.
When I’m trying to grasp the depth of a word, I deconstruct it — breaking it down into sound, shape, and image — until it becomes a landscape I can walk through and see. This helps me feel its meaning, not just define it. So I did this with Industry:
In-dust-tree.
This is where, as an indigenous business, we begin, in the very essence of our environment - the dust, the earth, the whenua.
We understand that to grow anything meaningful, we must first be in and of the land.
Only then can we rise - like a tree - strong, rooted, and alive.
It is from the dust, that our values are taken.
Valuse like manaakitanga - care, hospitality, and generosity - and Kaitiakitanga - guardianship and protection. These are pressed and compacted into the kākano, the seeds that hold our collective intent.
When nurtured, these seeds can grow into living, moving, shelter-providing entities - our industries like trees, standing not alone but together as part of a wider ngahere (forest).
Each contributes to the health of the whole, interconnected and alive, a system that breathes reciprocity, feeds communities, and shelters generations.
Within ngahere the trees are never all the same size.
Some stand tall and strong, offering shade and protection. Others are young, still growing, or quietly nurturing the soil beneath.
The purpose is not to become the biggest tree, but to understand how your tree provides
how it nourishes, protects, and gives back to the forest that sustains it.
Even as a tree's life cycle ends, it decomposes to feed the next generation - a continuation of care, a returning to the dust from which it came.
Our industries are not mechanical systems or economic engines. They are living, breathing ecosystems - grown, not built. Fed by the soil. Strengthen by the winds. Sustained by the waters.
They require our participation, not our domination.
Stewardship, in this sense, is not a distant concept or a sustainability goal; it is a daily act of intimacy.
To be part of in-dust-tree is to breathe in the land itself.
It is to allow what matters to settle within us, to let the dust of our whenua become part of every fibre of our being.
When we return to this way of creating, of being in-dust-tree, we begin to heal the fractures caused by extractive models.
We remember that creation and care are not separate acts.
To build, we must also nurture.
That which we take, we must replenish.
We are formed and fuelled by the land.
It is time to re-establish the old ways of working, to root our industries back into the soil of relationship, reciprocity and responsibility, so they can once again stand tall, like trees born from dust.