Ka hui maua ko Steph
We spoke extensively about her trip to Taupo last month in Kohitatea (January). We both met up with Uncle Jim and Aunty Nola. She followed that up with a meeting with George Asher, Rangi Downs, Te Kanawa & Uncle Jim
What did we learn from Uncle?
Whakapapa: it boils down to whakapapa and how we connect to those who have passed on, those who are yet to come, those in the here and now AND it is about how we connect to our whenua, our land, our environment. It is how we draw from the environment, & how we reciprocate by looking after the mauri (the life force) of that entity – after all, to us it is Papatuanuku – SHE is Papatuanuku, the mother of all living!!
By way of explanation, whakapapa is what connects us all together. Whakapapa is about relationships with all living things & it is about frameworks for understanding the world we live in, the world we have inhabited, the world we will leave behind when we pass on!
But for today:
She is heading up to the Taupo region in mid-April where she will stay with her kids for three months odd; she will be staying in Motuoapa just north of Turangi.
The idea is to collect the narratives from kuia/koroua as well as the younger generation & canvass their ideas about indigenous values, making decisions based on those values, & align all that with the LTFT and how they drive their decisions.
She has set out her goals for what she wants to achieve from her Taupo-Hikoi – of course Hikoi is a word that has many connotations – in this respect it will be a journey wherein she is part of the waka (canoe) – in the middle not at the taurapa end. She will be ok
She has structure her approach quite well and her writing will probably take a similar approach. I refer to her use of the current trends in the literature, her analysis of that literature, the narratives and her analysis of those narratives.
Steph is also on her way to Darwin for a conference on Cultural Resilience! That should be good – you just need to relax, position yourself and where you come from, and weave the theme in with your own narrative!
Just to get back to those narratives: they, the narratives will represent a persons life experience with the land, their living memories; in this respect she is capturing something special, she is capturing not only their thoughts and korero, but also their feelings, their living memories and those that have been passed down from their ancestors. With this type of narrative (if there is such a thing as type of narrative) she will be collecting mauri or rather recording mauri or the life force imbued into the landscape from many generations of those who have occupied and used the region and its resources! Thus it has mana or a power-in-and-of-itself; these narratives or korero has mana; it has tapu or sacredness; it has wehi or respect; it is the well-spring of everything that makes us who we are! We are Tuwharetoa (24retoa),we are the people of the land, of that land of Taupo!
In saying this, she will need to interpret the narratives or korero in a way that will give the korero as it will be transcribed the mana and tapu it deserves.
She will need to position herself in the beginning of her PhD. What do I mean by that? She will need to describe her turangawaewae – where she stands, what her perspective. This will inform those who follow in her waewae or footsteps a sense for how she understood and presented her findings.
If you read her thesis, you will get out of it what you will
- Naaku noa -
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