Members of the Rapua te Ara Rangatira team met in July to wānanga, prepare presentations, and work on a range of dissemination outputs from the project.
The three-day retreat began with a karakia from Pou Tikanga and project team member Utiku Potaka who grounded us on the whenua of Tūwharetoa, reminding us of the connections Hauiti, and indeed Luke and Utiku both have, to this rohe. During our formal team hui where we confirmed our project plan and progress made on the pilot phase of our work to date, Stacey Ruru presented the work she had done theming up the mentoring data arising from the project’s Key Informant interviews. Bridgette and Stacey will continue to work with this data with the expectation of being able to submit a paper to our occasional paper series, Te Pūtake, before the end of the year.
Meanwhile Utiku spent time collating material and drafting a presentation for our upcoming trip to Robinvale (Vic, Australia) where we will meet with colleagues from the Life Course Research Centre (University of Melbourne) and the Tati Tati mob to participate in an on-Country workshop. The focus of Utiku’s presentation, and our visit there, is to share a Hauiti perspective about the significance of water (cultural flows), the customs and traditional practices associated with it and the application of Indigenous knowledge to describe and measure the importance of water for health and wellbeing. Amohia also reviewed a Seed Funding grant application for colleagues from the Indigenous Knowledge Institute in Melbourne which, if successful, will allow us to host colleagues from the Life Course Centre at a similar workshop with Ngāti Hauiti.
During the retreat Luke drafted a research project proposal for one of the papers within his Masters of Indigenous Studies course which will explore how manawhenua-led kaupapa help restore the mauri of the Rangitīkei awa. This project will further contribute towards the work Whakauae has agreed to undertake as part of our new strategic direction as we consider the relationship between hauora and taiao in a more explicit way.
The key activity of this retreat for Luke, Amohia and Utiku, however, was to spend time working on the team’s paper from the Rapua study. The paper describes how the development of the Te Remu o Te Huia model is contributing to a broader kaupapa of te reo Māori revitalisation for Ngāti Hauiti. This is an exciting paper for the team to write, requiring us to become familiar with a whole new area of academic literature beyond health, wellbeing, governance and leadership, namely that of language reclamation broadly and community-based, te reo Māori revitalisation efforts in particular.
Amohia and Bridgette also completed their TUI Journal evaluations for a range of outputs, deepening the reflexive analysis started by Luke and Utiku. Luke will now integrate our comprehensive notes into a single document in preparation for the next hui with the TUI team. Bridgette began drafting a third paper from the Rapua study, drawing on the work of our intern, Rachel McClintock who explored what has already been written about Māori health leadership and decision-making models as part of a systematic literature review. As we now have a completed literature review, Bridgette’s mahi will align the findings of that review to our analytical framework so that we can discuss these in relation to what we are seeing as we progress our project with Ngāti Hauiti.
Aside from these periods of intense mahi, the team also balanced their time with some whakawhanaungatanga activities including kaitahi, a “walking club” and lots of kōrero. Highlights from the trip, other than being able to progress our mahi, had to be the men’s boil-up and Bridgette’s fruit sponge on night #2. The bar has now been set very high for our next team retreat. Ngā mihi mahana ki te rōpū i tā tātou mahi!
.jpeg)
