Te Aho Tapu

What are the links between environmental integrity and the health, wellbeing and wealth of Indigenous communities?

Ensuring the sustainable management of our natural resources is increasingly becoming an issue of national and international concern, and understandably so.

In 2004 Dr Kepa Morgan embarked on a pilot project based around an idea of combining rammed earth technology with muka (flax fibre) – effectively integrating mātauranga Māori with science and engineering, to create low-cost housing solutions. The result was whareuku.

Fast forward a decade to 2014 and Kepa and his team have gone from pilot, through design and build (2 whareuku), proof of concept and compliance testing. But Dr Morgan wasn’t finished there. In 2013 as part of the NPM Expanding Excellence programme, he proposed a programme of research to take it from proof of concept to the people.

Associate Professor Leonie Pihama, from the University of Waikato led the project Tiakina Te Pā Harakeke, which was focused on looking at Māori childrearing practices within a context of whānau ora.

The project, which began in 2012, was developed to support the investigation and identification of Kaupapa Māori approaches to Māori childrearing and parenting and specifically looks at how we can (as communities), draw on these frameworks to support intervention in the area of child abuse and neglect within our whānau.

Te Pōhā o te Tītī is an online tool designed to help whānau keep track of annual muttonbirding harvests, and look after future populations of the manu. (http://www.titi.nz/)

In an expression of the growing application of NPM projects into digital and online environments, the project Te Pōhā o Te Tītī was initiated in 2012.

Focused on realising sustainable customary harvesting of juvenile tītī (muttonbirds) within the rohe of Kāi Tahu this project was led by Corey Bragg from the University of Otago.

“To generate good health policy you need to ensure that the younger population doesn’t miss out.” THE FIRST STEP in fixing any health challenge is to understand what you most need to focus on, says Bridget Robson. For an epidemiologist this view may not seem surprising. But as Director of Te Rōpū Rangahau Hauora a Eru Pōmare (Eru Pōmare Māori Health Research Centre) at the Wellington School of Medicine & Health Sciences, the University of Otago, she has shown that the picture of New Zealand patient health can change quite markedly depending on the statistics you use.

“We are taking a strengths-based approach. So that teachers can go from where they are now to where they want to be.” AS EVERY CHILD knows, learning to read means first cracking a code. The next challenge is reading to learn – when you move from just identifying the words to extracting deeper comprehension.

Without Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, New Zealand research on evolution hailed as a breakthrough by the world’s leading news media would never have happened. LIKE MANY A scientific race, it came down to the wire. When Dr Shane Wright, at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Auckland, published new findings on the speed of evolution in top scientific journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, a rival team from Florida followed home just three weeks behind.

At Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga we now manage a database of well over 500 Māori scholars. Twenty five ago years ago Māori academics were so few we’d have had no need for the resource. As for Māori PhDs, with a national total of around 20, some academics would have been realistically able to name them all.

For Māori artists, as any other, recognition overseas can be vital. While sculptor Dr Brett Graham (Ngāti Korokī Kahukura) and audio-visual artist Rachael Rākena (Kāi Tahu, Ngā Puhi) had already built a strong following at home, their success at the prestigious Venice Biennale in 2007 was confirmation of Māori-inspired art’s international impact – and fulfilled a dream of exhibiting at a major world venue.

It never pays to underestimate the power of determination. When Patricia (Trish) Johnston (Ngaiterangi, Ngāti Pikiao) arrived to take up the position as Professor of Postgraduate Studies and Research at Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi she asked about basic research at the Wānanga and was told by one staff member it was something they didn’t do.