timeshighereducation.com
November 11, 2021
Does the teaching of indigenous
knowledge need to be examined?
John Ross Twitter: @JohnRoss49
20-25 minutes
The University of Auckland’s adoption of a new
Māori name in July was the latest instalment in a
reconciliation process that has been unfolding
across New Zealand for half a century.
The old moniker Te Whare Wānanga o Tāmaki Makaurau
was a literal translation of the university’s
English title. The replacement, Waipapa Taumata
Rau, combines the name of the nearby shoreline
with terms referring to “a hundred” or “myriad”
“summits” – invoking a sense of challenge,
achievement and revelation.
The university’s ihonuku, or pro vice-chancellor
Māori, Te Kawehau Hoskins, said at the
time that the new name better connects the
institution with its location and highlights its
partnership with the Ngāti Whātua iwi
(confederation of tribes).
“The University of Auckland is serious about its
developing relationship with mana whenua
[territorial rights] and that must be demonstrated
in our identity and carried through to our
actions,” she said. “This new name…champions
building respect for Māori knowledge and
challenges us to understand that we are part of a
whakapapa [genealogy] of historic and current
relationships.”
This represents a big turnaround from much of the
19th and 20th centuries, when te reo (“the
language”) was suppressed in schools and children
could be caned for using it. Te reo served as a
common form of communication between Māori and the
Western traders who began frequenting New Zealand
in the 1790s.
That changed from the 1860s, when Pākehā (European
New Zealanders) began to outnumber Māori. By the
post-war period, when many rural Māori moved to
the cities, te reo was in serious decline. But a
1970s move to reassert Māori identity helped stem
the tide. Pre-schools that immersed Māori children
in te reo emerged in the early 1980s, followed by
Māori-language primary schools. Māori became an
official New Zealand language in 1987.
These advances, while arresting te reo’s decline,
did not generate the critical mass needed to
ensure its future. Efforts to galvanise the
language, however, have gained pace under Jacinda
Ardern’s Labour government.
The Ministry of Māori Development’s latest
language development strategy sets goals for at
least 1 million New Zealanders to be capable of
holding basic conversations in te reo by 2040, and
for 150,000, or 19 per cent of the adult Māori
population, to use the language as much as they
use English – up from 15 per cent or so now. All
public service departments were required to
develop Māori language plans by June this year.
The country’s eight universities have also
outlined aspirations to help nurture te reo,
usually as part of broader Māori development
strategies. Auckland’s plan for the revitalisation
of Māori language trumps the national strategy
with its target of 50 per cent of staff having
basic competency by 2040. All staff will have
undertaken professional development in te reo by
2024 and all degrees will contain te reo courses
by 2025.
“While our people shouldn’t stress about not being
fluent in te reo Māori, they should be open-minded
to learning it and to Māori ways of thinking,”
Hoskins said in a press release celebrating Māori
language week in September. “That’s being able to
listen to people speaking in Māori and getting the
gist because they have familiarity, and maybe have
some basic short conversations, do a short mihi
[greeting or acknowledgement speech], and be able
to self-identify. It’s also an understanding of
concepts, like manaakitanga (enhancing the mana
[prestige or authority] of others).”
Plenty of Kiwis already possess such skills. Brett
Berquist, Auckland’s US-born international
director and a linguist by training, says many New
Zealanders habitually use perhaps 100 Māori words
in their everyday communication: “This has become
a mainstream part of how we talk.”
Auckland’s efforts to make te reo even more
mainstream include a free app called Te Kūaha (the
doorway), launched in 2020. It helps users learn
basic words and expressions, with
syllable-by-syllable pronunciation guides and
information on cultural protocols, songs, tribal
groupings, local geography and more.
Meanwhile, language specialists at Auckland are
developing a glossary of Māori terms for common
modern phrases, such as job titles, building names
and internet search vocabulary. All section
headings on the university’s website are now
bilingual, and many positions – from
vice-chancellor to manager, coordinator, adviser
and analyst – have been appended or replaced by
Māori names.
Kaiarataki (deputy pro vice-chancellor Māori)
Michael Steedman says some 1,000 te reo terms have
been coined by Auckland in a “relational
translation” exercise led by members of the local
Māori community, guided by language planning
theory and Celtic language revitalisation
experiences in Wales and Scotland.
Staff tend to include their Māori job titles in
their email signatures, while personalised Zoom
wallpapers carry indicators of their te reo
proficiency. These “simple” things help build
familiarity, Steedman says. “You’ve got to use the
language rather than do a one-hour professional
development programme and just leave it there.”
Language can help facilitate a deeper connection
with Māori customs, stories and significant
landscape features, he adds. “The more we use it,
the better that connection becomes.”
Auckland University Press produces many books on
Māori culture and history, as well as Māori
translations of global bestsellers. And
universities nurture and promote cultural
consciousness through myriad activities stretching
well beyond language revitalisation.
Each university in the North Island has its own
marae (meeting ground), serving as a family,
cultural and spiritual centre and a hub for
student services. It is often a focal point for
teaching and research and a venue for traditional
ceremonies – for example, to induct new staff or
to commemorate the bestowal of Auckland’s new
Māori name. Such ceremonies can last hours,
dwarfing “welcome to country” observances in
Australia. Many university meetings also begin
with karakia – incantations, intentions, prayers
or blessings used to encourage productive
outcomes.
Universities and other institutions provide free
community courses in te reo. “They’re full!”
Hoskins says. “People are flocking to them.
Sometimes Māori can’t even get into them because
they’re full of non-Māori – which is a good
problem to have, in a way. Like anything
indigenous, it can be a political football. So if
the broader community thinks positively about the
Māori language, that in a sense gives agencies and
the state permission to ramp up their support.”
For all the progress and ambition, there is
clearly still a long way to go. “My [first] name
is mispronounced every day, and I’m a senior
leader of the University of Auckland,” Hoskins
observes. “We [Māori] would all say, ‘focus first
on your pronunciation!’”
But if Māori are bemused at native English
speakers’ tussles with te reo, people overseas are
grappling with the increasing presence of te reo
terms in New Zealanders’ everyday English. Hoskins
acknowledges that this can generate “translation
difficulties” in offshore communication, but says
it is not a big problem. “When I write an article,
I use Māori language, but I’m well aware of the
readership, so I make efforts to provide in-text
guidance.
“Dominant-culture people think that everything
should be so readily available and transparent to
them – that we should have access to all knowledge
and all things at all times,” she adds. “I don’t
go with that.”
Academics say the chance to learn about Māori
culture, including language, is one of the
drawcards that entices foreign students to New
Zealand universities. But some counsel against
incorporating te reo in “outward-facing” documents
intended for overseas audiences, such as foreign
students and researchers who have no familiarity
with the language.
An academic who prefers not to be named adds that
New Zealand’s remoteness encourages an
“insularity” that sometimes overlooks the need to
make itself understood elsewhere: “New Zealand
academia is often just used to talking to itself.
Sometimes other countries aren’t really that keen
to engage with us anyway. It’s a perception going
both ways.”
Auckland’s English-born vice-chancellor, Dawn
Freshwater, says New Zealand needs to consider the
possible effects of replacing English words and
names with indigenous ones. “It’s a way of
expressing what is unique about us, a point of
difference, but it potentially creates isolation
if it does not facilitate inclusion,” she says.
But it can be difficult to discuss such things. A
professor at one university, who also asked not to
be named, says he has unsuccessfully raised
objections to a mention of Te Tiriti (Treaty of
Waitangi) without translation in a document
intended for both domestic and international
audiences. When he persisted, his colleague
replied: “I will not engage in a racist debate
with you.”
Sociologist Elizabeth Rata, a professor in
Auckland’s School of Critical Studies in
Education, says the “burst of inclusion” of Māori
words in New Zealand English has accelerated over
the past three years and would be a worthy topic
of research. “English can accommodate considerable
change. It would be interesting to know at what
point you create a new form of English that’s
difficult for others to understand,” she
says. “But no one dares to talk about
it...You’re either pro or anti Māori, pro or anti
Māori language, racist or not racist. That stops
people saying, ‘Something’s happening to New
Zealand English; let’s have a robust discussion
about it.’”
Rata has courted controversy since the early
2000s, when her criticism of immersive te reo
education – among other aspects of the
culture-based curriculum – saw her castigated for
supporting an “imperialist form of philosophical
universalism”, in which “racism” is “disguised as
public debate”.
“For children who are in the total-immersion Māori
schools, some are not getting the academic English
that they require,” she says. “Some are, but not
all. We should be able to talk about things like
that without being accused of being anti-Māori or
racist.”
Hoskins says te reo was on the “brink of
extinction” in her childhood. She learned it
through a combination of Māori immersion events,
university education and participation in Māori
language initiatives for her own children, such as
kōhanga reo (Māori language preschools). “My
parents didn’t speak Māori to me,” she says.
“Māori have suffered intergenerational breaks in
the transmission of the language in home and
community life.”
In that context, the release of Auckland’s te reo
revitalisation plan was a “watershed moment”,
Hoskins believes. “Language is an important entry
into understanding things about the Māori world.
Māori tend to teach te reo by embedding it within
culture – Māori concepts, Māori cultural practices
and the logic that underpins them – and that has
transformative effects for New Zealand society.
“Universities are producers of knowledge, so
they’re important in many ways to the language,
but also to our broader national project, which is
to make good on the promises of the Treaty of
Waitangi [the 1840 agreement between the UK and
Māori chiefs]. So they have an important role in
fostering appropriate engagement with and
recognition of mātauranga Māori, or Māori
knowledges. With those knowledges always comes the
language.”
But the incorporation of mātauranga Māori in
school and university curricula is a particular
bone of contention since it goes beyond merely
applying Māori terms to familiar topics. The
extent of that contention was laid bare in July,
when Rata and six other Auckland professors and
emeritus professors published a letter in popular
current affairs periodical The New Zealand
Listener.
The letter critiqued a Ministry of Education
working document exploring how to introduce
subjects that give mātauranga Māori equal
status and parity with “other bodies of knowledge”
in the senior secondary school
certificate. The seven authors took issue
with a proposal to introduce a history and
philosophy course as a fourth alternative to
electives broadly equating with physics, chemistry
and biology. The new course would examine how
science has been used to support “the dominance of
Eurocentric views” and as “a rationale for
colonisation of Māori and the suppression of Māori
knowledge”.
The letter says “science itself does not
colonise”, although “it has been used to aid
colonisation, as have literature and art”. And
science is not especially European, it adds, given
its origins in Egypt and Mesopotamia, as well as
the contributions from medieval Islam.
“Indigenous knowledge is critical for the
preservation and perpetuation of culture and local
practices, and plays key roles in management and
policy,” the letter says. “However, in the
discovery of empirical, universal truths, it falls
far short of what we can define as science itself.
To accept it as the equivalent of science is to
patronise and fail indigenous
populations…Indigenous knowledge may indeed help
advance scientific knowledge in some ways, but it
is not science.”
The letter drew visceral responses from academics
at Auckland and elsewhere. “[It] is a true
testament to how racism is harboured and fostered
within New Zealand academia,” one wrote. And
an Auckland ecologist asked how her department
could now be considered a “safe place” for Māori
students and scholars. “Rather than this letter
and the associated ‘debate’ progressing us forward
as a society, it enables white supremacy,” she
wrote.
New Zealand’s national academy for science and the
humanities, Royal Society Te Apārangi, denounced
the “harm” caused by the “misguided view” of the
authors and rejected their suggestion that
“mātauranga Māori is not a valid truth”. Asked by
Times Higher Education how it had formed this
interpretation of a letter co-authored by three of
its own members, it declined to comment.
The letter’s seven authors included Garth Cooper,
an Auckland biochemistry and medicine professor
who has Māori grandparents and who, although he
does not speak te reo (“My grandmother thought my
brother and I should learn English,” he explains),
knows “quite a lot” of words in the language.
Cooper has worked with Māori patients and
communities for years, and, as a longstanding
member of the Māori Committee of the Health
Research Council of New Zealand, contributed to
early drafts of the society’s guidelines on
research involving Māori. He has also developed
tutorials to help overcome the educational
disadvantage faced by many Māori and Pacific
Islander medical students. And his research
focuses on diabetes – a condition experienced
disproportionately by Polynesians. He stresses the
importance of a “factual basis” in the practice
and teaching of medicine.
“Excellence in the knowledge and understanding of
medicine is very important to me, as it is to
science,” he says. “Accessibility is really
important as well, so that people have access to
optimal care wherever they live. The main reason I
signed that letter is because I was concerned
[that teaching] Māori kids about the colonising
effects of science [would] lead to loss of
opportunity.”
Cooper credits fellow Māori Ross Ihaka, an
Auckland mathematician who co-created the R
open-source programming language, for “the most
important thing that’s come out of New Zealand in
the last 100 years. I think of young Māori
scholars that would be the next Ross Ihaka
basically missing out because they were told that
science was a colonising influence of no interest
to them.”
Auckland physics professor Shaun Hendy, a Pākehā,
has a different view. He says the colonisation of
New Zealand was “very much entwined with science”.
“Violent encounters” began from the moment that
James Cook’s crew became the first Europeans to
set foot on New Zealand soil during a voyage to
observe the transit of Venus.
Hendy says this history must be acknowledged.
“Allowing kids to interrogate it” will do much
more to alleviate the implicit Māori mistrust of
science than “sweeping things under the carpet. If
scientists aren’t addressing that, why would you
trust them?”
A response to the Listener letter, initiated by
Hendy, has attracted more than 2,000 signatures
from academics, students and alumni from all over
New Zealand and as far afield as Canada, Chile and
Denmark. “Science has long excluded indigenous
peoples from participation, preferring them as
subjects for study and exploitation,” the letter
says. “Indigenous ways of knowing, including
mātauranga, have always included methodologies
that overlap with ‘Western’ understandings of the
scientific method. [Mātauranga] offers ways of
viewing the world that are unique and
complementary to other knowledge systems.”
Hendy is principal scientist with Te Pūnaha
Matatini, a complex systems research centre that
claimed the 2020 Prime Minister’s Science Prize
for helping steer New Zealand’s globally admired
policy response to Covid-19. He credits the
centre’s early success partly to an indigenous
board member who disabused researchers of their
initial assumption that Māori, as a young
population, would not be particularly susceptible
to the virus.
“He drew on his oral history of the 1918
pandemic,” Hendy says. “He knew that Māori
suffered disproportionately in that pandemic
compared to Pākehā. He was quite insistent.”
The outcry over the letter in The Listener echoes
global arguments about the decolonisation of
university curricula. But, according to
Freshwater, Auckland’s vice-chancellor, the heat
in such debates often obscures the light,
prompting many people to opt out entirely.
“Nobody is wrong here,” she says. “Why would
we want to make people wrong for engaging in
debate and dialogue? I didn’t want to close this
down. I wanted to open it up. This is a great
opportunity to have a thoughtful, respectful
dialogue that places universities at the heart of
contentious ideas that can be examined using
critical analysis, evidence and debate
– these being essential to the process of
advancing knowledge."
Freshwater worries that people do not feel safe to
speak out, within or outside academia, anywhere in
the world. "Reactive emotions rather than passion
lead. Everything gets inflamed and exacerbated. I
don’t think it’s helpful to have everybody
modifying their behaviour because they might be
attacked on social media and people might threaten
them.”
For Auckland fish ecologist Kendall Clements,
co-authoring the letter in The Listener may have
taken a professional toll. Within 12 days of the
letter’s publication, Clements was removed from
two collaboratively taught ecology and evolution
courses that he had helped deliver for years. And
while an email criticising the authors was
distributed to staff and graduate students in the
School of Biological Sciences, Cooper’s attempt to
respond through the same channel was blocked.
The university says the school email distribution
list was “not the appropriate medium” for this
type of debate, so its moderators were told not to
allow further emails on the topic. And Clements’
teaching duties were changed to balance his
workload after another academic’s departure, “and
to ensure that the best teaching teams were in
place to deliver all courses. The Listener letter
was a catalyst for actioning this, but not for the
decision.”
Clements says many academics have privately
thanked him for voicing concerns that they share
but are afraid to express. He says he supports the
inclusion of mātauranga Māori elements when they
can clearly add value – in subjects on overfishing
or tree preservation, for example – but questions
their relevance to things like DNA replication.
He says Pākehā academics who raise such questions
are told to mind their own business. “I am far
from alone in having concerns about this. It’s not
just the lack of collegiality; it is the
assumption that only Māori get to have an opinion
on what gets taught and how. Anything taught in a
science paper should be open to challenge by
anyone.”
Rata says that even a year ago, she thought
universities were largely immune to such issues.
“Now there is a move to insert indigenous Māori
knowledge throughout the university curriculum and
throughout broad university practices. The problem
is, we can’t actually talk about it.”
Hendy, though, says Pākehā academics need to think
about “relationship building” and how they work
with Māori communities. “There are ways of doing
it respectfully, and there are ways of doing it
disrespectfully. I think the controversy is partly
generational. Younger New Zealanders are very
comfortable with the direction of the country.”
Hoskins says she has experienced controversies
like this before and tries “not to give too much
oxygen” to opponents of including mātauranga
Māori in curricula.
“There’s a wave of interest and positivity, and
it’s much more bedded down among the younger
generations of not just Māori, but non-Māori,” she
says. “I think we’ve seen a sea change. But
when the wave comes in, the wave goes back. It’s
just a complicated dance.”
john.ross@timeshighereducation.com
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