Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]
LINDA WAIMARIE NIKORA
Indigenous psychology or Kaupapa Māori psychology is more holistic in its outlook. It’s more outwards looking into the universe. We’re all part of the universe. And so, it’s more focused on relationships with everything. So that’s our relationships with plants, with fishes, with animals, as well as our relationships with each other as human beings. That doesn’t mean to say that we reject mainstream psychology or Eurocentric psychology. We just simply understand it for what it is. It’s an important knowledge base, and it’s one that can actually complement Indigenous knowledge and our ways of working with people.
SHILOH GROOT
My name is Shiloh Groot. So it’s an interesting way in which Indigenous people in Ontario like to introduce themselves. First, you greet the person that you address to the audience, then you give a context for how you came to be to this world, and then, finally, you introduce yourself. I guess, long story short is I am associated with [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] for better or worse in peace time and conflict and the best and the worst ways ever possible. If you’re Māori, it tells you a lot about who I am and where I come from. It gives you a strong context to who I am and my place in this world, the relationships I form with other tribes alongside ours. I’m an associate professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland. I have strong research interests in homelessness and precarity; Indigenous world views and communities; sex work; and labour justice. And migration, and how we come to know one another, and how we can create dialogue and solidarity.
LINDA WAIMARIE NIKORA
I’m Linda Waimarie Nikora. [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]. My tribal groups are Tuhoe, Te Aitanga a Hauiti, which is on a sea-based tribe, and a few other sea-based tribes, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] as well. So I’m a professor of Indigenous studies, but formerly a professor of Kaupapa Māori psychology at the University of Waikato.
BRIDGETTE MASTERS-AWATERE
My name is Bridget Masters-Awatere. I come from [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] regions. So my genealogy connects me to the far North from Ahipara, which is the southern end of the tail in the North Island, all the way up to the very top. And then, on my mother’s side, to the Bay of Plenty, focusing on the Township of Onepu, just outside of Kawerau, and then [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] connects me all the way through to Lake Taupo region [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] so that’s where [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] I’m currently associate professor at the University of Waikato in the School of Psychology.
DARRIN HODGETTS
So I’m Darrin Hodgetts. I grew up in the deep south. So I’m from Mirihiku. I work with Kaupapa Māori psychologists. I mean, I identify as a Pakeha New Zealander or [INAUDIBLE] Pakeha, but I do have family ties into Kai Tahu and I currently work on Mirihiku regeneration and projects down there. But I also embrace all the other aspects of who I am.
[ON-SCREEN TEXT: ‘WHAT IS KAUPAPA MĀORI PSYCHOLOGY?’]
LINDA WAIMARIE NIKORA
Kaupapa Māori psychology is defined by three very, very broad general areas. So the first is survival. We all want to live long lives, and we all want to enjoy those lives. However, as an Indigenous people, we’re faced by challenges of homelessness, food insecurity, having to find shelter, accommodation, having to find employment and ways to actually sustain our families. And those are all survival issues, they impact our health, our wellbeing, and all those areas need to be addressed in order to thrive. So that’s the first area. The second is maintaining our distinctiveness as a culture group. We want to be Māori moving into the future. And we want to take the knowledge of our tipuna and ancestors with us and pass that on to further generations as well. There’s a wealth of learning and knowledge that’s contained within what we call mātauranga Māori, or Māori knowledges. That knowledge is vital for our survival, our wellbeing, etc. The third is around wanting to make for a better world moving into the future. And that’s not just only within our own individual lives but extending out further into the environment, our seas, our waters, our lands, and ensuring that what the next generation inherits is better than what we did.
SHILOH GROOT
Kaupapa Māori psychology, I guess, arose in response to frustration with the individualistic and colonising approach of mainstream psychology that ignored us, would measure us, observe our misery, and would have no interest in engaging in our strengths and capacities and could sometimes behave violently towards us. As Māori, we’ve always had psychological frameworks to understand ourselves, how we relate to one another, the responsibilities we have towards one another, our relationship to the environment. It’s a world view that values continuity, unity. It doesn’t shy away from conflict. There are frameworks for working through conflict, for healing.
DARRIN HODGETTS
What we have in Kaupapa Māori psychology is a view of the self as fundamentally interconnected and related to different contexts and so on. So that becomes all part of it. That becomes this idea that you can’t deal with individuals in isolation. The problems we face aren’t just in your head. They often come from relationships in society. And those can be between people with family and community, but they can also be – particularly in a colonial context like ours, they can be the structures that have been imposed on Māori people. I think, also, this relationality is important because the thing I really like about Kaupapa Māori psychology is it’s by Māori for Māori, but it’s also for everybody else.
LINDA WAIMARIE NIKORA
We’re all part of the universe. All life has life. So that’s everything from the rocks we might encounter, the plant life we might encounter, sea, fishes, even buildings and things that we create. They all have a life. And that life is referred to as mauri, everything has a mauri. Because everything has a mauri it demands respect. So we have to respect our environments that we’re a part of. When we move into the space of respecting our environments and everything that’s in it, we step into the universe in ways that can be healing, therapeutic, and where we’re able to be good citizens in terms of future generations.
[ON-SCREEN TEXT: ‘WHAT IS WHANAUNGATANGA?’]
Whanaungatanga is really about relationality – the ways in which we reside in relationship with each other and the world around us. What that then means is that therapies and wellness can be grown within relationships as opposed to just within an individual. So, for example, if I take my relationship with a child, I can focus on the child being a problem or I can focus on the relationship that I have with the child. We’re walking away from the individual and seeing the individual in context and in relationship with everything that surrounds that particular person.
DARRIN HODGETTS
I think Kaupapa Māori psychology is also part of a broader movement within psychology to not only indigenise but repluralise our discipline because all cultural groups and communities have their own psychology. Kaupapa Māori psychology is actually quite an open psychology, and it’s a psychology that wants to have conversations with other psychologies, be they Eurocentric – there’s no choice in that matter because that’s the dominant approach in the field – but also with all these other psychologists, particularly in the Pacific and the Global South. So when we get PhD students from Vietnam, Indonesia, places like that, they can see themselves in Kaupapa Māori psychology, and they can see themselves developing something similar for themselves. And I think that’s what’s really great about it as an approach.
[ON-SCREEN TEXT: ‘HOW DO YOU WORK AS A KAUPAPA MĀORI PSYCHOLOGIST?’]
BRIDGETTE MASTERS-AWATERE
Everything I do is about centring Māori knowledge as a legitimate source of knowledge. It’s scientific. It’s artistic. It’s creative. It’s history. So it’s recognising all of those aspects of who we are that have been discredited by Western psychology, that whole kind of notion that the only legitimate knowledge is that knowledge that’s been written on pages, that’s been handed down through published books. But actually, Māori have a longstanding knowledge that’s been passed down through our [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] all of that knowledge. When you understand it and can engage with it appropriately, you can see how that reflects the times that our ancestors were engaging with.
LINDA WAIMARIE NIKORA
We set about a project looking at tangi – Māori ways of death and dying. So in the Māori world, we hold that when we are born, we come from our ancestors. And when we pass, we return to our ancestors. And so that becomes a cycle of life. So in the Māori world, we have some very, very elaborate grief and dying rituals, as is true in lots of other cultural groups. And those rituals are really, really important in terms of healing the breach that’s been formed when a person passes. So that person leaves a gap. How do we negotiate that breach? Secondly, helping to facilitate the journey of the spirit to whatever their next chapter is, and thirdly, putting that community back together again – how do we put that community back together again? So in terms of our tangi rituals, that’s one way in which we achieve that at a community level. And so as a psychologist, the important thing is to focus in on the community-level practices and make sure that those practices are adequately robust to facilitate that transition and that healing process.
DARRIN HODGETTS
Most homeless people in New Zealand come from the precariat, or people from households with insecure jobs or on unemployment benefits that pay unliving wages. They’re unsustainable situations. And what we did is we took the 10,000 heavy users of the food bank. We then selected the most heavy users, 1,000 of them, and then we basically randomly selected 100 and started calling these households. And what we did is we removed food insecurity by giving them free food for 18 months. And we also interacted with them fortnightly. And we just traced their everyday lives. And what we found is all sorts of really interesting things – when you give people food security and some stability in life, children may have been off school for 143 days in one household the year before. When they were part of family 100, those kids were off school for three days. So what we could show is that at the time, welfare was really punitive. But if you showed care and support to households and you resource them, they did well.
[ON-SCREEN TEXT: ‘WHAT HAS BEEN THE IMPACT?’]
BRIDGETTE MASTERS-AWATERE
25 years ago, there was barely any literature. There was barely any research. There was barely any – we weren’t even on the radar in terms of thinking about health and wellbeing from a Māori perspective. So now there’s this whole body of literature. You’ve got the next generation who are expanding and deepening that knowledge. You’ve got it on the radar of policy writers, of ministry research funders. And it’s being built into funding expectations and reporting expectations.
LINDA WAIMARIE NIKORA
The impact of Kaupapa Māori psychology on psychology, on mainstream psychology, has been to demonstrate that there are different ways of being and seeing and standing and living in the world. And if we understand what those ways are, we’re better able to treat with people and to support them in terms of their aspirations.
SHILOH GROOT
I think the impact is immeasurable. Psychology was largely failing us. It was violent in many ways. We had over institutionalisation of our people. We had researchers going in, denigrating our communities, ridiculing our communities, inability to engage with our strengths and our capacities, our own understandings. With all these devastating social issues that were impacting us as a people, that’s all they noted – our misery and what was going wrong for us, to a point where that was almost becoming synonymous with what it means to be Māori. I think Kaupapa Māori revitalised and transformed a lot of that discourse and gave us a pathway towards our own healing that was centred in our own understandings and connected to our own spiritual life worlds.
SINGER: [NON-ENGLISH SINGING]
[APPLAUSE]