Te Kaharoa

Te Rimu Ahu Whenua Land Trust in the Face of Climate Change

2026-04-15T22:37:10+00:00

Climate change poses an escalating global threat, with Māori—the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand—disproportionately exposed to its cumulative impacts. Increasingly frequent and severe weather events require Māori landowners to develop adaptive strategies that protect and sustain lands to which they hold enduring cultural, spiritual, and genealogical ties. Despite this urgency, limited research examines how small, rural Māori land trusts navigate climate risks while upholding tikanga, whakapapa obligations, and intergenerational responsibilities. Drawing on my doctoral research, this article examines how Te Rimu Ahu Whenua Trust, located in Te Araroa on the East Coast, is responding to these pressures. Using a whakapapa research methodology, it centres the perspectives of five trustees who discuss the changing climate, its impacts on the Trust’s whenua, and their aspirations for the future. Their reflections highlight mounting environmental concerns—particularly erosion, river instability, and ecosystem degradation—alongside the values, leadership practices, and succession needs that shape decision-making. The study provides new empirical insight into Māori climate adaptation and shows how Māori land trusts operate as critical, yet often under-recognised, sites of Indigenous climate leadership. By foregrounding place-based governance grounded in cultural values, the findings offer practical guidance for district and regional councils, government agencies, funders, Māori landowners, Māori land trusts, Māori communities, and Indigenous peoples globally who are confronting similar climate-related challenges.

The Stories we tell

2026-06-24T22:13:20+00:00

Using the intersecting stories of two 19th Century individuals, Wiremu Tamehana and Joshia Firth, i argue that Place-Based Education offers a sensetive and inclusive way of using New Zealand Teaching Council’s Tātaiako: Cultural competencies for teachers of Māori learners.

A Ngāti Hauā instigator of Place-Based Education suggests that its “Multi-generational” perspectives can align with “geology, ecology, sociology, politics” (Penetito, 2009, p.7) in differing dynamics. My 2 stories offer many of these elements. Teachers can begin with simple’ questions like ‘Where am I?’ ‘What is the nature of this place?’ ‘What sustains this community?’(Manning, 2012)” can support ways to hear differing, often conflicting histories about the soil, its uses and values in sustaining their peoples.

The prime value is to the teachers, learning about the depth and richness of their communities.

The Piko Stone and Organization of the Stones of Kūkaniloko

2026-07-29T22:02:46+00:00

Over two decades researching precontact Hawaiian astronomical knowledge at Kūkaniloko, the organization of the site's stones became increasingly apparent – that the arrangement represents the Pacific Ocean between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, indicating the equator, the doldrums, and the North and South Pacific Gyres, and that the same oceanic system is also indicated by the two sets of concentric circles on the piko stone.

Challenging Neoliberal Tertiary Education Systems in Aotearoa New Zealand Through Pacific-Centred Pedagogical Strategies

2026-08-31T22:13:10+00:00

This article explores the contours and constraints of Aotearoa New Zealand’s neoliberal tertiary education system and presents Pacific-centred strategies for teaching social work which contradict, and yet can be deployed within, this system. A critical analysis of neoliberal ideology, discourse, and managerial practice as it plays out in the tertiary education space is followed by an articulation of Pacific values and worldviews which sit uneasily in this context. Drawing primarily on their experiences teaching social work at the bachelor’s level within a large Polytechnic in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland (MIT and Unitec), the two main authors of this article identify pedagogical strategies which are not only culturally appropriate for a student body that includes a significant number of Indigenous students, but also aligned with social work principles and values. The authors argue that teaching approaches aligned with Pacific ways of being can serve as a counterbalance to the larger economic and social policy contexts which structure contemporary educational settings in Aotearoa, and act as a form of counter hegemony in relation to pervasive neoliberal discourses.

Shirking Responsibility and Accountability: Racial Capitalism, Biculturalism and the Ethics of the Crusaders Super Rugby Franchise’s Rebranding

2026-09-20T19:54:15+00:00

This article examines the Crusaders Super Rugby franchise’s partial rebranding after the 15 March 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks as a case study in how sport reproduces settler/invader colonialism, racial capitalism and white possessive power in Aotearoa New Zealand. While the attacks prompted public scrutiny of the franchise’s name, medieval crusading symbolism and pre-match performance culture, New Zealand Rugby and the Crusaders retained the “Crusaders” name and substituted the horseman logo with koru-inspired branding. Drawing on Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s theorisation of the white possessive, the Doctrine of Discovery, critiques of bicultural containment, and Māori constitutional values, the article analyses media discourse, stakeholder consultation and branding decisions to show how symbolic reform can protect institutional authority while appearing responsive to racial harm. I argue that the rebrand commodified a history of Christian conquest and settler nostalgia for commercial profit, while marginalising Muslim concerns and avoiding deeper accountability for Islamophobia, white supremacy and colonial violence. The deployment of Māori design elements functioned as a settler move to innocence: bicultural aesthetics were used to soften critique, provide cultural legitimacy and redirect attention away from the franchise’s refusal to relinquish the name. Consultation processes similarly operated as performative inclusion, privileging majority sentiment, fan loyalty and brand equity over the experiences of communities most directly affected. By situating the controversy within longer histories of Indigenous dispossession, terra nullius-like logics in Te Waipounamu, racialised capitalism and the containment of mana motuhake, the article demonstrates that the issue was never simply one of branding or public sensitivity. Genuine transformation requires more than a redesigned logo. It requires decolonial accountability, Muslim–Māori solidarity, mana whenua narrative authority, and sporting governance grounded in tikanga, manaakitanga, pono, tika and mana motuhake.

Beyond Citation: The Doctrine of Discovery, White Possessive Sovereignty and Mana Motuhake in Aotearoa New Zealand – A Response to Paul Moon

2026-09-29T16:25:45+00:00

This article responds to Paul Moon’s claim that the Doctrine of Discovery had little or no bearing on British colonisation in Aotearoa New Zealand. It argues that Moon’s analysis is constrained by an evidentiary frame that treats the Doctrine as a discrete historical instrument, whose relevance depends on explicit citation in British colonial documents. Against this narrow historicist approach, the article reframes the Doctrine of Discovery as a wider colonial grammar of possession, adapted through imperial law, discovery claims, Crown pre-emption, radical title, native title, waste lands policy and paternal governance. Drawing on Kaupapa Māori analysis, Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s theory of white possessive sovereignty and scholarship on mana motuhake, the article demonstrates that the Doctrine’s significance in Aotearoa lies not in proving direct papal authority over Protestant Britain but in tracing how its operative logics were secularised and enacted. Two sites are central to this argument: the Crown’s assertion of sovereignty over Te Waipounamu and Rakiura by right of discovery and the paternalist assertion of authority over Māori, including non-signatory hapū and iwi who never ceded mana motuhake. The article conceptualises the latter move as a ‘right of paternalism’, that is, the Crown’s claimed authority to govern Indigenous peoples while recognising their presence but denying their equal jurisdiction. It concludes that Moon’s functionalist account risks reproducing colonial innocence by fragmenting colonisation into contingent motives while leaving the structure of possession intact. Mana motuhake exposes this structure and demands a historiography attentive to colonial enactment, beyond mere citation.