Conception, construction and the cultural significance of Te Parapara Garden in Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wiremu T. Puke

Te Parapara Garden is the only complete pre-European-style Māori horticultural garden in the world. Historically inspired and empirically researched, it lies within the Hamilton Gardens on a young river terrace immediately adjacent to the Waikato River in Hamilton (Kirikiriroa), Aotearoa New Zealand. In this article, Wiremu Puke (Ngāti Wairere, Ngāti Porou) – a tohunga whakairo (master carver, including using pre-steel tools) and a tohunga whakapapa (genealogical expert on his tribal affiliations) of Ngāti Wairere (the mana whenua, or first people of the traditional ancestral tribal lands of Kirikiriroa) – describes the design and development of Te Parapara Garden from its initial concept in 2003 and the construction of its many features, including the waharoa (gateway), pou (carved pillars), pātaka (storehouse), whatarangi (small storehouse), taeapa (fencing) and rua kūmara (underground storage pit), and the sourcing and use of kōkōwai (red ochre). The garden was completed in 2010. Its ongoing functioning, including the annual planting and harvesting of traditional pre-European kūmara (sweet potato) using modified, mounded soils (puke or ahu), is also covered. The unique Te Parapara Garden is of great cultural importance and a source of pride, knowledge and understanding for national and international visitors and empirical and academic researchers.

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Edmond

Abstract Literary studies has taken a global turn through such institutional frameworks as global romanticism, global modernism, global anglophone, global postcolonial, global settler studies, world literature, and comparative literature. Though promising an escape from parochialism, nationalism, and Eurocentrism, this turn often looks suspiciously like another version of Anglo-European imperialism. This essay argues that, rather than continue the expansionary line of recent decades, global literary studies must allow other perspectives to draw into question its concepts, practices, and theories, including those associated with the terms literature, discipline, and comparison. As a settler colonial (Pākehā) scholar in Aotearoa New Zealand, I attend particularly to Māori literary scholars from Apirana Ngata, Te Kapunga Matemoana (Koro) Dewes, and Hirini Melbourne to Alice Te Punga Somerville, Tina Makereti, and Arini Loader. Their work highlights the limitedness of global literary studies in its current disciplinary guise. Disciplines remain important when they bring recognition to something previously marginalized, as in the battle to have Māori literature recognized within Pākehā institutions. What institutionalized modes of global literary studies need, however, is not discipline but indiscipline: a recognition of the limits of dominant disciplinary objects, frameworks, and practices, and an openness to other ways of seeing the world.


2021 ◽  
pp. 195-209
Author(s):  
Jodie Hunter ◽  
Roberta Hunter ◽  
John Tupouniua ◽  
Generosa Leach

AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic has caused new ways of doing and being, both in education systems and beyond across the world. In the context of Aotearoa/New Zealand, the widely supported government approach focused on the well-being of the nation with a position that saving lives was more important than maintaining an open economy. As researchers and educators, we supported teachers as they worked with their students in their home settings. This provided us with an opportunity to explore a vision of a reinvented system of mathematics education beyond institutional and formal structures of schools. In this chapter, we present the analysis of the responses from 24 educators mainly from low socioeconomic urban settings as they reflected on how they enacted mathematics teaching and learning during the lockdown while connecting with students and their families as well as their subsequent learning from this experience. Results highlighted that the mathematical learning of students went beyond what was accessed by digital means and included parents drawing on rich everyday opportunities. A key finding was that by supporting and privileging the well-being of students and communities, the connections and relationships between educators and families were enhanced.


Author(s):  
Jaspreet Kaur ◽  
Renata Jadresin Milic

Though short, Aotearoa/New Zealand’s history is rich and holds an abundance of knowledge preserved in the form of songs, beliefs, practices, and narratives that inform this country’s unique place in the world as well as the identity of its people. This paper observes that with migratory history and a heritage of colonization, the people of Aotearoa/New Zealand express three identities: indigenous, colonial and migrant, all with a claim to appropriate representation in the country’s built fabric. It discusses the current state of knowledge by looking at the history and architectural tradition manifested in Auckland, the largest and fastest-growing city in Aotearoa. It adds that further research is required to understand and develop an appropriate methodology to address Auckland’s growing multiculturalism, which lacks adequate expression.


Author(s):  
Angela Summersgill

Aotearoa/New Zealand is considered one of the most multicultural countries on the planet. The 2013 census revealed that ‘New Zealand has more ethnicities than there are countries in the world. In total, 213 ethnic groups were identified in the census, whereas there are 196 countries recognised by Statistics New Zealand’. This chapter shares some of the issues, experiences, questions, and practice implications arising for the author, a mixed-race, British-born community development practitioner and social work educator living in Aotearoa. She has sought to better understand the issues and questions regarding the coexistence of biculturalism and multiculturalism; and to question what it might be that we separately and collectively need to do in order to move forward with respect and inclusivity.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Ruth Ballantyne

<p>This thesis highlights two significant flaws in birth certification and legal parentage regimes in Aotearoa New Zealand that negatively impact children conceived and raised in an array of diverse family structures. First, birth certificates currently reflect a child’s legal parentage, excluding any reference to a child’s genetic or gestational origins. This thesis draws on social constructionist conceptions of the self and narrative identity theory, alongside Māori understandings of aspects of whakapapa, to demonstrate that birth certificates should incorporate more information about a child’s origins, and that a failure to do so can have negative consequences for a child’s identity development. To rectify these informational deficits, this thesis argues for the reform of birth certification in Aotearoa New Zealand. It demonstrates the nature and potential of these reforms through the creation of a prototype birth certificate for all children that incorporates their genetic, gestational, and legal parentage.  Second, this thesis claims that the current model of legal parentage, which permits a child to have a maximum of two legally recognised parents at any given time, does not reflect the lives of children who are intentionally brought into the world and raised by more than two individuals. Rather, it embodies historic understandings of legal parentage that privilege traditional heterosexual western forms of reproduction, and fails to account for the realities of assisted human reproduction and modern-day family formation. Expanding the operation of legal parentage to incorporate all of a child’s parental figures (and including them on the child’s birth certificate from the outset) would provide greater legal protection for children born into multi-parent families, in line with that currently enjoyed by children with one or two legal parents. Therefore, this thesis develops an intentional model of legal parentage accommodating more than two legal parents where a child is conceived by assisted human reproduction in specified circumstances.  Reimagining birth certificates and legal parentage as proposed in this thesis would better reflect the social and narrative realities of identity formation, especially for children, whereby who they become is greatly shaped by the individuals in their lives and their experiences in the world. It would also better meet our obligations under the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child, as well as possibly affording greater respect to Māori conceptions of identity, which is of fundamental importance given the classification of whakapapa as a taonga guaranteed protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The expansion of legal parentage beyond the two-parent paradigm would also provide greater legal protection to children in Aotearoa New Zealand, arguably making this area of family law consistent with a legal framework that is otherwise well attuned to recognising the diversity and complexity of family relationships.</p>


2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Neil Ballantyne ◽  
Simon Lowe

This issue of the journal marks a new stage in the continuing journey of Aotearoa New Zealand Social Work: this is our first open access issue and all journal content will now be freely available to anyone in the world from our new journal website (http://anzswjournal.nz). By taking this step we are contributing to a worldwide open access movement and to the foundation of an intellectual commons where the fruits of academic labour are available to all.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Melissa Bryant

<p>Ngā Ūpoko Tukutuku/the Māori Subject Headings (MSH) were released in 2006, with the aim of “provid[ing] a structured path to subjects that Māori customers can…use to find material in libraries…using terms familiar to Māori and arranged in a hierarchy that reflects the Māori view of the world”. The project is a world leader and internationally well-regarded, but very little literature has been published evaluating the uptake and use of the MSH.  I talked with staff in wānanga, university, public, and special libraries, to explore how research libraries are applying the MSH and offering the MSH to their users, when adding metadata, providing reference and research services, or supporting library users to search independently.  Libraries employed diverse approaches tailored to their specific users, but participants consistently emphasised the importance of the MSH, advocated for further development of the thesaurus, and hoped for more training and information sharing between libraries.  Results are discussed in terms of four questions - What is working well? What could work better? What are the benefits of this work? What further questions do we need to answer?  Suggestions for further research include broader assessment of the actual and potential uptake of the MSH in libraries and other memory institutions, discussion with library users, and consideration of the future development of the MSH.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Melissa Bryant

<p>Ngā Ūpoko Tukutuku/the Māori Subject Headings (MSH) were released in 2006, with the aim of “provid[ing] a structured path to subjects that Māori customers can…use to find material in libraries…using terms familiar to Māori and arranged in a hierarchy that reflects the Māori view of the world”. The project is a world leader and internationally well-regarded, but very little literature has been published evaluating the uptake and use of the MSH.  I talked with staff in wānanga, university, public, and special libraries, to explore how research libraries are applying the MSH and offering the MSH to their users, when adding metadata, providing reference and research services, or supporting library users to search independently.  Libraries employed diverse approaches tailored to their specific users, but participants consistently emphasised the importance of the MSH, advocated for further development of the thesaurus, and hoped for more training and information sharing between libraries.  Results are discussed in terms of four questions - What is working well? What could work better? What are the benefits of this work? What further questions do we need to answer?  Suggestions for further research include broader assessment of the actual and potential uptake of the MSH in libraries and other memory institutions, discussion with library users, and consideration of the future development of the MSH.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 102 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-95
Author(s):  
Bruce Kaye

For several decades now, Anglican churches around the world have been struggling with serious conflicts about gender relationships. Internal troubles have been most apparent in the United States, Canada, England, Scotland, and more recently in Aotearoa New Zealand. These conflicts between churches have occupied the attention of the institutions of the Anglican Communion, usually in terms of establishing some framework of unity between the churches. In this context, I wish to suggest a different way of approaching these issues. I want to draw on a renewed sense of catholicity in the church and of the eschatological framework in which all Christians are called to live. In the process, I hope to offer a picture of what might be a vocation for the Anglican Communion, specifically its institutions, that will better honor the narrative tradition of Anglicanism and provide a more effective way into engaging with the problems of our times.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document