Journal article

The importance of early childhood education programmes has been widely established by researchers, but there has been little research on the outcomes of early childhood Kaupapa Māori educational initiatives in Aotearoa New Zealand. The aim of the research project reported here, He Piki Raukura, was to define Māori child behaviour constructs that may underlie positive Māori child development. We conducted in-depth interviews with two experts and 21 whānau participating in a Kaupapa Māori early years programme in Taranaki.

For Indigenous peoples, and Māori specifically, storytelling and oral history are crucial to the survival of our collective identities, culture and language. Retold across generations, our stories are often explicit and interwoven narratives of personal and collective memories. Drawing on Native American scholar Gerald Vizenor’s (2009) concept of “survivance stories”, this article explores a set of three oral history narratives of kaumātua from Ngāti Tiipa, one of the 33 iwi and hapū of the Waikato-Tainui confederation.

The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting lockdowns in Aotearoa New Zealand have been a source of change, of uncertainty and of anxiety. The ways in which we engage with each other as Indigenous people have had to change drastically and suddenly; our ways of being, of sharing space, of being present, have all had to be adjusted. For Indigenous postgraduate students, COVID-19 and lockdowns have meant a re-shaping and re-thinking of how we come together as a community that supports each other within Westernised institutions and along our academic and research journeys.