Role models serve multiple functions as they influence Māori students’ goals and school aspirations. While Māori students are faced with various educational barriers, scholars contend that having a positive role model can influence their educational persistence and overall engagement at school. Therefore, it is important to consider who Māori students choose as role models and how they influence their goals and aspirations.

Giving voice to kaumātua perspectives and experiences, and those of older people in general, during the COVID-19 pandemic has been rare because older people are more often spoken about than provided with opportunities to speak for themselves. When they have been spoken about, the focus has been on their vulnerability. While such vulnerabilities are a critical concern, this focus ignored their active participation in and contributions to their communities.

There have been many attempts at measuring Māori identity and cultural engagement, yet there have been no scales created to specifically explore whanaungatanga. Whanaungatanga can be operationalised as active participation in and a sense of belonging to social groups and collective, reciprocal caring relationships. In this article, we document the development of a whanaungatanga scale alongside a measure of Māori identity.

Tapu and noa are often cited as fundamentals by which we enact tikanga, promote well-being and divide labour. However, exactly how tapu informed precolonial gender divisions of labour is difficult to examine, mostly because of the pervasive influence Christianity has had on cosmological narratives, from which tapu derives (Mikaere, 2017; Rewi, 2010; Te Awekotuku, 1994). This article outlines some commentary on the relationship between tapu, gender roles and colonisation, and tries to extend that scholarship.

This paper explores the process of co-designing a mātauranga-Māori-informed mindfulness intervention with rangatahi in a wharekura and examines the effects on wellbeing. Mahitahi co-design methodology underpinned the design, implementation and evaluation of the intervention, and quantitative psychological tests measured improvements in wellbeing and dispositional mindfulness. Findings showed positive indications for a decrease in levels of psychological distress, improvements in Māori quality of life domains and higher levels of dispositional mindfulness.

This article has been inspired by “Why Isn’t My Professor Māori?” (McAllister et al., 2019), an article which appeared in this journal and addressed the under-representation of, and inequities facing, Māori academic staff in universities in Aotearoa New Zealand. I present some personal reflections and raise some questions with regard to academics with Māori heritage but who struggle to identify as Māori. I also describe some of the discomfort of being in the “middle ground” of cultural identity and how this has come about, and argue that we need to engage with such troubled identities and histories if we are to decolonise ourselves and our universities.     

This paper explores how we, three wāhine Māori, are moving through citational practice—who, how, and why we cite. Stemming from a refusal to recirculate settler colonial ideologies in doctoral research, we consider what it means to cite as Māori. In centring whakapapa, we conceptualise citations as extensions of our relational world and as a way we can acknowledge and nurture the intergenerational relationships that constitute who we are, and how we come to know. Citation is an expression of whanaungatanga.

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.