The guaranteed Māori seats are a distinguishing and controversial feature of New Zealand’s democracy. In recent years, a number of reports, commentators and politicians have called for the seats to be abolished on the grounds that they are no longer “needed” in New Zealand’s proportional electoral system. These claims are usually grounded in principles of equality. This paper makes the opposite claim: that principles of equality create convincing and coherent justifications for the Māori seats.

This paper is about the adoption of a novel way of using documentary analysis in order to be culturally responsive in a research setting. It describes an original method, located in an actual empirical study in a wānanga, that meshed the analysis of documents with a group hui through a bricolage approach. To support a Māori kaupapa, the researcher wished to incorporate values of participation and collaboration, thus overturning the traditional values of simplicity, passivity and individuality that are the purported advantages of documentary analysis.

In recent times, during the Māori language revitalisation era, there has been a renewed interest in learning and promoting Māori dialects. Iwi identification is often signalled by younger speakers of Māori through pronunciation, idiom, vocabulary and written forms that are thought to be associated with a particular iwi or region. To date, there has not been promotion of a standard form of Māori; standardisation efforts have instead largely focused on lexical/technical development and promoting orthographic consistencies for writing Māori.

Protein intakes of advanced age Māori participating in Te Puāwaitanga o Ngā Tapuwae Kia Ora Tonu (LiLACS NZ) are presented. Detailed dietary assessments were completed by 216 Māori men and women aged 81–91 years using a repeat 24-hour multiple pass recall. Nutrient intakes were analysed using FOODfiles 2010. Among this cohort of older Mäori men and women, the highest contributors of protein intake were fish and seafood, meat and poultry. By contrast, bread, followed by milk, beef and veal were the main protein source in men and women over 70 years in the New Zealand Adult Nutrition Survey 2008/09.

Many Māori researchers have mahi-toi skills. Mahi-toi, arts and the production of art, is where a concept takes physical form, and is brought into the physical realm by mahi-ā-ringa. The mahi-toi practitioner is the conduit. When the practitioner is also the researcher and vice versa, these vernaculars can enrich each other, and structure the work. Setting research writing practice beside mahi-toi practice also lends theoretical and analytical frameworks that could be useful for mahi-toi practitioners making the transition to academic research. In this article, I focus on mahi-toi as the scaffolding for theoretical analysis and writing frameworks across the arts.

Māori directly or indirectly experience disability at a higher rate than any other population group in Aotearoa New Zealand. Despite one in three Māori having some form of disability, Māori have less access to support and health and disability services. Currently, gaps exist in knowledge related to Māori and disability, and this is not helped by disabled Māori being excluded from health and disability policy and service planning forums. With regard to disability frameworks, the medical model and the social model are the predominant northern hemisphere approaches to working with disabled persons.

The founding of the esteemed Atamira Dance Company (ADC) in 2000 signified a new wave of Māori dance, integrating cultural strengthening with innovation. For instance, the distinguished and founding members of the ADC, Louise Potiki Bryant and Jack Gray, seized the opportunity to collaborate with the inspirational scholar Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal. This paper provides a glimpse into their combined efforts towards developing the breadth and depth of haka through their contribution to the whare tapere recovery.

This article examines the issue of racial silencing in mainstream education by analysing four autoethnographic vignettes based on the authors’ teaching experiences. The methodology draws attention to the underlying racial assumptions that underpin the everyday of teachers’ working lives, thus demonstrating how silencing serves to perpetuate the interests of Pākehā culture.

The Atiawa ki Whakarongotai Charitable Trust recently instigated qualitative research to better understand the notion of iwi connectedness and the link with oranga. This paper reports of the findings of that research, which examined how connectedness is understood by iwi and identified implications of connectedness on oranga. Thirty Atiawa ki Whakarongotai iwi members were interviewed between February and June 2015 using a semi-structured interview guide. Questions related to multiple aspects of connectedness, including their participation in iwi and marae activities, barriers and enablers to participation, and advantages and disadvantages of participation.

This article presents the findings of a research project that examined six Māori students’ perceptions of how their Māori identity impacted on their experiences in a four-year Bachelor of Physical Education (BPE) programme. The BPE programme is positioned in a faculty of education situated in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, and has an annual intake of approximately 60–70 students. On average 20% of these identify as Māori. The research process involved both individual and group interviews conducted by the first author, who asked the students what Māori identity meant to them, and how they sensed their Māori identity had impacted on their experience of the BPE programme.