Modern-day Māui

I te taha o tōku pāpā.

Ko Huruiki te maunga. Ko Punaruku te awa.

Ko Whangaruru te moana.

Ko Ngaupaiaka me te Uri o Hikihiki ngā hapū. Ko Mōkau me Ngaiotanga ngā marae.

Ko Mataatua te waka. Ko Ngāti Wai te iwi. Nō Whangaruru ahau.

Te taha o tōku māmā. He uri ahau no Samoa, Tokelau me Ingarangi. Ko Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta tāku ingoa.

For me it was really about growing up in a whānau home that was very small.

A lot of my family, in sort of state housing or kind of unstable housing, I suppose, and as a child, sort of seeing that actually having a whare or a home, a place that you could love and call your own was something that I wanted for the people around me.

As I grew up, and I realized that I had sort of the creative side of me as well as the the intellectual side of me that loved my studies. I eventually met my graphics teacher who taught me all about architecture. And in the end, it sort of came together: both my passions at kura as well as my desire to tautoko my whānau and my community, turned into architecture. And it's what I've pursued since I was about 13.

So, the subjects I took at school, I really loved my humanities subjects, so it was like a English and Media Studies. I did a bit of Classics, but then I also took the sciences, Physics. I followed maths all the way through to Stats and Calculus. I've always been really strong and Drama and Kapa Haka so performance.

So for me I had kind of those aspects that I felt were quite well rounded and then in drawing so that the Graphics element that came through at 13 and I followed Graphics through, but a lot of people have studies, they've come through, say the visual arts. So Painting, Photography.

Architecture is really interesting because it draws from both the left and right brain. So having a physics understanding is really important as well as having the capacity to present and kōrero and write about that. So, for me I was lucky in that all of my subjects kind of kept me balanced on that waka through high school.

Architecture is one of the fundamental things we require as humans. It's shelter. It's protection from the elements. You know, we see our manu and our taiao, they create nests. All of our animals, all of our insects have ways of creating shelter for themselves. So architecture is human's way of doing exactly that as creating shelter and protection.

But we've obviously moved beyond just needing shelter in terms of homes and housing, where we also now need train stations, and schools, and arenas, and hospitals. So, architecture is the creation of the built environment. But it's absolute core, everybody actually has a relationship to architecture because it is fundamentally a thing we require to live.

Architecture, and the mahi that I do is pretty varied. It's everything from going to sites, talking to contractors to builders and to guys kind of constructing the things that I've designed. Some days it's drawing, some days it's presenting to clients. A lot of my mahi really is about facilitating our stories being told and creating spaces out of that.

So I do a lot of work with Māori, with Mana Whenua, Iwi Māori across Aotearoa. But for me specifically, the kind of niche that I work in, in architecture is really about storytelling, just with a physical outcome. So yeah, I think I get to combine all of my worlds and the best way where, yeah, occasionally I'm colouring in for a job. I feel like that's my full time job sitting there with a pen and pencil. And some days all I'm doing is talking to people and helping them to articulate the aspirations for their people and how my job can help facilitate that.

So, yeah. I don't think there's any one piece of advice for rangatahi wanting to come into architecture. All I would say is that at the moment architecture might not look outwardly, look like the industry for them, and that is fair. But what I would say is that all of the things that make you Māori, are all of the things that you need bring into this industry, they're not things to leave at the door.

So I have maintained this for years. Kids that do Kapa Haka, are well set up to also come into architecture because you have to present, you have to stand and be confident in front of people. All of those skills are skills that can be used and tapped into. So even though at the moment the industry doesn't look like an industry that might reflect them, it will change and it needs to change with them coming through.

So I understand if people might be nervous, but you know, there's a small group of us here ready to welcome you in. So that come on down, basically. Yeah.

Ko Taumata Mahoe te waka.

Ko Tinana te waka.

Ko Tangonge te Wai.

Te Reke te Repo.

Ko Te Rarawa te Marae.

Ko Ngati Te ao te taha wai ngā hapu.

Ko Te Rarawa te Marae.

Nō Pukepoto ahau.

Ko Troy Brockbank ahau, Kia ora.

So, I got the engineering by accident. It wasn't something that I knew about. It wasn't something that I was pushed towards. Actually, when I wanted to go to university, I wanted to do architecture.

Actually, I talked to the guidance counsellor at high school at Whangārei Boys and they said to me, “You could be an architect, these are the subjects you need to do.”

So I followed the advice did all those subjects and then when I went to apply to be an architect at university, they said, “Oh, you didn't do 7th From Art. So, do you have an art portfolio?” And I had focused more on physics, chemistry, calculus.

That was a bit of a shock to me, so I didn't get in. One of my teachers, a really good teacher, graphics, the graphics design teacher, and he said, “Well, you're actually really good at drawing buildings and structures. And I see, you quite often going around the school looking at structures, the buildings and you quite like the materials.”

So he said, “You're probably more inclined, you know, to be working in the engineering field.” And I was like, “What's engineering?” Which is actually something that's been quite common in my career when I'm trying to explain what engineering is to people and they always say, “Do you fix cars?”

So yeah, that's kind of how I ended up in engineering purely by coincidence and chance.

That big city aspect, it didn't faze me because Tāmaki was only a two hour drive from Whangārei, so whānau were always in Auckland. So, I think that actually helped.

When it was a bit scary was probably when I first started at university and I was just learning my new role as a student with no day to day guardian. I was the guardian. Even in my first year, I actually failed 2 papers. And it comes down to not having the, not living in the household that had regular available support.

Support was there if I asked for it, but there was no one actually watching over me and saying, “You need help.”

Ever since then, I never filed a paper ever again. Actually, I got more A's after that. Then I got home that first year and that was just all determination not to do that ever again, because I nearly got kicked out of engineering.

For something that I didn't really -  wasn't interested in -  but liked, and then failing 2 papers was kind of the thoughts in my head were, “Why are you doing this?” You know, this is terrible. Even the Dean was like, “You know, if you fail another paper, we might have to take you out of the programme.” Overcoming that, the determination and putting that support network in to kind of help me.

My whole whānau are all carpenters, my brother’s a carpenter, my father's a carpenter, his brother's a carpenter. My cousins, my uncle’s sons, they're carpenters. They all run a carpentry business. So in my mind, when I started to do engineering, I was like, “Right, I really want to be a structural engineer.” They kind of keep saying to me, like, “You're really interested in the structures, and you can come back and kind of help us.”

Even when I was looking for a job, when I was a graduate, they introduced me to their structural engineer that they used to work for them in a way to kind of take over.

As things panned out, I didn't do it if I went into water, which I find really weird again, from the aspect like what the careers counsellor told me, to what my graphic design teacher told me, my whānau were telling me, and then I kind of went into water.

Yeah. So, I work at Pattle Delamore Partners, and what we do here is we look at environmental solutions, environmental management, more so to do with environmental like field testing, and then the terms of contaminated land, in terms of water quality, air quality, fresh water management and ecological habitats, taonga species, fish species, everything to do with the environment predominantly onsite or design wise, we have some role in that. 

Making sure you have a safe environment, role in that. Making sure you have a safe environment. It's not just at university where you need a safe environment, you need that safe environment even in the workplace.

And I think that's something in my career I've actually struggled with a lot, being someone who's Māori and an engineer. The question always arises, “Are you an engineer that is Māori or are you a Māori engineer?”

Is the business you're working for working in a field that embraces Māori engineers or does it embrace engineers that are Māori? And they're quite two completely different things.

So I think when you whatever you do in life, we have to make sure you have that safe environment, culturally safe, socially safe environments as well.

E noho ana ki tāku taumata ki Ngongotaha.

Ka titiro whakararo au ki te Rotorua Nui a Kahumatamamoe.

Ka tū ngau au ki te motu tapu a Tinirau ki reira rā i totope ai te kawakawa.

Ka whakaripo i te ia ki Ohau taka rawa au ki te rotoiti i kitea ai e Ihenga.

Tukituki ana rā taku hoe ki ngā  toitoi o kere ki maurea.

Taku rere i te waka a takuika ki ngā hukahuka wai i tere ai taku tae ake ki akeake.

Ki te purae o te ihu o Tamatekapua e koko ia e ara e.

Kia ora ko Wharengaro Whakarangatiratangata tōku ingoa. I'm currently working at Alimetry as a Biomedical Research and Design Engineer.

Yeah, my whānau have always been like tinkerers and problem solvers and all of that sort of stuff, and I didn't know that any of that was engineering. Like they always do, like just home projects and stuff. And that was just what they did. They didn’t call it engineering and like I say, I subconsciously wanted to do or didn't know that there was a term for it and didn't know that they were doing it. When as soon as I found out that that's what it was like, Oh cool. Yeah.

When I was 15, I sort of put my own, like I bought a sub and and stuff and did like the big sound system set up in my car and that and I was like, once that was done, I was like, “Cool, what's next?” You know? And it's just a next project and it's the same thing. And I didn't even realize engineering was that.

In high school I did Tātai, which is Maths, and we did Pāngarau/Statistics. We did Hauora, which is Health Sciences, we did Waihanga, which is Art, Te Reo Rangatira, which is... Te Reo Rangatira, and English.

I wanted to go to the Navy as a Navy diver. When I did my aptitude testing at the Navy, I, I scored high enough to get into engineering school, for the mathematics anyway. And so I applied for engineering into the Navy but I didn't have the NZQA or my NCEA sciences for them to take me. So they just kept denying and denying me and they didn't tell me why. And I was like, “Maybe next intake!”. Eventually I called them and they said, Oh, I don't have the qualifications to get in.

So I went to Waikato and I just applied to go do engineering there. And they said, “Well, you have university entrance, but you don't have the entrance to get into engineering”. Which was a bit confusing because they had a bridging course, but the bridging course was for people who didn't have university entrance, so they sort of made this like custom pathway for me.

Yeah. So I did that bridging course, it sort of set the foundation to start my engineering study and then that, yeah, that's how I got into it, just stumbled from it.

Well, I didn't know anything about engineering except for like once I heard about it. It was like a, you know, as a good high paying job and it was a desk job. Then later on in life when I, I see all my whānau and stuff and they’re just hard workers, you know, you can only do that so long before your body gives up. And and so I saw the desk job was like a good long term like sustainable mahi for the body.

You don't have to be a genius like they expect you to be a nerd, but you don't have to be a nerd. Like, I'm not a nerd.... I think I’m not a nerd? I don’t know. But yeah, you don't have to be getting A's. And you don't have to learn fast. So long as you understand and you get to where you need to go, you can get there. And this if this is where you want to go, there’s help.

Yeah. So I was fortunate enough to have to belong to enough to have to belong to a Ahu Whenua Trust called Tūaropaki, and they have a partnership with The Auckland Biomedical Research Institute, just across the road. And the partnership sort of led to me being able to start - to get this internship.

Like it, to see more Māori in the space would mean would mean less Māori like, you know, on the street getting up to mischief, and that sort of stuff. Those kids are smart, but they just been dealt a bad hand and they haven't had the haven't had the support that I've had.

Ko Ngongotaha te maunga. Ko Te Arawa te waka. Ko Utuhina te awa. Ko Te Arawa te iwi. Ko Ngāti Whakaue te hapū. Kia ora my name is Sionaigh and I'm an exercise therapist. I work here at TBI Health in the Wairarapa, and I also work as a CrossFit coach.

As a child, I remember my cousins and I sitting and our grandparents living room and we wrote out the Mutu Wellness Centre. So our whānau are Mutu whānau on my koro’s side and it started off with my cousin wanting to be a doctor. He was the oldest male cousin, so he saw himself as "Yeah I'm going to be the doctor of the Mutu Wellness Centre".

Then each of the cousins was given a different health role. Oldest cousin was a doctor, another one was a chiropractor. We had nurses and dentists and I was given the role of radiographer and I rolled with it for many years. I did a work experience at school, at the local hospital, and then from there my passion for health and wellness grew.

When I was doing NCEA, my biology teacher gave me the advice, she said, “You need 80 credits to pass. Get those 80 credits and then you can spend the rest of your time this year doing the things that you loved.” And I really focused on that during school. What that meant is after that, I could spend time doing the things that I loved: doing CrossFit, playing sports, dancing, and I wasn't stressed about needing to overexert myself, trying to get all of these things done at the same time.

The subjects I took at school, I did all the sciences, I did chemistry, biology, I did physics, statistics. I didn't know what I was going to do outside of school, but I knew that I needed to cover all my bases. So I took all of those subjects. I took a gap year straight out of school. I went overseas, I was lucky enough to spend time with my family in Australia and I took this time just to reset, figure out what I was going to do. I did know that I wanted to come back and have a degree. So after the gap year I came back, I applied for different tertiary educations and I picked one in Wellington for a Diploma in exercise prescription.

I did this for a year and it was a good taster or teaser into what I could be doing and it showed me the different paths I could go down. From there, I moved to UCOL in Palmerston and I did my degree there. That was the best thing that I could have done in terms of the learning. I was never someone that could just sit in the classroom and listen to the teacher, and this degree provided me a lot of practical work.

I did work experience, which led me on to the job that I've got now. It always provided us opportunities to find work and network through the degree I was studying. I offered to work for a couple of rugby teams and that career has also grown. Now I'm working with Multiple at the moment and also working with the Wāhine Toa in the Wairarapa.

What I love about being an exercise therapist is I take my clients through this journey of rehab. They come to me with high pain or these other issues and I can take them through and then they leave with a higher quality of life and that's satisfying to me because I can say to them, “Well done, you're on your way and you can live your life again”, and they have a new lease on life.

Because it's so important to have Māori in these roles. A lot of doors have opened for me and I'm really appreciative of that. But it's also meant I feel like I have a responsibility to give back because I was given this opportunity and now I want to give that back. To me it’d be really exciting and important to see other Māori in this industry.

I think we're just starting to begin that process of bringing in Māori and when Māori professionals are here, that's when we can help the Māori community. Going out, being face to face with the community and the people so that they can see what is accessible to them. And a lot of it isn’t an easy process. But if I can be in front of them and say, “Come and see me, this is what we can offer you, this is what is available.” Then we can start breaking down those barriers, especially in health care.

Ko Aorangi te pae maunga. Ko Ruamahanga te awa. Ko Wairarapa te Moana. Ko Ōnoke te roto. Ko Kohunui te marae. Ko Kara Kenny ahau, I am a freshwater scientist for Mountains to Sea Wellington. So my passion is always started from the marine environment being by the ocean. And so I initially went to Brigham Young University of Hawaii. I got an opportunity to get a scholarship there and initially I wanted to studying Marine biology.

So my degree is in marine biology and my my bachelor in biological science. So we had that whole realm of field and biology. One of the papers there was freshwater ecology, and that was my least favorite. But I am currently working in that field. Here in the Wairarapa, there's no way of getting around it because we are surrounded by hundreds of streams and rivers, puna, which are springs and they're all quite interconnected.

So we have we're surrounded by faultlines and they create these really awesome ecosystems. As Māori we view the rivers and streams and rivers as the the life force or, or the veins of Papatūānuku. So, this is all very important, especially here in the Wairarapa, because we are connected so deeply. So I had the opportunity to go on Spirit of Adventure through my college, and we spent about a week on a boat and learned how to operate the boat.

I had this moment where I was on the bow of the ship on my own, just living in the moment. And then all of a sudden a pod of dolphins just came and joined me at the front of the ship. And it was just an amazing experience where I felt like, Yeah, if I could do this for mahi, I would feel like I'll be living every day instead of like working to live. I've had a bunch of these tohu that would come and visit me, especially from the environment where I felt like, "Oh yeah, this is this is my calling, this is where I'm meant to be". The colleges that I went to was really restricted with what kind of topics that I would like to to study. My first college, they had Japanese and I was really interested in learning Japanese and Te Reo Māori. My second college. They didn't have Japanese, so I had to do that through correspondence. My really big interest with Japanese culture is that they're very like “sea people” as well.

I find a lot of similarities to have them and Te Ao Māori in the way that they treat their fish and their fishing traditions is really interesting to me and I think that was my closest association to the subject that I wanted to actually learn, which was like marine biology. So I didn't really have the opportunity to study what I wanted to study, but I did have opportunities to have experiences, like Spirit of Adventure was a really big one.

I went on a Japanese exchange with my intermediate school, so it's just having all of these opportunities that made me shape "okay, this is maybe what I want to do". My advice for people who want to work in the environment is find opportunities. Volunteer, I did some really cool things with the little blue penguins when I lived in Tauranga, and I was able to find an albino little blue penguin, which I had never seen before, and learned how to capture them and chip them.

So this happened after the the Rena incident over there with the oil spill. So just get out there, experience things, even contact your Iwi and what kind of projects that they're working on. Just putting your hand up and saying, "Hey, I really want to work in the environment". It is important to have more Māori in my line of work and in any type of work it's just kind of like biodiversity within the environment.

Without having biodiversity, then you kind of lack knowledge or you lack how the system works. So if you have snapper in the ocean they’re the predators and then you've got the grazers which are kina and paua, and then you have our seaweeds. If you take away the snapper, then you're left with a whole lot of kina that can graze all of the seaweed.

And so there's no one controlling the kina population. And so you're left with kina barons which are just basically rocks with heaps of kina on it. Which is not really good for the environment. There's no balance. It's the same with having Māori and even different ethnicities and perspectives in the work environment. But I think Mātauranga Māori holds so much,  mana and also understanding of how Aotearoa works and then in the environment as well as socially, I think it's really important to weave these two knowledge systems just like a braided river meeting, a big channel.

It all works together.

Kia ora, ko Cherry Matthews taku ingoa. Ko Ngāti Porou, me te Aitanga-a-Mahaki, me Te Whakatōhea, me Rongowhakaata aku iwi. I am a Māori nurse and I work at Whaiora Medical Centre.

I just really enjoy helping people and I love connecting with people and I just find joy doing that. So when I was younger, I would be that kind of person that would see a nanny walking across the street and holding heaps of bags and so I just wanted to help. I met a couple of people that were nurses to my whānau, and so I would see them in the home and I just looked up to them and I wondered to myself, I wonder if that's something I could do. And that's how it kind of started. I loved going to school for Māori culture, really. I loved kapa haka. I loved to do music. I really enjoyed biology. That was intriguing to me how the body worked. And I also enjoyed science. Also, it did help I had a cool teacher in science.

So generally it takes three years to get the Bachelor of Nursing degree and start going out and doing the mahi. I didn't complete all of my credits at school, so I took one year to gain all of the credits I needed to then enter The Bachelor. So all in all, it took me four years. So what helped me to be successful in my study was my whānau. My nanny, she is very she likes to push, push you to be successful in education. And I took that on board and that helped me to and to try and achieve. Also, I grew up in a home where my mother was on sickness benefit and so wasn't able to do some of the studies that she maybe had dreams to do.

And so that was a motivation for me as well as I wanted to achieve something worthwhile and have a career for the rest of my life, really. My advice before studying is look around, see if you are able to find support through your iwi. Your whānau might have trusts that can help you or there are lots of scholarships out there that are willing to support Māori to be successful.

I think it's extremely important that we have more Māori in this in the sector. We are screaming out for Māori nurses, male and female and I just think our people out there are wanting to connect in these spaces and we all know that if you are seeing someone who is similar to yourself, you can connect easier. And so that's how I just really want to encourage some of our young people.

If you have a desire to to help others in this way, come on board. And I absolutely love having a moment to whanaungatanga and connect. Especially with our nannies and koros that come in. One time I had a koro come in and he actually wasn't quite sure why he was here. And, you know, and the first thing we did was we just introduced ourselves.

“Kia ora, I'm Cherry, I'll be your nurse today.” And instantly he said, “Girl, where you from?” And I was like, Oh, I'm Ngātu Porou, I'm from the coast, Whakatōhea. And he was wearing a cowboy hat and I wondered if he was going to say that that came from the coast. And he said, “Ah, there was this cowboy and I, he was my mate and he gave me this cowboy hat.”

And we know we shared stories like that and we were able to connect. And then we got into the mahi, and just as I'm noticing how important it is to whanaungatanga and connect before we get into business, because he was able to leave, understanding why he was here, what he needed to do to help himself with his wairua, his hauora.

Yeah, and we had a great time. And so that's that's something that I treasure and those are some examples of how I implement Māori values.