Academic literature on the topic 'Maori storytelling'

The relationship between emergent narrative skills, gender and ethnicity continues to be an important area of debate, with significant socio-political consequences. This paper explores the ways in which these variables intersect in a cross-cultural, longitudinal study of children’s storytelling, focusing on data taken from a multicultural school in Auckland, NZ. Differences in storytelling style reflected the characteristics of Maori English and Pakeha English conversational narratives, but also varied according to age and gender, where the variation was most marked for the 10-year-old children, and was most polarised between the narratives of the Pakeha girls and Maori boys. A longitudinal comparison indicated that these differences were by no means fixed, and that over time the older Maori boys’ storytelling altered in line with the literacy demands to conform to the dominant westernised pattern being imposed in this pedagogic context. This study thus points to the ongoing importance of analysing the shifting ways in which gender and cultural identity are renegotiated in educational contexts, suggesting that there is more scope for questioning and potentially changing dominant literacy practices in this part of New Zealand.

This article proposes that settler communities cannot teach or understand our shared intercultural history without listening to ideas presented by Indigenous communities about their own history in lands currently occupied by modern nation- -states. This history enables us to understand the power of the ethnographic gaze and its relation to The Doctrine of Discovery (1493), which extinguished Indigenous rights to lands and resources, rights later transferred to the modern nation- -states through the legal notion of “eminent domain”. These rights include the ownership of intangibles such as the image and storytelling through photography and film. Maori scholars Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Barry Barclay and Merata Mita are cited on knowledge production, copyright and image sovereignty to decolonise our understanding of the right to self-representation. The study includes a brief analysis of films that help decolonise an ethnographic gaze at these relationships, particularly the Brazilian documentary “O Mestre e o Divino” by Tiago Campos Torre (2013).Keywords: Indigenous peoples. Nation-state history. Film. Self- -determination.

This article examines how a Native Hawaiian activist’s inventive self-representational tactics, deployed within corporate mass media, have enriched North American pop-culture discourses on the Kanaka Maoli independence movement. Analysis focuses on the convergent (that is, transmedial or purposefully cross-medial) self-representational efforts of Dennis ‘Bumpy’ Pu‘uhonua Kanahele, who rose to fame as one of several notable organisers in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement during the 1990s. Several film and television texts became targets of Kanahele’s indigenous media interventions into commercial cinematic genre storytelling across different narrative platforms beginning in the 2010s. Applying a utopian reading that brings out Kanahele’s Indigenous Futurist interventions, this article offers readings of the theatrical feature film Aloha (2015) and a 2017 episode of Hawaii Five-o. Both texts visually focalise Pu‘uhonua o Waimānalo, the land base of Kanahele’s sovereignty movement known as the Nation of Hawai‘i, which gets positioned within these narratives as a Kanaka Maoli utopia providing refuge for indigenous Hawaiians away from the predation of both rampant capitalism and Western empire.

I kid you not. This is a time in Pacific regional history where as a middle-aged Tongan woman with European, Maori, and Samoan ancestries who was born and raised in New Zealand, I teach students taking my undergraduate papers how not to go about making stereotypical assumptions. The students in my classes are mostly Maori and Pakeha (white, European) New Zealanders. They learn to interrogate typecasts produced by state policy, media, and academia classifying the suburbs of South Auckland as overcrowded with brown people, meaning Pacific Islanders; overburdened by non-communicable diseases, like obesity and diabetes; and overdone in dismal youth statistics for crime and high school drop-outs. And then some well-meaning but incredibly uninformed staff members at the university where I am a senior lecturer have a bright idea to give away portions of roast pig on a spit to Pacific Islanders at the South Auckland campus open day. Who asked the university to give us free roast pig? Who asked us if this is what we want from a university that was planted out South in 2010 to sell degrees to a South Auckland market predicted to grow to half a million people, largely young people, in the next two decades? (AUT University, 2014). Who makes decisions about what gets dished up to Pacific Islanders in South Auckland, compared to what their hopes might be for university education prospects? To rephrase Julie Landsman’s essay, how about “confronting the racism of low expectations” that frames and bounds Pacific Islanders in South Auckland when a New Zealand university of predominantly Palangi (white, European) lecturers and researchers on academic staff contemplate “closing achievement gaps?” (Landsman, 2004). Tackling “the soft bigotry of low expectations” set upon Pacific Islanders getting into and through the university system has prompted discussion around introducing two sets of ideas at Auckland University of Technology (The Patriot Post, 2014). First, a summer school foundation course for literacy and numeracy on the South campus, recruiting Pacific Islander school leavers wanting to go on to study Bachelor’s degrees. Previously, the University of Auckland had provided bridging paths designed for young Pacific peoples to step up to degree programmes (Anae et al, 2002). Second, the possibility of performing arts undergraduate papers recognising a diverse and youthful ethnoscape party to an Auckland context of theatre, drama, dance, music, Maori and Pacific cultural performance, storytelling, and slam poetry (Appadurai, 1996). Although this discussion is in its infancy and has not been feasibility scoped or formally initiated in the university system, it is a suggestion worth considering here. My inquiry is frank: Why conflate performance and South Auckland Pacific Islanders? Does this not lend to a clichéd mould that supposes young Pacific Islanders growing up in the ill-famed suburbs of the poor South are naturally gifted at singing, dancing, and performing theatrics? This is a characterisation fitted to inner-city Black American youth that has gone global and is wielded to tag, label, and brand urban Pacific Islanders of South Auckland. Therefore, how are the aspirational interests of this niche market reflected in the content and context of initiatives with South Auckland Pacific Islander communities in mind?

<p>Este ensaio tem como objetivo propor algumas hipóteses de estudo sobre o comportamento econômico e social em uma situação de crise sanitária. Estas hipóteses são pertinentes ao estudo de formulação de políticas públicas. A crise sanitária tratada é a causada pelo Covid-19. A história narrada passa-se na Espanha, em particular em Madri. O método usado é a do relato oral subjetivo na forma de roteiro ou da aplicação parcial do <em>storytelling</em>. O referencial analítico usadoconsta de modelos microeconômicos que lidam com tragédia dos comuns, comportamento econômico ampliado para altruísmo ou autointeresse limitado. As conclusões sumarizadas são as sugestões de hipóteses a serem testadas por métodos empíricos experimentais, estatísticos ou etnográficos.</p>

Human beings live and tell stories for many reasons, and it is a way to not only understand one another but to give a time and place to events and experiences. Therefore, a narrational approach within the context of this research offers a frame of reference and a way to reflect during the entire process of gathering data and writing. This study examines the importance of storytelling among Native (Kānaka ‘Ōiwi) and Indigenous (Kānaka Maoli) women of Hawai ̒ i and their interconnectedness to land and spirituality through accessing [k]new knowledge. The main focus of this article is to illustrate the resiliency of stories as told by the Kānaka women who are connected to a time and a place of traditional and ecological knowledge. Findings indicate that despite forced cultural and political changes generationally, these women’s innate beliefs and interconnectedness to land and spirituality has begun to reshape as enduring patterns over time and space. This is evident by a resurgence in moʻolelo (storytelling), ho' oponopono (Hawaiian peacemaking process), revitalized methods of traditional land irrigation, cultivation, and sustainability programs as testimony. In ancient Hawai ̒ i, both men and women equally participated in the activities of food production and cultivation, however, in contemporary Hawai ̒ i, it is mostly the Native and Indigenous women who have mobilized to revitalize these traditional practices.

Decolonising methodologies continue to be critically developed to disrupt the marginalising approaches to knowledge production. By privileging Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing, relations with nature are a more-than-human entanglement and a relational pursuit. Ecosystems such as estuaries and rivers are connected through kin-based relationships and treated as (or are) ancestors and family members. Such embodiment connects the body–mind–spirit to maintain relations with the mauri of ancestral beings and Deities. Within this ontology, nature is indistinguishable from culture. Our research responds to the call of how method might proceed to de-centre the human and make bodily and material encounters with the nonhuman matter. ‘Thinking with Kaipara’ is a methodological strategy that is a deliberate attempt to pursue embodied ways of producing knowledge. To work with situated knowledges, place and social difference to address the crisis of representation of such in ecosystem-based management, the problematising of ecosystem degradation and restoration practices. Research data produced is founded on human and nonhuman collaboration, an ethic of care, diverse epistemic nature–culture relations, social/nature/gender justice and equality, which makes for empirical evidence not enjoyed by scientific and technocratic methods utilised to inform and shape ecosystem-based management decisions and policy. Geo-creative practices are used by co-researchers/co-participants to recount their lived experiences and knowledges of ecosystem degradation and restoration. Storytelling, poetics, and painting, sculpting, whaikorero, waiata and writing were practices used. We argue that such geo-creative practices challenge the normative spaces and practices of disciplinary knowledge-making and enable the examination of social heterogeneous nature–culture relations in settler-colonial societies.

This visual art project has explored the ancient Maori pukorero (oral tradition) of Te Whatu o Poutini (The Eye of Poutini) that articulates the journey of Poutini Taniwha, Waitaiki and Tamaahua from Tuhua (Mayor Island) in the Bay of Plenty, to the Arahura River. An oral geological map, the pukorero also expresses through cultural values, the intimate spiritual relationship Ngati Waewae have with our tupuna, the Arahura River, pounamu stone and each other. Exploring the genres of digital storytelling and video art installation, this project combines them as new media storytelling. The current experience of colonisation and urbanisation emotionally parallel the abduction, transformation and multiple places of belonging experienced by the tupuna Waitaiki at the hand of Poutini Taniwha. The project explores and acknowledges this connection. The survival, restoration and celebration of Ngati Waewae culture and the need to assert control of our own destinies has infused every component of the project.

This chapter examines Merata Mita’s Mauri, the first fiction feature film in the world to be solely written and directed by an indigenous woman, as an example of “Fourth Cinema” – that is, a form of filmmaking that aims to create, produce, and transmit the stories of indigenous people, and in their own image – showing how Mita presents the coming-of-age story of a Māori girl who grows into an understanding of the spiritual dimension of the relationship of her people to the natural world, and to the ancestors who have preceded them. The discussion demonstrates how the film adopts storytelling procedures that reflect a distinctively Māori view of time and are designed to signify the presence of the mauri (or life force) in the Māori world.