Lincoln University Digital Dissertation - Lincoln University Research ...

will give them a life at least as good as how yours has been and hopefully
better. So it’s about setting the scene, whether that is targeted or focused on
economic or money factors or whether it’s targeted on social position and how
you interact with others or whether it’s to do with educational factors. That’s
personal choices about what people emphasise. And this will always be
different. Because people look for different things but I think the reality is that
Maori want to be able to contribute to New Zealand society as Maori – without
other people telling them how they should do that and without those external
sort of inputs sort of forcing them to do it in certain ways. So that really if you
want to apply yourself to managing the whenua in a cultural way then that’s
your choice. The reality check is that you have still got to pay some bills and
that it’s important that your kids get education and that sort of thing. You can’t
run away from the fact that it costs money to live.” (Grower 1)
This drive to contribute to the well-being of the next generations has a strong
focus on encouraging rangatahi back to the whenua. Bringing young Maori
back to the land and helping to rekindle that caring and nurturing relationship
with the whenua is a real desire. Growers described a hope that taewa can in
some way facilitate and contribute towards a ‘return to the land’ for Maori 4 .
“The [Maori] kids are asking questions about it like, the Maori potato – why do
they look this colour or why are they shaped like this? It might be just trivial
questions but it means a lot to them and starts you talking about all sorts of
other things [e.g. whakapapa etc].” (Grower 5)
“The succession thing is very important and it’s a real big issue for Maori at
the moment because if you look around and look at your next set of leaders
… we don’t really have the strength in horticulture that we used to have. You
know when you look at the next… generation of Maori leaders how many of
them are from living off the land, growing crops or farming?” (Grower 1)
4 This ‘return to the land’ is encapsulated in the literal meaning of ‘tahuri whenua’.
53