traditional knowledge conference 2008 te tatau pounamu

Indigenous Knowledge:Traditional Responses to Contemporary QuestionsMere Berryman, Sonja BatemanMinistry of Education, Special EducationTom CavanaghUniversity of WaikatoAbstractContinually marginalising indigenous knowledge within colonial education systems has provided aperilous pathway of disadvantage for many indigenous peoples, including Māori. However, payingattention to solutions informed by indigenous knowledge can enable other relevant and effectiveresponses to emerge, thereby enhancing the lives and experiences of both indigenous and nonindigenousgroups. This paper contends that power-sharing relationships of respect and trust betweenindigenous and non-indigenous peoples is one way that traditional cultural constructs and pedagogiescan begin to provide important principles to effectively inform contemporary education.This paper examines some traditional Māori understandings that first begin from a point ofrespectfully knowing each other or, as Sidorkin suggests, a pedagogy of relations. These understandingsare then applied to contemporary whānau and practitioner questions emerging from current strategies tosupport Māori students at risk, such as parenting programmes and Restorative Practice.IntroductionThe historical signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 still influences to varying degrees the lives ofall contemporary New Zealanders. While this Treaty promised power sharing and self-determination forboth groups, relations between Pākehā (New Zealander of mainly European descent) and Māoriaccording to Bishop and Glynn have “been one of political, social and economic domination by thePākehā majority, and marginalisation of the Māori people” (1999, p. 50). For Māori, the result of thisoverpowering stance by the Pākehā majority continues an inequitable share in the benefits that NewZealand has to offer and at the same time the suppression and belittlement of indigenous knowledge,language and culture (Bishop & Glynn, 1999). The ongoing belittlement of indigenous knowledgetogether with contexts that maintain power imbalances leads to the perpetuation of cultural deficitexplanations (victim blaming) of low performance. This, in turn, maintains on-going mainstreamdiscourses about the indigenous or cultural minority situation and continues the maintenance of powerover what is determined to be pedagogy and knowledge in classrooms (Bishop & Berryman, 2006;Bishop, Berryman, Tiakiwai & Richardson, 2003).Despite Māori expectations of the promises implicit in the Treaty of Waitangi and although manyNew Zealanders consider this Treaty to be the founding document of this nation, partnership and selfdeterminationby Māori have not ensued. On the contrary, the majority Treaty partner has historicallyexerted and continues to maintain political dominance with the result that Māori as the minoritycontinue to be socially and culturally oppressed (O’Sullivan, 2007). Historically, this involved landwars and loss of land through confiscation, but has continued through biased legislation and successiveeducational policies and initiatives that have imposed the majority’s language and knowledge, while atthe same time marginalising and denigrating Māori knowledge and language (Consedine & Consedine,2005; Bishop & Glynn, 1999). Government educational policies aimed at assimilation, integration,multiculturalism and biculturalism, determined largely by the non-Māori majority, have resulted inMāori sacrificing more and more of their own indigenous knowledge, educational aspirations and theirlanguage to the needs and goals of the mainstream. Participation in mainstream education in NewZealand has come for Māori at a cost of their culture and language (Bishop & Glynn, 1999; Bishop etal., 2003). Importantly, however, as stated by Linda Smith:To acquiesce is to lose ourselves entirely and implicitly agree with all that has been said about us.To resist is to retrench to the margins, retrieve what we were and remake ourselves. The past, our131