traditional knowledge conference 2008 te tatau pounamu

called Te Tīmatanga (the beginning). Before they began their lessons, their debates, their discourses,they followed the thought to the beginning and then back again. That journey seems to me to symbolizethe whole process of knowledge.The story of that knowledge can take many forms. My nanny used to make tāniko, which for thosewho do not know is a fine weaving often used in the bodices of the tops that women wear in our kapahaka (cultural performance groups) and so on. When she made them for our marae (“village”) group,they were usually the traditional red, black and white. When she made them for our young people, theycould be all sorts of other vibrant colours, yellows, blues, purples … Often she would hang them on aframe and the threads would hang loose. You could take one thread and try to follow it through thepatterns in the tāniko design to see where the beginning was or where the end was. On the journey thatthese students took from Whaiwhakaaro to Te Tīmatanga, they too were trying to find the threads ofunderstanding that lay in the stories and the land. Ultimately, the stories that are most relevant to apeople and a community are the stories that come from that land, that reflect the relationships with theland and that hold within the land the knowledge that has been nurtured there.As I tell the stories in the brief time I have today, I hope you might find your own threads ofunderstanding. Try to track them through to what you think is the beginning or the never-endingbeginning, so you can take from the stories what you will. What I take from the story of the walk fromWhaiwhakaaro to Te Tīmatanga is a symbol of the journey of knowledge itself, its dangers and itspleasures. I also take from it what one of my whanaunga (relatives) from Ngāti Porou called thetūrangawaewae (home place) of our thought. When Raukahiri coined that term he talked about the ideaof the thought that comes from the land.The second story that I want to tell looks at a different aspect of the notion of knowledge. And thereare two parts to the story, which may seem to be disconnected but I hope we will find the links. In ourtradition, in our intellectual tradition—and I do not think we should be shy of using the phrase ourintellectual tradition—we have the story of a man, in some iwi called Tāne and other iwi calledTāwhaki, climbing the vines to the heavens to capture for humanity the kete (baskets) of knowledge,which our people called Te Kete Tuatea, Te Kete Tuauri and Te Kete Aronui. As he climbed up thevines to the heavens to find these baskets of knowledge, lightning flashed across the sky, thunder andrain fell upon him, but he kept on going; eventually, he found the kete and brought them back to earth.If we jump forward several centuries, we come to the 1980s when I was part of a committee thatwas charged with the task of building what became known as an urban marae (Māori meeting place).As Linda intimated, to build a marae, to be involved in any Māori activity can be as difficult as it isexciting. To build an urban marae is, perhaps, particularly difficult because you are having to tread thedifficult path between those who are tangata whenua (people of the land), who have lived traditionallyin that area, and the taura here, the people who have come to live in that area from somewhere else.Often, trying to balance those differences can be a very complex and irksome task. But we worked well,people from different iwi who knew in the end that the whakapapa that made us distinct andindependent in our iwi also made us interdependent. We eventually got to the stage where the whare kai(dining room) and the meeting house were built.The meeting house was beautifully carved. We were getting organized for the opening. Somepeople led by Ruka Broughton were coming from Taranaki to open the house. At a meeting about twoweeks before the opening—our meeting was meant to be about the opening—somebody made thesuggestion that we should put Venetian blinds in the meeting house and, immediately, a huge scrapdeveloped. The committee split into two, one side arguing that there is nothing wrong with havingVenetian blinds in a meeting house, the other side saying you cannot have meeting houses withVenetian blinds because it is not tikanga, it is not consistent with our knowledge. People began toinvent the tikanga of Venetian blinds. I learned that Venetian blinds were actually, in spite of theirname, invented in Tokomaru Bay. Eventually, we reached a compromise and said, “We have got somuch to do before the opening, let’s wait until after the opening and then come back to this issue.”Everyone agreed; we entered into what I call the tautoko (agreeing) syndrome; everyone went “kia ora,kia ora” (yes, yes). Then half the committee promptly ignored it. On the night before the opening—we28