Southern Spotlight: Tihi Puanaki the 'kapa haka queen'

Friday, 7 February 2020

Tihi Puanaki stands beside a crimson bench seat and stares out at the hundreds of tiny flowers carpeting the lawn at Rehua Marae.

Inside the inner city Ōtautahi Christchurch marae it is cool and shadows cast from exquisite carvings envelop the corners. Puanaki runs a hand gently along the smooth wood beside her. A solitary beam of light from a rear door illuminates her face.

E kore te kūmara e kōrero mō tōna reka - a kūmara does not speak of its own sweetness - is a saying which sums up Puanaki well.

Although she is often quick to share the spotlight, for today - waiho ma te tangata e mihi: let others praise you.

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A shining star in Aotearoa's education system, Puanaki is a teacher who has devoted decades to sharing her love for kaupapa Māori in Ōtautahi.

She is beloved by her people - Ngāti Hine, a subtribe of Ngāpuhi - in the far north and considered a living taonga by many in Te Waipounamu where she has built strong connections with Ngāi Tahu.

Puanaki is a true advocate for Māori education and has changed many lives as the leading light of award-winning kapa haka group Te Kotahitanga for more than four decades.

Wherever she is, her beloved tane, Wiremu, is never far away.

On Wednesday the couple were driving to Waitangi where their musician son, Te Huaki, would perform.

'We are on country roads and it's unbelievably hot,' she said, following this remark with a loud 'whoop'.

'We go to Waitangi every year, it is like a pilgrimage for our family to return.'

She grew up on a farm in the small rural North Island town of Matawaia.

'My family were a family of women,' she says. 'It's quite ironic, the homestead name literally means 'the place of many issues'. We like to talk a lot.'

She was raised in a whāngai, a Māori adoption, by her aunt.

'Often in Māori foster the grandparents have the eldest child so they can be implanted with knowledge. In my situation my birth mother had helped raise her siblings and look after her invalid mother who was still bearing children,' says Puanaki.

'Mine was an adoption of convenience. When she left, the story gets quite hazy but she went nursing and as the story goes she nursed Helen Keller.'

As a young girl she discovered a love for languages and reading at school but also experienced racism.

'I don't recall being strapped for speaking Māori, I remember being strapped for having dirty feet. We were in the country so to get to school you had to walk to school and then at school there was a place where you rinsed your feet…,' she says.

'Strapped for dirty feet, that's terrible. Everything was Pākehā knowledge in the education system. I went to one school and it was very racist. We were treated not well…'

At secondary school she struggled too.

'I was very shy and it was a difficult time,' she recalls. 'I had close friends. I only allowed myself to get close to certain people.'

A 'lovely teacher' nurtured her love of learning and languages and prompted her to enrol at teachers' college.

'I think I intuitively modelled my style of teaching on this lady.'

Since moving to Ōtautahi in her mid 20s during the 1970s as part of a government training scheme, Puanaki has taught kura kaupapa to multiple generations. She credits kapa haka as being a powerful way to empower Māori.

Husband Wiremu was a founding member of Te Kotahitanga, an award-winning kapa haka group of more than four decades.

'We started a kapa haka group in Christchurch and its members were from different Māori hostels, there was a time in Aotearoa… Māori were scattered to the winds,' she says.

She found a kaupapa in kapa haka that was 'powerful'.

'We were 22, 23, life was good. The kapa haka groups became whanau, the Māori boys became like our brothers, so caring of the Māori girls, very protective.'

Newly released prisoners and others with drug and alcohol addictions gravitated towards the group for help and guidance, which she gave with kindness and strength.

'I'm not qualified as any kind of drug counsellor,' she says.

'I'm just a whaea, a growly aunty who could help them with that. The aunties are the growly ones. When the family can't handle their children, they get aunty in and aunty will chew the children up. It's like that.'

In the mid 1980s she established the first Māori language immersion school in the South Island. She also taught for more than two decades at Aranui High School and worked alongside Te Kura Whakapūmau.

'Our graduates now are fluent, they are in positions from training college lecturers to Māori-speaking scientists, all sorts … I'm very proud of that.'

In 2003 she was awarded the Queen's Service Medal for her contribution to Māori education. She also received the Lifetime Achievement award at the 2014 Pride of New Zealand Awards for her contribution to Māori education.

'The immersion teaching started when a woman came to me. She had three children and had run away from an abusive relationship,' says Puanaki.

'Two of her children needed to go to school and she wanted a Māori school and there was none around. 'No way am I taking my children to a Pākehā school because of their spirit, their wairua, I'm going to teach them myself, she said.'

Puanaki found her a little room to use so she could get away from the house to teach her children.

'From there I started to network and get expertise as to what sort of stuff we could teach. People heard about it and started showing up with their kids and it grew from there.'

Now in her 'late 60s', she is out of the classroom but is still involved in secondary education at a local and national level.

'I go in and support teachers, management, others at a national level. We do work that relieves a lot of burden on the teachers right now, for teachers workloads are a huge thing… I am so rapt to be able to support teachers.'

Sometimes a brave person will ask if she has any plans to retire.

'They say 'when are you going to hang up your pupu'? That's your grass skirt. I say 'oh yeah, shortly' but then I say 'hang on' and there's something else to do.'