How a Witi Ihimaera story inspired me to go to university
Friday, 12 February 2021
In this extract from Ngā Kete Mātauranga: Māori scholars at the research interface, Professor of Law at Otago University Jacinta Ruru (Ruakawa, Ngāti Ranginui) reflects on her university journey. Ngā Kete Mātauranga is edited by Ruru and Professor of Indigenous Studies at Te Wānanga o Waipapa at the University of Auckland, Linda Waimarie Nikora and tells the stories of 24 Māori academics who reveal what being Māori means to them and their work.
By chance, I fell into tertiary study and then the study of law. It was not always obvious I would go to university. Few we knew had. I was rarely inspired in my Central Otago schooling. This began to change in fifth form (year 11) when I read for the first time a short story by a Māori author about racism in our country. Witi Ihimaera’s ‘Yellow Brick Road’ provided me with certainty of the lived reality of everyday Pākeha prejudice.
It is a simple relatable story of a Māori family travelling from the country to the city in the 1970s. Their car runs out of petrol. No one helps them. In reading this story, I knew then I would go to university because I wanted to know more. I thought then my career would be in documentary-making to better understand ongoing colonial injustice in our society, but once I began the study of law, I was hooked. I liked how I could build an argument to support a cause to be heard in a forum that had to seriously consider it: the courts. But the experience of studying law disappointed me.
The general teachings that the country’s law is objective did not reconcile with the stories of my whānau. Our stories are about dispossession from ancestral lands through deceptive legislation and manipulative court decisions. This law relied on magic and fictions, on suppositions that Māori were ‘savage’, which conveniently enabled (and still enables) Parliament and the courts to deny iwi their sovereignty and property.
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I knew our whānau experiences with the law were not unique; all Māori families tell of similar accounts. In the 1990s, our realities and our Māori laws barely featured in the Western-biased law school curriculum. These gaps did not look like they were going to be filled any time soon. I wanted to help make positive change.
Just over twenty years ago, in May 1999, I commenced my career as a ‘lonely only’ Māori law academic at the University of Otago. I teach and research how our legal system can be reimagined to provide genuine reconciliation in a manner intended by those iwi leaders who signed our modern nationsetting constitutional documents back in the 1800s: He Wakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni / The Declaration of Independence of New Zealand (1835) and Te Tiriti o Waitangi / The Treaty of Waitangi (1840). I have gone on to have an incredible career with many highlights. I love my job.
Every day, I work with talented tertiary students, researchers and scientists who want to make the world a better place. I have been able to travel the world to work with some of the best Indigenous thinkers. I have worked with Māori nations to help bolster legal arguments to seek justice; what is right. But my job has been hard too, in a racial way. The racially biased legal content is a daily battle. Also, it has been intellectually lonely. One obvious point to make is that when I began my law lecturing job, there were about ten Māori teaching in the five law schools across the country.
Today, there are still only about ten Māori teaching and researching in the now six law schools. It isn’t just law. The tertiary sector across all disciplines employs about a static 5 percent Māori. It is well past time that our country seriously commits to decolonising the tertiary workforce, curriculum and research agenda. This book is an important contribution to this call for action. This is an ambitious book that brings together the stories of twenty-three Māori scholars working in the country’s research sector, mostly but not exclusively in universities.
They have attained degrees in fields as diverse as anthropology, psychology, physics and zoology to name but a few. They each bravely share how they, like me, are navigating ways to decolonise the research sector specific to their disciplinary training. One important way to do this is to find ways to bring our own mātauranga – Māori knowledges – to our work. This book is our opportunity to provide New Zealanders with an insight into how mātauranga is positively influencing the Western-dominated disciplines of knowledge in the research sector, and how it can further do so. We hope this book inspires change by those in power to more firmly acknowledge mātauranga and the immense value of increasing Māori at the research interface.
Ngā Kete Mātauranga: Māori scholars at the research interface. Otago University Press. Published February 12 2021. RRP$60