Abstract:
Hei Oranga Māori i te Ao Hurihuri Nei: Living as Māori in the world today- an outcome of kura kaupapa Māori. Kura kaupapa Māori are primary schools that provide a unique education for the indigenous people of New Zealand – the Māori. Children in kura kaupapa Māori schools are educated in a Māori language and cultural environment. The main aim of these schools is to enable children to ‘live as Māori’. However, the notion of ‘living as Māori’ is a very complex idea, not least because Maori live in a society governed by the English language and a set of values and social structures that are far removed from the traditional world of Māori. My presentation will interrogate the ideas about ‘living as Māori’ that underpin the objectives of kura kaupapa Māori. Interviews of a selection of graduates from the first kura kaupapa Māori in Auckland, New Zealand were conducted in order to develop a critical sense of the empirical and other possibilities of ‘living as Māori’ in the modern world, and the effectiveness of the kura kaupapa Māori in meeting these possibilities. The guiding question for the presentation is: What are the tensions that face kura kaupapa Māori graduates as they seek to live as Māori in a world that is often at odds with the objectives of kura kaupapa Māori? The kura kaupapa Māori objectives include the preservation of ‘Māori language and culture’; the provision of ‘Māori education’ and ‘the validation of ‘traditional Māori knowledge and pedagogy’ (Sharples, September, 1992), all values that must be struggled for on a daily basis in New Zealand. A detailed examination will be made of what the kura kaupapa Māori objectives have meant to those who experienced being students in the first five kura kaupapa Māori that were created in Auckland. It was in these kura kaupapa Māori that the objectives were developed and the path set for kura kaupapa Māori into the future.