New columnist Hinemoa Elder on knowing your place

Ko Parengarenga te moana, ko Tawhitirahi te maunga, ko Awapoka te awa, ko Potahi te marae, ko Te Aupouri, ko Nga¯ ti Kurı¯, ko Te Rarawa, ko Nga¯ puhi nui tonu o¯ ku iwi, ko Hinemoa to¯ ku ingoa.

Kia ora.

Parengarenga is the harbour, Tawhitirahi is the mountain, Awapoka the river, Potahi is one of my marae, and those are my tribal affiliations. This is me, this is home.

You may wonder what is the use of that introduction? It is a pepeha. A greeting. It locates me in time and space according to the places of my ancestors and their stories. It grounds me and it weaves together multiple layers through which we see connections between us. It makes who I am visible to you. That is the purpose of pepeha, building relationships. Our lands, sea, mountains, rivers, lakes are so powerfully, so tangibly part of our identities here in Aotearoa.

When we say the names of our places we can instantly be transported there, we can be in those memories, and this is part of how we know who we are. Such is the power of our minds.

And no, I feel some of you eye roll, this is not the exclusive domain of Ma¯ ori.

What I love is that we Ma¯ ori have this potent, time-honoured tradition of pepeha which makes our identity very clear. It means when we recite pepeha that we can stand and be at home, on that mountain, in that ocean, no matter where we actually are, we can see ourselves there, an ancient kind of ‘‘beam me up, Scottie’’. And what pepeha does is it firmly lays down a kind of welcome mat, on which we can then discover how we are connected through the stories and peoples of our lands, across Aotearoa, NZ.

I have a vivid memory of a wha¯ nau reunion at Ahipara. I’m the one with the long brown hair looking a bit sceptical hanging onto my Grandad. I can picture the beach of my youth in my mind. My eyes stretching to take it all in. The thumping of the waves, the light shimmering on the water, blinding. No sunnies on that day. I can feel the sand under my toes, soft and scrunchy and I can see the imprint of my feet as I retrace my steps back to my laughing relations. No one taught me to love that ocean. No one taught me to love that beach. But I do. Going back to that childhood memory makes me smile. It has that primordial pull.

And there is more than a tinge of sadness. I think about my mum in the same moment, she’s sitting next to me in the photo. My mum who gave me this connection to that laughter, that beach, that ocean. She didn’t have the Reo, she was part of those generations where ‘‘being Ma¯ ori’’ was actively discouraged, sometimes with violence, kids strapped at school for speaking our language. This hurt her. She cried about it.

I see the same pain in the eyes of the young people, many of whom are my whanaunga, my relations who I see in order to write court reports. They often tell me jokingly ‘‘I’m a bit of a plastic Ma¯ ori, I don’t know where I’m from’’. They can’t tell me their mountain, their river, their places and their histories.

At first this response comes over as pretty bleak.

Where can you go from there, right? Such loss, such trauma.

And yet, taken another way this invites the discovery of stories from their places, their mountains, rivers, lakes, oceans, waka, ancestors. Stories that are waiting to be found, to be brought to life.

I have seen with my own eyes how powerful learning pepeha can be. The transformation when our taiohi, our young ones, learn their pepeha on the Ko¯ ti Rangatahi, the youth court on marae. It gives me goosebumps thinking about it now. There is a squaring of the shoulders, a new, warm and confident eye contact, a sense of healthy identity, a sense of direction if you will. A resetting of the cultural compass. And it’s portable.

They can now take that with them where ever they go. It’s protective.

So you can probably picture me in those assessments when I’m meeting our taiohi in my role as court report writer. I’m unashamedly using the connections with my own pepeha and whatever I can glean about theirs. Pepeha work like a kind of Ma¯ ori Da Vinci Code. Following clues, unlocking the pieces, helping put into words the connections that bind us together. That positive platform is the basis for change. For navigating a different course. Not saying its going to be easy, but pepeha are a solid starting point. My experience has shown me that the pepeha are the heart of literally, a bringing home, to your self, to your own.

So Aotearoa, you got your pepeha sorted?

Child and adolescent psychiatrist Hinemoa Elder PhD is a Fellow of the Royal Australia NZ College of Psychiatrists, and Professor of Indgenous Health Research at Te Whare Wa¯ nanga o Awanuia¯ rangi, and Ma¯ ori strategic leader at Brain Research NZ.

Te toto o te tangata he kai, te oranga o te tangata he whenua. Food nourishes the blood of the person, but their wellbeing is in the land.