I. The Man Behind the Myth

A Pūrākau to Begin

In the Urewera, around 1896, two men sit together. One is a Tuhoe rangatira — a war leader, a commissioner in his people’s government, a man who has navigated Te Kooti’s Ringatū faith, written letters to the Premier of New Zealand, argued the case for Tuhoe land sovereignty in official correspondence that would sit for a century in government archives, mostly unread. His name is Tutakangahau of Maungapohatu.

The other man is Elsdon Best, Pākehā ethnographer. He has come to record the last traces of an ancient Māori world — a world he believes is vanishing, a world he has decided, before his pencil touches paper, that Tutakangahau inhabits. Best calls him “Old Tu.” He calls him “the old-time Māori.” He calls him “the tattooed neolith.”

Tutakangahau, for his part, calls Best “Te Peehi.” And he talks to him. He shares stories, teachings, the deep kōrero of Tuhoe cosmology and spiritual life. By every account, he is generous with his knowledge. What he perhaps does not know — what he cannot know — is what Best will do with those words once they leave the room.

Because Best will take those words and pass them through a filter. The filter has a name: Victorian evolutionary anthropology. It believes in a hierarchy of civilisations, in which Māori sit near the bottom, relics of a primitive stage that European humanity has long since outgrown. Through this filter, the complex political man who wrote to Seddon about land rights becomes a living fossil. The Ringatū faith that shaped his spirituality disappears from the record. The letters to government agents — evidence of a rangatira fully engaged with colonial modernity — go unread in the archives. What remains —what Best publishes and what enters the national bloodstream —is the mythopoetic Māori: pure, pre-contact, primitive, and — crucially — safely in the past.

The kōrero left the room. But it did not arrive unchanged.

The Poison Ivy did not only grow through the land. It grew through the words.

This is the fourth companion layer of the Whakapapa of Colonisation — and in some ways the most difficult to see, precisely because it hides inside what appears to be recovery. The previous layers named what colonisation took: land, law, language, sobriety, creative voice, economic ground. This layer names something more subtle. It names what colonisation gave back—in altered form—and called tradition.

It names te repo o te mātauranga: the contamination of the knowing itself.

II. The Archive and the Wound

How a Pākehā Pen Became the Keeper of Māori Being

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman’s 2007 doctoral thesis, Best of Both Worlds: Elsdon Best and the Metamorphosis of Māori Spirituality, is not comfortable reading for anyone working in kaupapa Māori. Holman spent years in the archives — letters, notebooks, official correspondence, multiple editions of Williams’ Dictionary of the Māori Language — tracing what happened to key Māori spiritual concepts as they passed through Best’s writings and into the permanent record.

What he found was this: the foundational vocabulary of what we now call Māori spirituality — mauri, hau, wairua, and the broader architecture of ‘authentic Māori being’ — was substantially constructed, expanded, and reinscribed through Best’s pen. And those definitions, embedded in the dictionary, taught in schools, cited in the Māori renaissance, absorbed into kaupapa Māori methodology, are now so thoroughly part of the furniture that very few stop to ask where they came from.

Holman’s central provocation is blunt: no late nineteenth-century Māori epistemology was unmediated by Pākehā influence. Not because Māori knowledge did not exist — it did, richly, in the living transmission of oral culture, in whakapapa, in the body, in karakia and in the maramataka. But because the archive through which that knowledge was captured, preserved, and returned to Māori was not a neutral vessel. It was a colonial instrument, shaped by the theoretical assumptions of its time.

“Such definitions and other terms influenced by his work — now found in essentialist texts of the Māori identity movement — are often considered to be purely Māori and deployed as part of a kaupapa Māori methodology… Syncretisms, as always, are omnipresent in colonial literary sources.”

— Holman, 2007, p. 331

Holman is not saying Māori spiritual concepts are false or invented. It is more precise and more disturbing than that. He tracks the word mauri from its earliest appearances in the written record — a concrete, object-bound force, embedded in fishing sinkers, eel weirs, and the karakia that linked material need to the spiritual order of the world — through successive editions of Williams’ Dictionary, tracing how each edition expanded the term’s meaning as Best’s Tuhoe field notes entered the scholarly record. By the time those meanings were absorbed into post-1970s Māori theological writing — from Māori Marsden to Cleve Barlow to Hirini Moko Mead — mauri had become something considerably more abstract, more metaphysical, more resonant with Western comparative religion than with the mauri of the eel weir.

This is not a small thing. Mauri is foundational to wellness frameworks across the kaupapa Māori landscape. If its contemporary meaning carries the fingerprints of Victorian anthropology, then the tools of recovery may carry traces of the wound.

Old words gaining new meanings as the ground of their original creation disappeared.

And yet — and this is the move Holman himself makes, and which matters for our work — the answer is not to throw the word away. The answer is whakapapa awareness: the willingness to trace where a concept came from, who shaped it in transmission, what was altered in the telling, and whether it still serves the hauora of those who use it. The question is not purity. The question is provenance and purpose.

III. The Poison Ivy That Grew Through the Roots

Te Repo o te Mātauranga — The Third Layer of Colonial Injury

Through this series, we have used the image of Poison Ivy to name what colonisation does: it grows unseen, its roots entangled with the roots of what you would protect, until one day you reach toward what you thought was yours and find it has become something else. The image holds because colonisation was rarely a single violent event. It was — and is — a creeping process.

The first layer the Poison Ivy crept through was land. The second was law. The third was language — te reo marginalised, suppressed, shamed out of the mouths of children. The fourth was the body’s relationship with wai — water displaced by waipiro, the colonial chemical. The fifth was creative voice. The sixth was economic ground.

This realisation is the hardest to see because it does not look like loss. It looks like recovery.

What Holman’s work names is the moment the Poison Ivy grew through the roots of the words themselves — through mauri, through wairua, through the very concepts Māori reached toward to understand who they were and to heal what had been broken. The ethnographic archive was not only a record of Māori culture. It was a remaking of it. And that remaking was returned to Māori, generation by generation, as if it had always been so.

We might call this te repo o te mātauranga: the swamp of the knowing. Not the silencing of Māori knowledge, but its partial preservation through the colonial apparatus — received back in subtly altered form, the ecological grounded in the abstract, the relational dissolved into the metaphysical, the living mauri of the eel weir elevated into a universal life-force concept legible to European comparative religion.

The clinical implications of this are real, and worth naming honestly.

Some of those who carry Colonisation PTSD — who have done the work of returning to te ao Māori, of reclaiming reo and tikanga and wairua — may find a particular kind of grief waiting here. Not only the grief of what was taken, but the grief of discovering that some of what was recovered was itself partially shaped by the taking. That the frameworks they reached toward for healing were not untouched by the wounding system. This is a double grief, and it deserves honesty rather than being managed away.

It is also, in a different light, a cause not for despair but for discernment. Because not everything was captured. Not everything passed through the archive.

IV. What the Net Could Not Reach

The Unarchived Transmission

Return to the image from Apirana Ngata’s letter — that extraordinary whakataukī he wrote about Best in 1930, the year before the old ethnographer died: a drag-net fishing in all types of fish, for the women on shore to separate. It is generous, as Ngata was generous. But notice what the net does not catch. A drag-net does not catch everything. It misses what is too deep, too still, too close to the riverbed to be swept up in the pass.

Best’s net was comprehensive and committed, and we should honour the scale of his effort without being naive about its distortions. But it could not reach all knowledge. The Tohunga Suppression Act of 1907 severed the formal institutional transmission of healing knowledge — but it could not reach what was held in the body, in the whakapapa line, in the dream state, in the relational field of whānau living close to the land. What was never offered to the ethnographer was never available for ethnographic capture. What persisted through those lines did so, paradoxically, because it was not written down.

This is the epistemological ground on which Te Poutama Ora stands. Not in opposition to the archive, not in denial of what Holman’s work reveals, but in a different location entirely. TPO’s healing knowledge is not reconstructed from Best’s record of Tuhoe cosmology. It is recovered from the body, from the maramataka, from the lived-experience teaching story of those who have moved through the dimensions of hauora from within, from the accumulating evidence of clinical practice, and from the lineage transmission of healing gifts that formal suppression could interrupt but not extinguish.

“He kupenga kaharoa tana e hao ana i ngā momo ika katoa, mā ngā wāhine i uta e wehewehe.”

— Apirana Ngata on Elsdon Best, 1930: a drag-net fishing all types of fish, for the women on shore to separate.

The net went out. The net came back in. But not everything was in it.

The mauri that TPO’s Wairua dimension works with is not the etherealised, literary mauri of the post-Best archive. It is the mauri of the eel weir: concrete, relational, embedded in the rhythms of the natural world, dependent on karakia, tikanga, and right relationship with the whenua. The maramataka that anchors TPO’s therapeutic infrastructure is not a romantic reconstruction of pre-contact Māori life — it is a living temporal intelligence, tested against the body, against the seasons, against the clinical evidence of what heals people and what does not.

This is the distinction that Holman’s work clarifies for us. TPO does not reach backwards toward an uncontested pre-contact authenticity — the very project Holman shows Best to have distorted and Māori essentialism to have too often uncritically inherited. TPO begins in the present body, in the present wound, in the present maramataka cycle, and asks: what is available, right now, for the work of recognition, reclamation, restoration, and return?

The gifts continued. They continued through the body, the lineage, the dream, the whenua — through everything the net could not reach.

V. The Invisible Rangatira

Tutakangahau, the Double Exile, and the Framework That Had No Category

Something else in Tutakangahau’s story matters for our clinical work. It is this: Best’s romantic frame had no category for who Tutakangahau was.

Here was a man who had navigated Te Kooti’s Ringatū faith, who had fought in the wars of the 1860s, who had written letters to the Premier of New Zealand in his own hand, who served as a Commissioner in the Urewera District Native Reserve — a man whose father Tapui had greeted the missionary Colenso with kōrero “spiced by scriptural allusions” as far back as 1841.

By the time Best arrived, Tutakangahau was a fully modern man navigating a colonial world with intelligence and mana. He was neither the ‘old-time Māori’ of Best’s romantic imagination nor a Brown Pākehā who had abandoned his people. He was something the colonial framework had no box for: a Tuhoe rangatira, fully himself, fully engaged with the present, holding his own complexity with apparent ease.

Best could not see this. His theoretical framework — built on the idea of Māori as primitive survivals of a pre-contact world — had no room for a man this complex and this contemporary. So Best made him simpler. He made him earlier. He wrote out the political engagement, the Ringatū faith, the letters to Seddon, and what remained was “Old Tu” — the tattooed neolith, the last keeper of authentic Māori being.

The rendering invisible of Tutakangahau’s actual life is, in miniature, the same violence the double-exile framework names. We might summarise it this way: if you are too complex for the available frame, the frame will simplify you. If you are too modern to fit the category of ‘authentic Māori,’ you will be written into the category anyway — as its ideal — and your modernity will disappear from the record.

For clients who carry the double exile — urban Māori, ‘Brown Pākehā,’ those whose connection to marae and reo was severed by pepper-potting, migration, or the accumulated trauma of urban displacement — this pattern is intimate and familiar. The only Māori identity the dominant framework offers them may be one constructed for an imagined pre-contact being they have never been and cannot become. And in reaching toward it, they may find not homecoming but a fresh form of exile: the realisation that the very identity they were reaching toward was also, in part, shaped by the wounding system.

TPO’s response to this is not to offer a purer, more authentic version of Māori identity in its place. Instead, it refuses the authenticity test altogether. In TPO’s framework, identity is not a historical reconstruction. It is a living, present-tense act—grounded in whakapapa, expressed through wairua, enacted through the body, the maramataka, and the ongoing practice of hauora. You do not have to be “old-time Māori” to be Māori. You do not have to pass a test that was designed by a Victorian anthropologist to serve his own theoretical project. You only must do the work of recognising, reclaiming, and restoring what is yours — at whatever depth or form, with whatever resources are available to you right now.

VI. Where TPO Stands

Critical Humility and Rooted Confidence

This companion layer requires a posture of us, and it is worth naming directly. It is not the posture of disillusionment — the discovery that the archive is compromised does not mean the work is futile. It is not the posture of paralysis — we cannot spend our clinical hours tracing the whakapapa of every concept before we use it. And it is not the posture of denial — after Holman’s work, it is no longer possible to claim the unmediated purity of a kaupapa Māori methodology without accounting for where its vocabulary came from.

The posture it requires is whakapapa awareness: the ongoing, honest practice of tracing where knowledge comes from, who was in the room when it was recorded, what was altered in the telling, and whether it still serves the hauora of the people for whom it was recovered.

This is, perhaps, a posture uniquely suited to a framework built on the whakapapa metaphor. We do not trace whakapapa to prove purity — we trace it to understand relationship, influence, continuity, and change. A whakapapa that shows colonial mediation in one branch does not thereby become invalid. It becomes more honest. And a practice grounded in honesty about its own lineage is a practice you can trust.

Te Poutama Ora holds itself to this standard. It draws on concepts that carry layers of colonial and post-colonial reinscription — mauri, wairua, whakapapa itself — but does so with the awareness that these concepts are working clinical and spiritual tools whose depth is continually tested against lived experience, against the body’s response, against the evidence of the maramataka, and against the outcomes of those who have moved through the framework’s dimensions.

And it grounds its primary epistemological authority not in the literary archive but in what the archive could not reach: the embodied transmission of healing knowledge through whakapapa lines, the ecological intelligence of te maramataka, the clinical accumulation of te pūrākau — the lived-experience teaching story of those who have made the journey — and the healing gifts that formal suppression could interrupt but never extinguish.

The standard Te Poutama Ora holds itself to is not the purity of its sources. It is the integrity of its methodology — and the hauora of the people.

VII. The Question That Holds Everything

The Poison Ivy grew through the land. It grew through the law. It grew through the language, the body’s relationship with wai, the voice, the economic ground. Then, quietly and persistently, it grew through the roots of the words themselves—through the concepts Māori reached toward for recovery, through the archives Māori drew on to rebuild identity, through the very vocabulary of healing.

This is not a reason to stop reaching. It is a reason to reach with your eyes open.

Tutakangahau wrote letters to the Premier of New Zealand while Best was recording him as a pre-contact relic. He navigated Ringatū faith, land politics, missionary influence, and colonial governance simultaneously, with apparent wholeness. He was not broken by the complexity. He held it. He was not the mythopoetic Māori of Best’s imagination. He was something better: a man, fully present in his own time, doing the work of his people with whatever was available to him.

That is the image this framework offers in the end. Not a return to a pre-contact purity that was never uncontested, never unmediated, never fully available. But a present-tense practice of hauora: grounded in whakapapa, held in the body, aligned with the maramataka, honest about its own lineage, and always — above all else — accountable to a single question.

Does this serve the hauora of the people?

That question is not naive. It is not innocent of the history this series has traced. It is asked with the full weight of what colonisation did — to the land, to the law, to the language, to the body, to the voice, to the economic ground, and now to the knowing itself.

It is asked anyway. Because the people are here. The wounds are real. The work is now.

And because some of what was given to us — through whakapapa, through body, through dream, through the quiet persistence of healing gifts across generations of suppression — arrived unaltered. Arrived whole. Arrived waiting.

The net went out. But it did not catch everything.

For Your Own Reflection

As you sit with the kōrero in this piece, you might gently hold these questions:

● Where in your own understanding of Māori identity have you encountered a version of ‘authentic Māori being’ that felt unreachable — that seemed designed for someone else, someone earlier, someone simpler than you are?

● What knowledge do you carry that was never written down — that came through the body, the dream, the relationship, the whenua? How do you trust it?

● If you have done the work of cultural reclamation — returning to reo, to tikanga, to wairua — is there a grief present in discovering that some of what you reached toward was also, in part, shaped by the wounding system? What does that grief need?

● What is the question that holds your hauora work accountable? What would

Tutakangahau — the real one, the political one, the complex and fully modern one — ask of you?

For further information or to view published articles related to Te Poutama Ora, please see https://www.iantemo.com/publications

Reference

Holman, J. P. (2007). Best of both worlds: Elsdon Best and the metamorphosis of Māori spirituality [Doctoral thesis, University of Canterbury].