Identity
Articles on identity, culture and belonging, including Māori perspectives on healing and wellbeing.
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What Did Colonisation Teach You?
When I wrote about poverty, I asked what it taught me. To do, to hide, to carry, to become, to want. Then…
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What Did Poverty Teach You?
In religious class one day, we were asked to talk about the rich and the poor. How the gap grows. What it…
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Snobs Hill – They Were Not Mine, But I Lived Them
This term in religious studies, the readings took me into Aotearoa's land history: David James’s timeline of land dealings, laws, and schooling…
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The Closed Circle – Whitu: The Number That Would Not Let Me Go
A number in my whakapapa keeps finding me. By Nōpera Te Rangīūia’s generation, formal teaching at Te Rāwheoro had ended. I don’t…
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When the Bindings Break – The whakapapa-pond, and why three traditions all knew the same thing
I've seen a pattern across years of research and development that I didn’t have a name for at first. Someone comes in…
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What Your Descendants Will Thank You For – The moment the healing becomes ancestral — and what you declare forward from here
The gifts my grandparents gave me. Grandad, an Anglican minister and healer, was strong in his faith. He passed before I was…
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From Wai Māori to Waipiro: The Colonial Wound Beneath the Wine Glass
There is a man in the counselling room who does not have a drinking problem. He is not violent. He does not…
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Te Ngākau Tūāhua – The Normalised Heart
When the wound became the water. There is a kind of harm that is very difficult to see. Not because it is…
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When you finally have a name for it – Colonisation PTSD
The healing that begins the moment you stop calling the wound "just how I am"...to ..“I am suffering from Colonisation PTSD” There…
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Te Māra me te Pīkao – The Garden and the Ivy
Three sentences. Three exiles. And why “just get over it” is not a garden — it’s a weed strategy. Poison ivy doesn’t…
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