One of the great pleasures of working as an academic in the discipline of architecture is teaching studio. Of the thousands of worship spaces in the discipline, teaching studio, for me, is right up there with miracles because, every semester, students come to you with empty journals, desires (some misplaced, others inspiring) and anticipation that is, in equal parts, wariness and inquisitiveness. Together, you set off in the waka with open-ended questions, curiosity and infinite creativity.

Over the course of the semester, for me as a tutor, it is a journey with smooth sailing, rough waters, gorgeous sunsets and profound moments for self-reflexivity; I hope the students experience the same. Finally, we arrive at the destination – after the absolute storm of hand-in week – to the tranquil bay of student work. To me, it is always a kind of prayer to enter a newly pinned-up bay, when there is quiet before a crit. From where there was nothing, there is now time and space, learning, new knowledge, creativity, problem-solving and the ever-enduring commitment to architecture as a human endeavour. It is a process. And it is fraught
with unknowing.

This semester, I am teaching a Design 4 (D4) studio, where students are required to work in groups to propose and resolve an architectural scheme. This D4 is unique in that it asks students to create papakāinga proposals on iwi-owned land, with a hapū client at Rāwhiti, and its meta-brief was set out by Professor of Architecture (Māori) Anthony Hoete (Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Ranana). It is the first time that papakāinga has been the focus of D4 and been led by an indigenous professor. One cannot help but be a little bit surprised by how long it has taken for this to occur.

Hoete leads a teaching team made up of individuals of different backgrounds from across the globe, who come to te ao Māori as tauiwi, or Pākehā: me included. This is to say, te ao Māori is not the first lens with which we view the world. It is humbling to think of this: that there is a world to which I will always be a student. Against Aotearoa’s colonial history, this implicates us all in complex and tense ways: the individual and the collective in the communal endeavour. We, as individuals, will collectively enter into a journey of unknowing and teaching while we learn ourselves. I cannot speak for my fellow tutors but my own position requires me to reconcile with genuine humility (something I am not great at) how little I know of te ao Māori, how much more I feel I ought to know as tauiwi, and how I so badly want to get it right all the time (also one of my less-attractive characteristics).

Trying to get it right all the time is not the point and it is certainly the rightest way to getting things wrong. That said, there is grave responsibility and, in the context of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, there are obligations – as architectural practitioners and citizens – to the task at hand. Navigating new cultural landscapes as manuhiri brings on professional and personal anxieties, which surface in the thousands of ways they can in the studio setting: tentativeness, premature worries and stress. How do non-Māori teach about Māori housing? How do we decolonise? And are we the ones to do it? My answer is: we must try and, when we get it wrong, we must be open to correction with humility. For the job is too big, too critical for tauiwi and Pākehā not to help with, and we can do so while centring Māoridom.

Contemporary papakāinga, according to the Auckland Design Manual, may “provide Māori with opportunity to live according to that group’s social and cultural values, which may not be provided for through Western models of housing and tenure. Papakāinga developments can create opportunities to provide affordable, secure housing for whānau and hapū on ancestral whenua, and can foster economic independence and community resilience for these communities.”¹ This is a helpful guide for non-Māori, still, to help place such a proposal and the related stakes in the colonial context, the Māori concept of tūrangawaewae is useful.

“Tūrangawaewae,” writes Professor Deidre Brown (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu), “describes one’s sense of belonging or attachment to a particular place and the ability to locate oneself there physically and spiritually.”² Acts of land confiscation, subsequent eviction and alienation have disrupted chains of birthright for Māori to a place to stand in their ancestral land, to locate physical and spiritual belonging. Disturbing these chains has and continues to have profound material consequence; Māori are overrepresented in the areas of housing need and homelessness.³

Therefore, the provision of secure housing for Māori on ancestral whenua is not only about economic independence and community resilience – although critical factors they most certainly are – it is about meaningfully recognising long-standing injustice and our role in bringing balance to scales that have been tipped unevenly for too long.

For non-Māori, sitting with the far-reaching effects of colonisation and actively engaging in decolonising approaches require us to set out as learners of te reo Māori, Mātauranga Māori, and Māoritanga. This is all in real time and space, where deadlines exist, capitalism organises priorities and who is picking up the kids? We must also know that no matter where we get to in proficiency, we will always be students.

These positions can be made complicated by the materiality of the world, both physical and otherwise. As an academic, the clock I keep belongs to the institution; one could say it is institutional. The same applies for the spaces I inhabit; they have a history of gatekeeping at the expense of Māori, knowledge and ways of knowing, and this is a disservice to knowledge and tangata whenua. It is wrong and limiting – future generations deserve better attitudes to knowledge and potential creativity for the challenges ahead.

A recent letter to the editor of the New Zealand Listener, authored by seven University of Auckland academics, is testimony to such limited approaches.⁴ The group of Pākehā academics opined that, while indigenous knowledge contributes to our understanding of the world, it is not “science”. But this assumes that science is universal; it is not, it is only one way of knowing.  

I sense that these scholars have understood that mastering their world of knowledge is equivalent to mastering all knowledge. I cannot help but wonder if they have deprived themselves of the wonderful transcendental pleasure of climbing into the waka as a student, feeling the buoyancy of the water underneath and setting out, unknowing, and finding that there is learning, new knowledge, creativity, time and space, where once there was nothing.