2024 Te Puāwaitanga Award: Serving communities and protecting ecosystems

This award, established by the Royal Society Te Apārangi in partnership with Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, recognises research that has made an eminent and distinctive contribution to Te Ao Māori and to indigenous knowledge.

Based in Te Wānanga o Waipapa (Department of Māori Studies) at Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland, Dan says his research is driven by serving communities, helping to realise their goals or overcome challenges. 

An earth systems scientist, Dan has worked on projects ranging from assessments of geothermal areas to restoration of polluted rivers, lakes, and wetlands, adapting to coastal change, and managing the risks of floods, earthquakes, and volcanoes.

Restoring mauri

“The majority of the research I do with communities is about restoring mauri. Mauri is a universal Māori concept and it’s understood as the life-supporting capacity of air, water, and soil. When ecosystems are thriving, the mauri is thriving. Conversely, when ecosystems are suffering, the mauri is suffering.”

One example of this is when the container ship MV Rena became grounded off the coast of Tauranga, spilling oil and impacting the environment.

“Birds were covered in oil and dying on the beaches,” Dan said. “You couldn’t collect seafood or kaimoana for months and months. But now, much of the mauri of that area has restored. The birds have come back. You can now collect kaimoana.

Kaimoana monitoring

Dan says that for many Māori communities, the mauri of kaimoana seafood is “a very live question” both for whether there is actually any kaimoana there to start with, in populations that could withstand harvesting, and even then whether it is safe to eat (i.e. not polluted with metals or pathogens or other “nasties” in runoff from land, roading, or wastewater spills).

“For that kind of work, I draw on my science training, but I also draw from the mātauranga. If we were just doing a biodiversity sample, for example, we would set out our transects along the beach and do a uniform approach or a random sampling model, all of which will tell us useful information, but instead when we do kaimoana surveys, our first question is ‘Where did you used to go and collect the pipis? Where did you collect the tuangi (cockles)? Where did you collect the kutai (mussels)?’ and then we would frame our sampling around that.”

The practice of rāhui

Another research project Dan is involved in is looking at rāhui, a “tried and tested practice of restricting human activities in the environment in order that the environment might rebound”.

“The beauty of such an approach is that it draws on our ethical responsibilities. For Māori, we see ourselves as part of the taiao, part of the environment, and so we have to manage our relationship with it. So it's not about managing the mussel beds, it's about managing our relationship with the mussel beds. 

“Sometimes, all we have to do is not take anything.” Rāhui work best when they are placed before ecosystems or beds become too degraded or over-harvested. In some areas, for example, koura have been over-harvested, so that’s there’s virtually nothing left.

This can mean that species are ‘functionally extinct’ and the population won’t be able to come back from those remaining individuals. This is when reseeding may be needed.

“A rāhui might have worked if it had been placed a decade, or even decades ago, but now maybe it’s too late,” Dan explains. “We are hoping rāhui still work in such cases, and that is part of the research.”

Dan is peripherally involved in efforts to reseed mussel beds in the Hauraki Gulf. Mussels used to be very prevalent throughout the entire gulf, filtering the water and providing habitats for myriad creatures. “Without them and their filtering super-power, and because we have, and continue to, use the land in ways that lead to massive erosion, large tracts of the Gulf that were once mussel beds on sand, are now just metres of mud,” he says.

Giving communities a voice in development

Te Mana o Ngāti Rangitihi Trust, based in the small village of Matatā on the eastern Bay of Plenty, was receiving many applications from developers and the council for various projects. “They felt powerless and unheard because none of the things that they thought were important were being listened to by the decision-makers,” Dan said. Dan’s team responded to Ngāti Rangitihi’s appeal for tautoko.

“We framed it about mauri. We included all the scientific and technical information that the council or developers would use, but we also included what was important to Ngāti Rangitihi.  We included their mātauranga, their stories of connection. We looked at the way the rivers had been completely redirected and had the heads of the estuaries severed away from the rivers. We looked at the impacts upstream of pulp and paper-mill waste. And we looked at the multitude of impacts there, as well as all the typical things that a scientist would look at, as well as considering some of the economic benefits that might come from these proposed activities. And then (after receiving permission beforehand) we published this research and said ‘this is what Ngāti Rangitihi think’.

“And now, we see that in the Ngāti Rangitihi settlement, there is a focus area on trying to restore the mauri to it. What's great to see, is that actually, their voice was heard. Finally, now the decision-makers understand, ‘Ah, we see your point of view, we can now include it in our decision-making.’

“And that’s the kind of research that I think I’m here to do. I see myself less as an associate professor in a university, and more as a servant of the people or more realistically, in the service of our grandchildren, and our grandchildren's grandchildren.”

Learning from pūrakau

“We need to recognise that decisions made on where society should build settlements, bridges and infrastructure, some over a century ago, some more recently, have been a mistake,” Dan says. “It’s hard for some people to hear, but if you’re living on a floodplain, it’s in the name – a flat piece of land that floods.”

“What we’re saying is let’s not make those same mistakes again. Let’s draw from the mātauranga that tells us about how the rivers have behaved through time – often that knowledge is codified as taniwha in story form, we call them pūrākau. One pūrakau describes a taniwha in the form of a lizard that lives in a stream, and the message is, beware the flicking tail of the lizard.

“Many scientists or engineers would dismiss that outright as being nonsense, ‘the river is six kilometres long, ten kilometres long, there’s no such thing as a lizard that long’. What they’ve failed to see is the underlying observations of river behaviour, knowledge codified in that story of a taniwha, is the important information. It maps a channel avulsing, shifting through time, and that’s exactly where the tail of the lizard flicks.

“There are numerous such pūrākau of taniwha around New Zealand and if those had been involved in decision-making, we may not be facing some of the situations we have today.”

Greater together

“What I've come to realise is that many of the solutions we arrive at could not be reached from either body of knowledge in isolation. If I just looked at mātauranga Māori or, if I just looked at science, we wouldn’t land in the places where we’ve landed, and so it’s only through the weaving together of those two knowledge systems—which are very similar in some aspects but also very different in other aspects—that we can start to imagine futures and solutions that neither body of knowledge can reach in isolation.

“To me, that’s really powerful and, it’s incumbent on people like myself and other researchers to draw from all the knowledge that’s available and to do that respectfully in ways that honour the knowledge but also understand it for what it actually is, which is a treasure trove of codified information that goes back for centuries about this place.”

Focus on being a good ancestor

A fundamental message that comes through in Dan’s work with communities, yet remains unsaid, is that we should focus on being good ancestors.

“If we can frame the work we do around being good ancestors, so many of the challenges we face today would pretty much disappear.

“So maybe this is a learning to share with folks: ‘think about what being a good ancestor would look like in the work you do and then follow that with everything you’ve got’.”

In awarding this Research Excellence Award, Te Puāwaitanga, the selection committee recognised Dan’s “tireless efforts serving Māori communities, exploring mātauranga and illuminating its ways of knowing for scientists”.

In accepting this award, Dan said: “So many colleagues, mentors, my whānau, near and extended, have all contributed to me being in this place. And so I’ll accept this award but it’s actually for our future and for all those people who have part of my journey. In particular, I would like to thank Professor Dame Anne Salmond for nominating me and Professors Jacinta Ruru and Richard Le Heron for supporting my nomination.”

Te Puāwaitanga Research Excellence Award:

Te Puāwaitanga was established in partnership with Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga to recognise research that has made an eminent and distinctive contribution to Te Ao Māori and indigenous knowledge.

Citation:

To Daniel Hikuroa for his research, work with Māori communities, and empowerment of kaitiakitanga in environmental policy.