Pūrākau analysis

One as yet unaddressed impact of Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonisation was the ongoing erasure of mātauranga Māoritanga from intellectual credibility. Māori ways of relating to, and knowing of, the world are still presented by many as holding primitive value when compared to western scholarship. This is based on the same colonial fictions of inferiority with which the western view has positioned itself as the superior culture in contrast to the “natives” and ‘primitive” forms of society; this fiction has been promoted for the past 250 years in NZ. Although we are making improvements in society now, especially in the Health and Justice sectors, where Māori expert practitioners and ways of knowing have been getting included more in how these organisations operate on a day-to-day basis. The same cannot be said for all public sectors with a history of  dramatic discrimination against Māori. There has definitely been a push for similar changes in NZ’s education system over the past decades, but education is a very slow moving vehicle. While we see more inclusion of kapa haka and events such as Māori language week (“why not the whole year?” Māori people ask), for the most part, mātauranga Māoritanga is still a foreigner in most mainstream NZ classrooms. One important thing in mātauranga Māori is the telling of stories, often related to those stories we know from and about our ancestors. These oral histories hold stores of carefully passed on knowledge that has helped our people navigate the world successfully, both philosophically & geographically for many generations. Māori society was not perfect - no-one ever claimed it was, but it is generally agreed that it was without the horrendous inequality and health statistics we are identified with in the western model of NZ we live in today. By demonstrating an understanding of the intellectually significant place of pūrākau in mātauranga Māori, we can skilfully respond to the colonial fiction that casually labels these historical and philosophical roadmaps as no more than imaginative stories told by a “race” of “natives”, with no real importance, nor benefit to interacting with the world. Making these points to the people around us who may not have been provided this understanding is not only important for Māori; it stands to benefit us all, because added to the absence of the massive inequality - it can also be assumed that our current environmental challenges that are presently not being thought about in terms of “for the future”, would not be so disastrous as they now are, if more western nations had tried to learn from indigenous peoples rather than attempt to ‘vanquish’ them from existence (as The Papal Bull Romanus Pontifex put it). Below you will find a guide for how to approach each section in your literary analysis of a pūrākau.