Growing up in a rural Māori setting, Te Whetu Marama Henare-Winitana felt she had stepped into a black hole when, as a pre-teenager, she moved to Hawke’s Bay.
Now the EIT Bachelor of Arts Honours (Māori) graduate is living up to her name – Te Whetu meaning “the star” – in championing mātauranga Māori.
Te Whetu Marama was raised in the Tainui district by her paternal grandfather, a Rātana minister of Raukawa descent. Travelling together around the country, “attending a hui here and a hui there”, she grew up steeped in Māoritanga, tikanga whakapono and te reo Māori.
The Māori renaissance had only just taken hold in Hawke’s Bay, she says, when her grandfather moved from the Waikato to be with whānau in Napier. Detached from her deeply-embedded Māori roots, the young Te Whetu Marama felt different and isolated amongst her mainstream school peers.
“Māoridom was not strong here at that time and I lost confidence – it was a complete cultural shock. I tried to box up that Māori side of myself and bury it,” she recalls.
Moving directly from Hukarere Māori girls’ college to EIT’s school of Māori studies restored her sense of belonging.
“I found my place,” she says of Te Ūranga Waka. “The lecturers and tutors knew their stuff and they saw I was struggling to find my place in the world. They were guns, and I settled. It totally worked for me.”
As a fluent speaker of te reo Māori, she “floated” through a Level 3 programme and then progressed to a Bachelor of Arts (Māori).
She had been at EIT for five years when her younger sister gave birth to twins. Te Whetu Marama took over their care, and managed part-time work as a matron at Hukarere because she could take the infant boys with her. “It was full on,” she says of that time.
Then, during a “stay-at-home” stint, she got involved in kōhanga reo, taking on a variety of roles and responsibilities in the whānau-led movement. Recently she completed the Level 7 Te Kōhanga Reo National Trust Board’s immersion early childhood teacher training qualification Whakapakari i te Tino Rangatiratanga.
Feeling in need of further academic challenge, she is now enrolled for EIT’s newly launched postgraduate degree – the Master of Professional Practice – and will dovetail the study, co-parenting whānau with husband Raymond Winitana and continuing in her full-time position as kaitakawaenga with the Hawke’s Bay District Health Board’s mental health department.
Working as a cultural liaison adviser for CAFS (Child and Adolescent Family Services) since last October, Te Whetu Marama is feeling increasing confident about drawing on her skills, knowledge and experiences in advising clinicians on how to treat Māori people.
“A lot of Māori patients have been disconnected from their culture,” she explains. “I know what that feels like to a certain degree and that gives me a foot in the door as to how they think.”
Te Whetu Marama says that as a Māori woman she views the world as an interconnected place where acknowledging the past guides your journey forward – a perspective she sees as different from other cultures. Proud of who she is and what she is achieving, she says it was EIT that put her on the pathway to becoming whole.