Decolonising Porirua Pt 2

10/25/18 • 20 min

EPISODE SUMMARY: In part two of our story on the Imagining Decolonised Cities project, we talk to some of the practitioners who were involved in a day-long, free public hui held at Takapūwāhia Marae in Porirua which invited public dialogue on the question - "what is a decolonised city?"

GUESTS: Lena Henry, Rebecca Kiddle

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Jade Kake v/o: Our urban landscapes in Aotearoa New Zealand have been arranged and disciplined according to colonial values which favour private over communal land ownership. For mana whenua living in what have become urban environments, the city rose up around them, their land base eroded rapidly, acre by acre. They were pushed out, often forcibly.
New Zealand has a long history of seeking to contain and erase indigeneity in urban places, swiftly quashing any assertions of Māori sovereignty in the urban environment. The occupation of Takaparawhau in 1977 and the 1995 occupation of Moutoa Gardens are both notable examples in New Zealand history.

So what is a decolonised city anyway? And why does it matter?

Tēnā koutou katoa

Nau mai haere mai ki te Indigenous Urbanism, Aotearoa Edition, Episode 19.

I’m your host Jade Kake and this is Indigenous Urbanism, stories about the spaces we inhabit, and the community drivers and practitioners who are shaping those environments and decolonising through design.

On this episode of Indigenous Urbanism, part two of our story on the Imagining Decolonised Cities project, we talk to some of the practitioners who were involved in a day-long, free public hui held at Takapūwāhia Marae in Porirua which invited public dialogue on the question - "what is a decolonised city?"

The Imagining Decolonised Cities project was initiated by a team of academics from Victoria University of Wellington and members of Ngāti Toa Rangatira to stimulate discussion around what our cities might be like in the future if they were decolonised.

We spoke with Lena Henry, nō Ngāti Hine, a lecturer in planning at the University of Auckland, and one of the speakers at the symposium.

Lena Henry: I te taha o tōku pāpā, ko Otamaewa te maunga, ko Mahururoa te awa, ko Ngāti Toro te hapū, ko Ngāpuhi te iwi. Nō te kāinga Otaua. Ko Piki Te Aroha te marae. I te taha o tōku māmā, nō Ngāti Hine, ko Hineamaru te rangatira. Āe. Ko au tenei. Lena Henry.

JK: So as part of the Imagining Decolonised Cities project in Porirua, there was a one day symposium at Takapūwāhia Marae, that really just encouraged people to think about 'what is a decolonised city?' and what might it be like, and what is the process to get there? And there was a wide range of speakers talking about their mahi, and reflecting on that provocation. I just wondered if you could perhaps share some of your whakaaro around that topic? I think it was a really cool thing to provoke people to think and talk about this idea of a decolonised city.

LH: So first of all, I really appreciated the privilege of being able to present some ideas. And I like to use these opportunities as a way to reflect back what communities have said to me in the past. And so, the actual kaupapa of decolonisation has been one that has been talked about for a long time, and I guess the adding onto that, decolonising cities, has been the new addition to the kōrero about decolonisation. So it was really about understanding 'what is decolonisation'? Because I think what we've tried to do, primarily, is to indigenise. And then decolonise really fits well with planning, because it's about the structural dimensions, as well as talking about, how do we reconstruct or reclaim the processes of planning, and develop policies that will provide the types of outcomes that we're looking at. So, what I talked about then was really looking at, what are the aspirations, that I know of? That would represent a decolonised city. And I quickly started off with an interaction or discussion I had with our then five year old, Toa. Toa Slavomir. Where he was, we were down on Queen St, waiting for Helen to finish work, and he looked up at these, he was just looking around his environment, and I was looking at my phone, and he said, he just said to me, 'why don't they like us?' And I sort of stopped, and put my phone away, and I thought, what have I missed? And I go, 'who doesn't like us?' And he goes, 'why don't they like Māori?' and I thought, have I missed something, is someone looking at us? And then I said, why do you ask that? And he just pointed up to the signs. So he goes to a rūmaki reo class called Whānau Ata down at Freeman's Bay, and he was learning how to read Māori. And so, obviously he's waiting and he's trying to engage with his environment, his urban environment, Queen St, and he just said, 'why don't they like Māori?' And he pointed up at this signs. He goes, 'there's no Māori words. I don't know how to read that.' And, so it really is apparent to, yo...

GUESTS: Lena Henry, Rebecca Kiddle

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

So what is a decolonised city anyway? And why does it matter?

Tēnā koutou katoa

Nau mai haere mai ki te Indigenous Urbanism, Aotearoa Edition, Episode 19.

We spoke with Lena Henry, nō Ngāti Hine, a lecturer in planning at the University of Auckland, and one of the speakers at the symposium.

Previous Episode

Decolonising Porirua

EPISODE SUMMARY: On this episode of Indigenous Urbanism, we travel to Porirua, Wellington to learn about Imagining Decolonised Cities, a project designed to stimulate discussion around what our cities could look, feel, sound, taste and smell like if they were decolonised.

GUESTS: Rebecca Kiddle, Fiona Ting, Jessica Hulme

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Jade Kake v/o: If we walk around our cities in Aotearoa, they feel like colonial spaces. This is changing, slowly, but on the whole they don’t feel very Māori. In general, they don’t reflect the hau kāinga or local people of that place.

Our cities in New Zealand have, for the most part, taken shape according to Eurocentric values. Pre- and early- European contact, Māori had kāinga and pā where all the major cities were founded, but were dispossessed of their land in order for these cities to be built.

Māori concerns have historically been understood as rural despite the fact that most Māori live in cities, and urban spaces are turangawaewae for a number of iwi and hapū.

So, what is a decolonised city anyway?

Rebecca Kiddle: We wanted to explore this idea of decolonisation, and that really started from not really understanding what that might mean, in relation, particularly to the build environment. New Zealand often understands itself to be a rural place. And maybe you've heard people talk about this before, but we're one of the most urbanised countries in the world, and yet we still understand ourselves to be, you know, people with sheep basically. The reasons for exploring that are, that it becomes pretty problematic if we conceptualise ourselves to be rural, in relation to Māori identity. So what I think happens, is people understand Māori-ness to be a rural thing. It's not an urban thing, it's not something that’s relevant to the City, and that’s problematic in two ways. First of all it kind of dismisses the mana of the iwi and hapū, for whom these places are theirs. So, Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Whātua in Auckland, and so on. It means that their identities aren't represented well in the built environment. I think the second is really about a sort of general kind of erasure of indigeneity in the built environment.

JK v/o: Tēnā koutou katoa

Nau mai haere mai ki te Indigenous Urbanism, Aotearoa Edition, Episode 18.

On this episode of Indigenous Urbanism we travel to Porirua to learn about Imagining Decolonised Cities, a project designed to stimulate discussion around what our cities could look, feel, sound, taste and smell like if they were decolonised.

The project did this through eliciting utopian ideas for a decolonised city through a public urban design competition, and a public symposium where speakers were invited to respond to the provocation ‘What is a decolonised city?’

We spoke with Dr. Rebecca Kiddle, nō Ngāti Porou raua ko Ngāpuhi, a senior lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington, and leader of the Imagining Decolonised Cities project.

RK: I te taha tōku kuia nō Ngāpuhi. I te taha tōku koroua, ko Hikurangi te maunga, ko Waiapu te awa, ko Ngāti Porou te iwi. I tipu ake au i Heretaunga, ko Becky Kiddle tōku ingoa. So I'm Ngāti Porou and Ngāpuhi, but I grew up in Kahungunu territory, and yeah, my name's Becky Kiddle and I'm a senior lecturer in environmental studies at Victoria University.

JK: Could you talk us through the project, and how it came about?

RK: That project came about cause I had spent a few years overseas. So I was overseas for about ten years, and I came back and sort of felt a little bit like our built environments hadn't moved on all that much, since I had left. There was obviously some real gains in some areas of the country, particularly around uptake of the Te Aranga principles in Auckland. But for the most part Māori were seen to be excluded from decision making processes around, just the form and function of our cities. In parallel with that, there was a real sense of pain, I guess, amongst Māori communities, around what cities were and meant to them. And that pain is for obvious reasons, all the government policies post-World War 2 that led Māori into the cities, and led to the demise of things like culture and language, and has caused a whole lot of pain amongst many Māori communities. Those are those coming from other rohe to be in the cities, but there's also pain amongst iwi for whom the city has always been their papakāinga or their tūrangawaewae or whatever. So, a sort of double-edged pain going on around cities and Māori. But I think the problem of conceptualising cities as all being about painful reminders of terrible government policy, is that we can miss out on the opportunities of cities, wh...

Next Episode

In Conversation with Patrick Stewart

EPISODE SUMMARY: On this episode of Indigenous Urbanism, we speak with Dr Patrick Stewart, a citizen of the Nisga'a Nation in north-western British Columbia who has been operating his architectural practice in Sto:lo territory in Chilliwack B.C. since 1995.

GUESTS: Patrick Stewart

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Jade Kake v/o: Tēnā koutou katoa

Nau mai haere mai ki te Indigenous Urbanism, Aotearoa Edition, Episode 20.

On this episode of Indigenous Urbanism we speak with Dr Patrick Stewart, a citizen of the Nisga'a Nation in northwestern B.C. from the community of Gingolx, and a member of the Killerwhale House of Daxaan. His Nisga’a name is Luugigyoo, which means calm waters.

Patrick is the founding principal of Patrick R. Stewart Architect, an architectural firm with a First Nations community development focus which has been operating in Sto:lo territory in Chilliwack B.C. since 1995.

JK: Kia ora Patrick, thank you for sitting down with me. So my first question is, who are you, where are you from, and what do you do?

Patrick Stewart: My name is Patrick Stewart. My Nisga'a name is Luugigyoo. I'm an architect, from Canada. I'm from North-Western British Columbia.

JK: I met you, actually, two years ago, when you came over with a group of other Canadian First Nations Indigenous architects, and that was really exciting, because that was definitely a first for me. And since then, we came to visit you last year, and that was really wonderful, you showed us around some of your projects, and we spent time together also in Ottawa at the symposium. And now here we are again. And there's been some really cool stuff that's come out of that. So I'm just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about some of the collaboration that's emerged in this dialogue between Indigenous architects.

PS: Well it has started in the last maybe three years, four years, where us as practitioners have started to find others. I mean it's sort of an organic thing in a sense. It's like, hey, you see some project designed by somebody, and you think, well, I should talk to them. And it just sort of grows like that. You find out names of people who have had a ten year long collaboration with Australia, so I've known those guys, and Rewi Thompson has been collaborating there, had been collaborating there as well, and he was the first Māori architect I met. We were at conferences together, we were on a speaking tour together in Australia, and so, yeah, it was good. And Kevin O'Brien, and Dillon Kombumerri, the two of them were our sort of anchor point there. Michael Mossman has come on since, over there. And that country being closer to here, than I am, they knew more people. So they knew Rau. So that's how that sort of happened, and then finding out about Ngā Aho, and thought, well, that's really big. We don't have an organisation like Ngā Aho, in a sense. I chair the Indigenous Task Force for RAIC, but that's the national architectural organisation. But they do, or did, see their way to having something Indigenous, and that's been a good rallying point for all of us. But we're not our own organisation, and you know, just leaving Tammy's presentation, on the AICAE. I'm a member of that, and I was in Albuquerque last year when they had their meeting, and Michael Laverdure, who's the president, we were talking about, we need to do something. So, we were talking about - and I've got to talk to the RAIC about that - if we can have some kind of link between organisations. It would be good if we had something like Ngā Aho as well.

JK: Building our networks, we're getting strength in numbers.

PS: We are. And when I was, last time in 2011, in Australia, we formed a loose organisation, and it actually had funding. I don't know if the funding's still there. But it was called the International Network of Indigenous Architects. That was just something we put up, and the University of Sydney funded it, and we had some money and we did a few things though that. But, everybody has a busy life, and everybody goes back to their own country, and it's like, time flies.

JK: Especially for Indigenous architects, they're often wearing a million hats, and doing many projects, and network building. You feel like you have to carry the weight of a movement on your shoulders, but I think when you come somewhere like this, you kind of realise, actually, we are all really busy, but it's important to be able to come together and support one another.

PS: It's true, we are busy, and we're always, I think, very positive despite the context we all work in. But we have to be positive because we have to look to the future, and I think that's one aspect that we all have...