Rangatiratanga - Kawanatanga: Dealing with rhetoric

Abstract

Numbered among the few Maori appointed to an academic position during the late 1980s, I have seen our discipline and profession, in all its awkward self-consciousness, make genuine attempts to grapple the respond to questions and challenges delivered by Maori and Pakeha alike. For example, Where is the Maori content in courses? Why aren’t Maori graduating from professional training programmes? Why are there not more Maori academics? Where is the place/space for Maori as practitioners, academics, researchers and decision-makers? Why does it seem that Maori are always on the ‘client’ side of the professional/client equation? Where are the Maori men? In responding to these persistent challenges the professional and discipline in Aotearoa/New Zealand has been irreversibly changed, in my opinion. The change has not been dramatic (psychology is somewhat averse to self-promotion) but, of those changes that have occurred, a definite contribution has been made to advancing Maori development, to building a more bicultural discipline and practice, and to supporting the strength of the Kawanatanga and Rangatiratanga dynamic whose importance I emphasize here.