Mason Durie - Nga Tini Whetu

Ko tini whet ki te rangi
Ko Rangitne nui ki te whenua.

For centuries the heavens have provided navigational markers for ocean voyagers. Because the appearance of stars can be predicted according to the season, and the positions of stars are consistently aligned to magnetic compass points, constellations of stars such as Te Pae Mhutonga, act as sentinels in unchartered waters. Without recourse to the stars it is unlikely that Mori would have reached Aotearoa or that settlers from the northern hemisphere would have found land in the south. Further, quite apart from their navigational qualities, stars have fired the imagination of generations, acting as sources of wonderment and inspiration and challenging adventurers to seek new fields and remote domains.

The combined themes of navigation on the one hand and discovery on the other are germane to Ng Tini Whet: Navigating Mori Futures. This book is about the future and Mori journeys towards the future. It does not discount the past nor disregard the many expeditions made in bygone years but it recognises a changing seascape and the need for voyages that will go in search of new destinations. Importantly, those voyages will be more likely to reach preferred landings if their passages are illuminated; not necessarily by celestial lights but by pointers that can bring lucidity to murky waters. Moving ahead, towards new levels of achievement, new technologies, new alliances and new economies, will require more than simply a message of hope or good intention. It will be necessary to read the signs of change and to know how change can be managed and manipulated to deliver the best results for the most people. Taking charge of the future rather than charging into the future will be an increasingly relevant challenge for tomorrows leaders. They will need to identify stars that can point the way.

Ng Tini Whet: Navigating Mori Futures is a sequel to Ng Khui Pou: Launching Mori Futures. Both books discuss perspectives relevant to Mori in the years ahead and highlight Mori aspirations, experiences, and excursions in contemporary times, often in novel situations. The papers in Ng Khui Pou had been presented at conferences and seminars between 1999 and 2002 and represented views that were pertinent to those years. Ng Tini Whet follows a similar pattern but contains a set of twenty-five papers presented at various conferences in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Malaysia, and the USA between 2004 and 2010. Though less than a decade separates the two books, the gap between them is sufficiently long to have seen the emergence of trends and challenges that were barely visible in 2002.

Papers in this book cover a wide range of topics and are primarily about Mori journeys and indigenous aspirations in a rapidly changing society and in a world that has become increasingly complex yet, ironically, more accessible. Global climate change, global mobility, global technological advancement now rival national policies and programmes as factors that can accelerate or undermine Mori advancement.

Although each paper in Ng Tini Whet has been broadly shaped around the topics selected for particular conferences and by the associated academic disciplines, they share similar and often overlapping messages. Inevitably, in order to preserve the integrity of each chapter, this has resulted in some repetition. But apart from minor editing to maintain a consistent style, each chapter is essentially the same as the original presentation. The Mori dimension traverses a range of subject areas and can be seen as a cross-cutting theme that is relevant to many disciplines and a number of policy areas. The holistic thrust highlights the shortcomings of a sectoral approach and also points to the limitations of inquiries that act in isolation from other fields of inquiry. In that respect the breadth of Mori development is challenging conventional approaches to the acquisition of knowledge and understanding. While specialist knowledge in any particular area will open up new territories and add depth to understanding, the complexities of a future world will also demand a capacity to integrate multiple threads so that a coherent fabric can be woven.

Global transitions and trajectories form part of the rubric within which change is discussed; indeed it would be futile to speculate on Mori futures without considering the impacts of worldwide trends. New Zealand, like other countries, is not immune from global influence. However, although the Mori and indigenous focus is contextualised by global challenges and discoveries, the book contains an equally strong focus on Mori distinctiveness, a cultural reality that provides a unifying link and a starting point for discussions about the future. Maintaining Mori distinctiveness in the face of competing international forces will be a major challenge in the years to come as it was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is unlikely that Mori distinctiveness will be unchanging or inflexible; people will change and cultural markers will shift. Earlier experiences suggest that culture changes as society changes. But there is also evidence that even in the face of threatened assimilation an underlying ethos remains; and within that ethos lies Mori distinctiveness.