 Te Na Rākau tū, koti me tūatahi, he kōreroa ki te kaihanga o tātū hui hui o tēnā irā. Ngāi tū o Maraimaha o Whanganuiatara, he te tangata whenu o tēnā i motu, he hūno hūno ki te aitua o Ngāti Whātua, nāraira hairi atu irā. Rōi wēni o ukeinu i kai tūtā. Te Pāti e i Kaua tēnā, rei tū māria tū. Tēnā i tū tēnā, Tū māria tū māria tū tētā i kai te tū māria tū… anda roi pohant maurini pett te iranga waiwai visitein Daimtiata, a te plezio givin Uncle Doc, o Takutai Wikarewhi, ko pasti wei just last week, a rai back up to Auckland from Ngārua Wahi'a. A on the way up, I asked him the question, hey, Uncle, what does the word tangata fenwa mean to you? And he looks at me and goes, well, I don't know about you, boy, but it means the place I grew up. I didn't leave home until I was 17. That was the first time I went to Auckland, to the big smoke. Everything I ate, everything I did, occurred within two kilometres of my marae. The marae is the centre of my universe. You young fellas, you eat bananas from Ecuador. You eat onions from Pukekoi. You eat teiti from the south. Nice stuff that. And I live down there now, so I'm a good place. Anyway, so the point I'm trying to make here is that being tangata fenwa, having an identity, it's about emotional connection. I really resonated with what Simon was saying today. And that's values. What are our values? The culture which I've been fortunate to be part of and grow up and be associated with is a marae culture. It's a tribal marae culture. It's been part of our whakapapa for tens of generations. It comes from a people that have had innovation, technology, wisdom and access to knowledge that's taken them across the whole Pacific. I've just returned from Alaska and the North West Coast. It appears that our people were engaging with them annually. They were trading. They were entrepreneurial and looking across their horizons. We know that they visited numerous places in South America. They brought the kumara back into the Pacific. They found their way here to Aotearoa, perhaps up to 1,000 years ago. And they've made do not just with what they've got, but they've prospered. They have passed on a sense of identity and belonging that's taken them into an interaction with the incoming colonists that's all based on the Treaty of Waitangi. So now I've used up just about everything. I'm going to give you 20 slides really rapidly. And the family shots. So there's a few words there. If you can't read them, that's OK. I'll try and keep you in step with it. This proverb, Hekakanoe Rururuia, Mai e rangatia, is in reference to us as a people, Pacific people scattered right across the whole of the ocean. We're oceanic people. We're people that belongs to the ocean. And only in recent times have we become land-based here in Aotearoa. And it's the transfer of knowledge that is the most important thing here. As with knowledge comes identity. And with identity comes sense of purpose. And with purpose are the values and the principles that maintain you from one generation to the next. So 3,000-year-old institution of memory. So watch out museums. They're still very young in our world. We have 800 centres of the universe across Aotearoa, still existing, but some of them hanging on by their fingernails. They are the focus of tangata fenua, what it means to be the people of that land. Sometimes we refer to as manua te fenua. They're a place that are valued in terms of rangatiratanga, those who are familiar with the New Zealand Treaty. It's embedded in there. Manakitanga, to give service, hospitality, and kaitiakitanga. Again, Resource Management Act. It's about protection, protection for future generations. Sometimes our political leaders might need reminding of that. We're also in a space when you're on the marae where we worship the past in terms of honouring the dead. And during tangihanga, the dead come alive again. That is to those recently deceased that we offer those who have passed away to come collect them and take them back to the homeland, show them the way forward, and the separation of our wider and the separation of the essence that makes us part of the earth, separates from the essence of the spirit that makes us part of the sky. What we have today is a lack of that knowledge I've briefly just given you, being transferred to our children. Over 90% of our children now grow up away from marae communities and they're into their third generation and don't understand what it means to be part of a place in terms of belonging that the marae represents. When colonisation first occurred, one of the responses to that crisis was the building of large meeting houses. And they have become the identity of marae. So, most of us who travel around the country, we recognise marae by the meeting house we see sitting on it. But that's only recent. Former days of the past sites, the many hundreds of past sites you see still, thanks to sheep grazing on them, preferably not cattle, they were a bit more destructive, but you can see the terracing. They were, again, innovation. And perhaps we're starting to realise the ones that were in the coastal areas, they were innovation against a major threat called tsunami. And, funny how we're waking up to that now. In the 20th century, Roldan and urban marae are the response in cities to the diaspora of Māori leaving their impoverished communities right across the country. They are also the gangs that we have within urban areas, another response. The social isolation that's been occurring amongst our youth, I spent a lot of time in South Auckland, where being Māori is very different from what I grew up with, being Māori is an ethnic identity. And yet we're living on the territory of Tainui, of Shane, who spoke this morning. This is his land, his responsibility, his sense, deep sense of obligation and accountability. Yet how do you provide when you yourself have been, had your land confiscated through the colonisation process? So how do we provide for these youth that are becoming more and more separated from an incredible value system? How do we re-engage them with that value system and give them a sense of belonging? So we can move them out of that one track path that so many of them are now going on that will cost each of us $100,000 a year if they end up in prison. Funny enough, the graves are still in Goodnick. The old people do what they can to get back and get their youth to drive them home where they can. But when you live in Auckland and you're trying to go up to the Huk Younger and look up to your graves, it's a long journey. And even closer to home is one of my marae which was fire-bombed by a 16-year-old youth who was high on methamphetamine. So the separation is just geographical. It's also, we would say, a wider separation, a breakdown in the values of understanding of what it really means to belong to a community. This is a... This marae here looks like it's collapsed. It's gone. And when we started putting together the Māori Maps project, we always, for every marae we visit, we'll jump on Facebook, look at the different social networking sites that might be associated. And we found that there's over 1,000 youth belong to a social networking site that belong to this marae. And they're all talking about how one day they're going to rebuild what's important to them. They're living in Australia, all parts of New Zealand. And it's those sort of things that gives us hope. They're not looking to return back to being a post-settlement environment of receiving money for education. They're looking for a place to belong. They're looking for their kin to reconnect. And they're looking for a purpose of why they're actually living on this planet. And if we get that right, then we get New Zealand right. Last year, I was fortunate to be on Te Matua Māori, one of the seven waka rua that were out in the Pacific. And a lot of youth from right across the Pacific, many at risk, many have come through tough journeys, re-engaging with old navigation skills of their ancestors and reconnecting with themselves with what it meant to be a Polynesian, a Pacific person, and Māori or Fijian or New Caledonian or Tahitian. The old way of maintaining our identity was the reunions. And as one of my aunties said, I'd hope there's no sex during this reunion. And what has become quite common is people, especially amongst Māori Pacific Islanders, is the old video camera in the old days and now digital is recording our stories, maintaining a record, trying to figure a way to crack this breakdown and communication between grandparent-grandchild generation. And so being involved in some of these projects outside Māori maps of recording oral knowledge and then making it available to the communities in ways that they control. I mean, it's one thing to democratise knowledge, but it's another thing to make knowledge nor common. If you want to maintain the power of knowledge, you've got to maintain the tapu. You've got to know where the boundaries are and how to negotiate them. And this is one of the questions I ask myself in terms of innovation and digitisation. How do we maintain the knowledge for the purpose that it will best serve the future of wellbeing of a nation? Then we've got to look at where the boundaries are and how they're negotiated. The website Māori Maps is five years of thinking through those boundaries and looking at ways in which we bring the visitor, in particular our youth, to the gate so that it can start to engage in the knowledge that sits behind that marae, that they can turn up and be safe and not feel like a fool that they're not going to be ridiculed. At the same time, it provides the home, the hokai and the home people an opportunity to engage with them and know that this is about reconnection, not about having to crack at them because their father took off in the 50s and left them alone, but only turned up when there was a tangi and thought giving money to build the wharekai would fix things. It's also an opportunity through our site to reconnect to the taonga, to the very ancestral objects, the treasures out of which they've come from these marae and now sit in museums around the world. So this project we're working with the Auckland Museum. So our site will take you directly into those taonga. And our youth, they're doing their own things. They're setting up their own blogs, they're creating their own ways of engaging and we provide gateways for them to reach net through Māori Maps. So we bring them to the gate and at the gate they can see all the different social networking sites that are available to interact with. There's a picture of that marae that was burnt out through the social networking that was just starting up in the mid-2000s. Huge mobilisation of money and resources to bring the people together to rebuild the marae. And it's a community that's gone from strength to strength. It's now, you could say, it's digitally enhanced. It's social networking. It's primary essence. I've been economically, socially and politically well again. And underneath that, we had the same from Māori Maps and He Tu Porou Te Re Te Re. That's about if our youth are not tethered to a marae, they become like floating logs on the ocean of humanity. So moving forward, new tools, digital, but it's the old values, kind of accountability. It's about redefining what it means to be a home person within a virtual marae space. Māori population, we're still a fast-growing demographic and we're not going away. And it's the whole ethic to not respond versus to respond. And if we are to respond, how do we respond? And those who are in position to respond, can you respond? And one of my kōmātua, bless him, long past on, but I remember one time when we were going to paddle out into the lake to take one of our aunties who died across and she just said, oh, yeah, Paoro, if our two-printer had an outboard motor, do you think they would not have used it? So it's about, you know, if the tools are there, use them. And to finish, there's a quote and I've actually talked to Mason about this. Masterful is okay. I record him at our last board meeting, but this is what he said. It would be unethical not to respond to this crisis. Digitally grounded tamariki to their home marae is critical to future Māori wellbeing in today's world of global confusion. So it's all about purpose. Kia ora, tātou.