 Tēnā koutou katoa, ngā mihi o te wākia koutou katoa, e uritaturu ao o Hamoa, ko tolumatnave Barbara Amirisiana Queenie Makwati awhitu te oku ingo'a, e kai a Babs, e kai a Beyonce. Tēnā au e tū nei, hei hono ngā ke ngā wāonu mata, taino ki tēnā i wātounu, ki te whakaputa anga uri whakatipu, ki te whai ao ki te ao marama. No reira tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou angbola. So, māi mihi speaks of me being a very, very beautiful and proud Samoan. But it also speaks of me standing here in front of you. And normally it's to my community, but this is my digital community. I'm giving all of myself and acknowledging all of those that have come before while we as a collective start to create for those that are to follow. Oh fuck, that's what I forgot I was doing this. So it's an honour to be here and to stand here in front of you. So thank you for letting me come to have a kōrero. So, I suppose very much around the honouring of this project is the creating of the future. And this is where I am very, very proud to work at Tamaki Pāinga Hira. The Pacific Collection Access Project is a living example of what are more informed and I suppose honouring future should look like. And I have to acknowledge Tamaki Pāinga Hira for being brave enough to tell tōko and honour my people and my ancestors in this way and through this project. Naively, I thought that a lot of these kind of projects in the glam sector included community at the start, but it's a beautiful way to start that kōpapa. So the success of PECAP has very much been because of the communities. They have actually co-developed and co-created this kōpapa that we are very, very honoured to share. So for those of you who don't know what PECAP is, Tamaki Pāinga Hira has a world-class Moana Pacific Collection with over 30,000 tōnga. Over the next three years, we're looking at 5,000 of those tōnga from these 13 beautiful island nations here. So we started with the Cook Islands and we are now into Fiji. We have an amazing team working on the project. Some amazing catalogers, some who are in the whare, a conservator, storage technicians and also some of the photographers who are in the whare. The uniqueness and specialness of this project has definitely been our community. Through Kanohe Kite Kanohe and Talanoa, our communities have gifted us knowledge holders that will speak for their tōnga and for their ancestors. A lot of this is based on te olewa, which is our Pacific strategy at Tamaki Pāinga Hira. Te olewa is a philosophical culture based on a Samoan Moana Pacific perspective on cultural value to help us ensure that our museum is a respectful, relevant and an engaging place for all people, including those of Moana Pacific descent. Our te olewa Pacific strategy to me is the foundation for PCAP. Te olewa was created by our museum. Moana Pacific staff at the time and it's just a really beautiful strategy. These are our te olewa principles that we are trying to honour through the mahi at Tamaki Pāinga Hira but also especially through the mahi that we're doing through PCAP. One of the kōrero that definitely always comes up is how do we honour te olewa when we're not all Moana Pacific? It's always hard to talk about a philosophy that is embedded in my DNA and my upbringing and also lovingly softly beaten into me. But we tried to make it relevant to what it means to us working at the Auckland Museum. So for us as Tamaki Pāinga Hira our sacred relationship as Kaitiaki is two and four our collection but we also have a very important and sacred responsibility to all of our communities including our Moana Pacific communities and as Kaitiaki we are responsible for being the connecters, the bridge and providing opportunities for our communities to come and connect with their taonga. Understanding for some of our communities that our collection is sacred because they are their ancestors. So our roles are much larger because of that vātapu ea because of that mode and because of that spiritual maa and therefore we are responsible for creating that culturally, spiritually and physically and I suppose digitally safe space for them to come and be. So honouring the voice this project appealed to my servant heart someone who was born to serve and to honour all of my ancestors and to honour yours but it also makes me realise that we as a collective need to take responsibility to honour their voices acknowledging that their ancestors, these creators and those that have lovingly gifted to the museum so that we can enjoy today. We are learning to create this safe space for each other but we also need to ensure that we honour their voices. So the success of this project has been because of our communities and I can truly say it's just absolutely humbling every day my heart, you know the warmth, the beauty the love, the sacredness that comes into the whare every day and the communities are in the whale. We had this little girl and so this group here we had MPP Language Week launches and one of the little girls walked in and she goes oh my gosh and she goes that's my nana's kalosie and just to have that kind of beauty in the whale we've just had so many amazing experiences we've had three generations of one whanau actually standing over one of their taonga and the Papa sharing to all of them how things were made because he would have seen it when he was growing up we had a beautiful little girl during one of the oh sorry so this is actually one of our knowledge holder sessions and our knowledge holder sessions I can't speak to the sacredness that actually gets gifted in that space and so this is where the community have actually gifted the knowledge holders they've actually come up with the people that they believe are the cultural experts that hold the traditional cultural the reo but also that mana within the community to be able to speak for their taonga and that space is so sacred and it's sacred because a lot of these taonga have not been touched by a feji and hand or by a kuki hand for probably over 100 years and so I can't it's just a really beautiful moment to be able and I feel very blessed to be able to stand in that space since we launched officially in May last year I think we've had over 4,000 people come through P-CAP and we've probably had over 160 visits I love this picture because the guy in the blue blue jacket isn't actually part of the group but he comes up to me and he goes I saw the colour, I want to be part of this and I go eh and so then but I was walking them out to the bus so he followed us out because he wanted photos bless his heart and so this is one of the launches for the Cook Island the Cook Island group and I've got to say I've never ever seen so many over 65-year-olds with so much technology in my whole life so they not only had their phones but they also had their charges which I had to climb under the table to go and charge but they also had their iPads as back-ups and this is another group they would have had the retoumen to just lit up our whare honestly but I had a little girl they came in as a thank you for us hosting them and they asked if they could do a performance and I said oh how long have they said 45 minutes and I thought they were joking but after an hour they were still going and they were amazing but I had a little girl come up to me and she had a note and then she goes and she goes this is for the performers I want to say thank you for your beautiful dancing and singing and I'm so happy that I came to the museum today and I was like oh thanks so part of our Fijian so for every single of the 13 for everyone that comes through we ask the community to gift us a name that encapsulates what it means for them in Vereo and for our beautiful Fijians it's the Na Yalva Kaviti Na Ka Marangeti so the success of this project is because of these beautiful people so I'm just going to play something from them hopefully feeling of coming into this wonderful house that's looking after all our treasures not just Fiji but the whole of Pasifika in this case I was honoured to be asked to be part of this project and also I came with a hidden motive I wanted to look at the things to also educate my own family my own household that these things were here for them and my grandchildren to come that you know there's a place where they can come and say yes this is mine this belongs to me this is why we came up with the name because of the word Yal means treasures so what we see in front of us here Yal and Vakaviti means of Fijian origin so that's the first part of it which is Nakamaringeti means to something to be treasured to preserved and I think all encompassed in that is the thought of the future all of these treasures from the past to preserve for the future generations so in a nutshell Nakamaringeti can be defined as Fijian treasures that are treasured I think Auckland Museum is quite the leader in this type of program because I'm with the old thought of like you go to a museum you look which you're not allowed to see or touch and you hear of many other treasures that are stored here and we're told about the program and I thought wow we're actually going to get to see all of that it's like that's unheard of and so yet just the thought of coming in and seeing a lot of these treasures from you see it in a book you read and you learn about it in school but to actually come and see the objects and the numbers of them and to actually touch them just amazing it's quite real honour to be a part of it and last week what was interesting was grandparents bringing their grandchildren and I had a number of emails that came through was that their little grandchildren all night even in the car when they were going home one grandmother said oh my little granddaughter keep saying oh so grandma I'm Fijian and it was so lovely that the program at the museum validated that part to know that they came here and they said wow these things take me back to my childhood memory here I've really enjoyed my time here with PCAP just being around all our Fijian treasures it's been such a joy I think it's quite a buzz in the community and I think Dr John Jonathan from Cook Islands former teacher of mine he made a comment once that he believed cultural preservation and a lot of this will be led by most islanders live overseas and I think that's just being illustrated with this program here because I mean the culture is somewhat alive in the islands but it's taken for granted so much because it's surrounded it surrounds you all the time so I think it's such a crucial role that we're going to play here and I think this is going to filter back to the islands once they see how we've responded and reacted to the program it's definitely going to like John I mentioned it's really opened up a lot of the elderly have said well I grew up with this and their thoughts are directed to the little ones they haven't had that experience so it's going to get them to think what can I do to help them have the same experience so I think that's it's been such a really good role and thanks to social media that are connecting the whole global Fijian village and everyone is all part of this and everyone is talking about it and it's cutting through all the age group and all the tribes so I think the younger Fijians will now be proud to be a Fijian because they're learning more about themselves and it's a beautiful thing so a lot of the amazing amazing knowledge that is being gifted as part of PCAP I suppose as a daughter of the Moana and a daughter of Samoa I realise its sacredness and that it has been generations built generations protected but also generations carried but one of the other things that has been happening a lot with through PCAP is what I like to call the whisper so we had this beautiful matua come in recently and it was a three hour visit but this particular papa he was just really quiet and I love the quiet ones I do love quiet ones but he just he just kept walking around the table and he just kept looking and he just kept crying you just have that connection where you just feel like he's just but he was so emotional and probably after the first hour he started whispering in my ear so we would be talking about certain things and he just kept whispering he kept whispering and he was like and he was going no and he was saying that the sword all the sword has to do is touch the skin and they will die but it's not because of the poison it's because of the words that are spoken on it and he just kept doing this whisper and I just felt really I just felt really crazy no I felt really really special the fact that he felt that he could trust in the ears he could see into my eyes and he just made that connect and so after a while he looked at me and he goes okay and he goes I will give it to you and I'm like and I go what and he goes I will share with you and I go oh no papa and he goes I share for here and I go this folly isn't ready for that kind of sacredness for a lot of Amwana Pacific communities certain parts of our tradition of our culture is carried by one particular family so it's carried generations down and so while I love the digital world because I know this is the only way that we can get a lot of our messages and a lot of you know a lot of the taonga out there certain parts of of the whisper needs to be honoured and I love how we're having these kind of chordedals because this is going to start the chordedal to ensure that a lot of the whispers are protected and protected right especially with my friend Sarah Powell so so so how do we ensure that the ancestors mana is honoured online so this amazing woman Ana Bessie came from all the way from Utah she has a charter school and she was just blown away by what she could see but what she kept saying is that we don't realise how lucky we are we don't realise how lucky we are and then she posted this and just really humbled me and she kept thinking about the students at her academy and how important these kind of projects are because these kids are never going to have access to it they're not going to come to Utah to engage with their taonga and their ancestors but they'll be able to see it online which is just a really which is just a really beautiful thing part of our project, P-CAP is very much around honouring the reo and so this Tairi Eddie to people from all around the mana and around the world will be able to search for it in its own deal which is just a really awesome way to honour the reo and the ancestors that made it and these are some of our beautiful taonga that we have in Tamikipaingahira so I just want to thank you for letting me come to share and I hope it helped and no questions, Kia ora