Growing The Puna intern, Eilensia Ransfield, spent the summer of 2024/25 with the Kai Māori Kai Ora team researching Tī Kouka. We then had the great pleasure of having her join us for the pilot of our online wānanga, Exploring the Foundations of Kai Maori Kai Ora. It has been affirming and inspiring to see coming generations embedded in and shaping the space of Kai Māori Kai Ora. During her time with us, she created a Tī Kouka booklet which outlines some of her learnings about Tī both here in Aotearoa and across the Pacific. Here too, she shares some sentiments around her time spent with the Kai Maori Kai Ora team.
Earlier this year my time with Toi Tangata as the 2024 Kai Māori intern came to an end, I started my internship with more excitement than direction and ended it with more direction for my excitement. Recently, as I contemplate my current studies and some of the previous decisions I’ve made about my career, I’ve been reflecting on how important it is to know what’s possible in a line of work. Ironically, while I have my own ideas about what’s possible in the Kai Māori space, my time with Toi and Kai Maori Kai Ora has pushed me to believe that it is less a matter of what is possible and more a case of what isn’t.
Regardless of the spaces we may be in, the work and living we do as Māori is governed by the same tides; tikanga, whānaungatanga, decolonisation, manaakitanga, whakapapa and tino rangatiratanga. Kai Māori is often either a vehicle or a representative of these. It shows us where disruption and abundance are and how we may rebalance, restore, remember or celebrate. It is our responsibility to ask which of these are taking place and listen for the answers.
In the many conversations I have with whānau and friends, their curiosity about Kai Māori will typically start and finish with “Kai”. What comes to their mind is, why kai is more meaningful than a mean feed and what, if any, jobs there are in this space. A good feed can’t be underestimated, but our kai Māori is just as much about eating as it is about relationships that make the eating possible. Often as Māori we love to lead with a future that’s possible because of the intimacy we share with our pasts, “Kua whakatōmuri te haere whakamua”. Kai happens in our futures just as much as it made our pasts. It's the kai we grow, who we call on to tend to the seeds, the mātauranga we ask for, the hands that take it to a plate, the karakia we say before, and those we eat with; it is quintessentially Māori. At its most poignant, kai to me also represents what politics fails to represent for everyone. It’s about the disparities between who eats and who doesn’t, who is well, who isn’t and understanding why our relationships with kai have shifted.
When I chose Tī Kōuka / Whanake / Tī Manu as my research focus for my internship, “The whakapapa of Tī Kōuka & Its story in te ao Māori past, present and emerging”, I did so to call forward those questions, and, as I found out, to attempt the great task of remembering. As a kai rangatira, Tī Kōuka is one of few kai that has been with us even before we became tangata whenua in Aotearoa. Our tupuna took the utmost care to bring Ti to Aotearoa, because of who Ti was to us. Yet despite this, for a lot of us, Ti isn’t yet anything more than a familiar face across the motu. Our relationships aren’t lost, they’re patiently waiting for us to remember them. For some of our kaumatua and kuia, that remembering is less distant; it may be a taonga they are waiting to pass on to their mokopuna, it might be a longing they’ve learnt to live with. If all of us inherit both taonga and longing, then the questions we’re left with are:
