Te Mana ā ngā wāhine, whare tangata: Māori women in the role of mothering

Abstract

This thesis is about Māori women's role as mothers; kōkā according to Ngāti Porou, and hākui and taua for Te Waipounamu. The focus is Māori women born between 1915 and the 1920s and the skills and knowledge of mothering and motherhood acquired from their own mothers, grandmothers and significant others in their communities. This is then compared with their own experience of mothering the next generation in an urban environment and the impact and implications of their urban transition. The kuia who participated in this study told of the aspects of the role they considered pivotal in the raising of their own children. These included religious moral values of loving, sharing and caring for one another, of living with extended whānau in a rural environment on marae and in some cases, the papakāinga. Data for this study was collected by means of in-depth interviews with 24 Māori women aged seventy years and over. For the purpose of this thesis nine of the 24 case studies are presented. All the oral histories collected are now housed in the Oral History Archives in the National Library in Wellington as agreed to by the interviewees. Thus this collection makes a unique contribution to Māori women's history in that the recordings of these Māori women's voices are now stored for the future. The importance has become evident, as over the course of the writing of this thesis, many of the kuia have passed on. The importance to the kuia of their largely rurally-based extended whānau, was one of the central findings of this study. Additionally, the influence of their mothers and grandmothers on the role of motherhood, especially within the contexts of self sufficiency on the land, the stability of the home and family environment, and the teaching of traditional values was found to be of great importance. Out of the findings came a major theme relating to motherhood that traditional values may have languished as a result of the women's shift from rural to urban living and the radically different life style that this shift entailed.