Tui Keenan reclaimed her identity and found her own “food sovereignty” while hunting.
Now she has dedicated herself to helping whānau and rangatahi at a Gisborne school learn key skills to provide food and connect with their taiao.
Eventually she hopes this kaupapa can spread to whānau throughout Tairāwhiti schools.
Keenan, a former police officer known for the Hunting with Tui programme on Whakaata Māori, was born and raised in Christchurch.
“I’m half Pākehā [and I was] very disconnected from te ao Māori and very ashamed to be Māori due to growing up in Christchurch in the late 70s, 80s,” Keenan said.
The mother of five girls (aged 24, 18, 16, 13 and 10) began hunting seven years ago to try one of her husband Comrie’s hobbies.
“I liked to walk in the ngahere (forest/bush), but I didn’t like to kill the animal,” she said. “I would look away or block my ears. I wouldn’t touch the animal but then we made a new year’s resolution that we would fill our freezer with meat and not buy it.
“I shot my first deer and how I would describe it, only women can understand it ... when you give birth you have these endorphins and hormones go through your body. It is my drug of choice to give birth and when I shot my first deer, those same chemicals within my body were released and there was this connection being created.”
She made a Facebook post about that first hunting experience and not long afterwards a television producer approached her with the pitch that became Hunting with Tui.
“The first episode the camera was rolling, I knew something special would happen going up my mountain the first time. Going up the mountain, I felt my grandfather with me, who has passed,” Keenan said.
“When I let go of my thoughts and really connected with what was happening with my wairua, the lies that I had been believing my whole life – about me being inferior as Māori, as a woman, it all exploded and I felt like I was receiving the truth.”
Keenan said all her girls were into hunting.
“My kids are all into it because of what they have been living with for the last seven years. They are actually better than me. They are better shots than me and they really respect the animal. That is my greatest reward, watching my girls embrace food sovereignty.”
Working for Te Kura Reo Rua o Waikirikiri as a counsellor and in a team called Kaiwhakangau Kai Connect, Keenan helps organise trips into the bush for school rangatahi and parents, fortnightly meat nights and a Kete Kai (food basket) subscription service, which has expanded to two other schools.
Part of the curriculum for Te Kura Reo Rua o Waikirikiri students is learning food preparation skills such as skinning, cutting and packaging game meat.
Keenan brings deer meat to the school’s hākari chiller and a qualified butcher takes the dads and kids through cutting up meat once a fortnight.
“They are taking it home for their families and you can just see this real mana-enhancing connection take place,” Keenan said.
“That is food sovereignty. It is not a handout approach. It is this hand-up approach where you are providing a facility to allow them to connect with food sovereignty.”
She saw that fathers were uplifted when they could take the meat home to whānau.
“It is reducing financial stress. It is bonding whānau time with their kids. It is taking the meat home to Mum [and saying], ‘look, I have provided this for you’.”
Keenan said it was rewarding seeing the mindset change among the younger students.
“At first they would be like, ‘ewww’ if they saw a deer hanging in a tree, but now they are like, ‘yum, venison burgers.’”
Keenan and her whānau live in a relatively remote part of the rural East Coast and every two weeks they have either parents, staff or students of Te Kura Reo Rua o Waikirikiri visit and stay to connect with the taiao (environment).
“They arrive with nothing. They don’t have to bring anything. And for the whole day, we are harvesting food for their meal.”
Visitors join Keenan and her whānau eeling, fishing, egg collecting, looking for watercress and tending to the maara kai.
“Everything they eat on their plate is what they have sourced that day from the land.
“We don’t go hunting as such but there is always meat hanging in the chiller, whether [it’s) beef, mutton or deer, and they’re processing that and cutting it up.”
The therapy some students got from being in nature over the two-day experience was powerful she said.
“When we spend four hours in the bush looking for bush vegetables, they leave that bush changed. They are so much more calm. The bush has taken over and given them the therapy they need.
“I see myself as a facilitator of the taiao and it is actually the environment that is doing the counselling on my behalf.”
Keenan said her “amazing boss” Yolanda Julies, tumuaki of Te Kura Reo Rua o Waikirikiri, had allowed her to “reinvent what therapy looks like for our rangatahi”.
“She created a wellbeing model for her students that is not your regular systemic model. A lot of that is around food sovereignty and what that looks like due to the poverty in our community.”
Julies said the motivating factor behind the school’s approach to wellbeing was whānau, because they were aware of the financial and food scarcity stresses people were under.
“We also wanted to include whānau in all of our wellbeing practices and we realised that for our kids to be healthy, the homes have to be healthy as well.”
The school’s wellbeing programme developed in 2020 after the first Covid lockdowns. Keenan joined the school in 2021 as a whānau facilitator.
“We kind of modified our model as we went along and discovered all the needs our whānau have," Julies said.
“We had humble beginnings just looking at an internal lunch model and then we looked at how could we support the internal lunch model and make it more cost-effective. Therefore we looked at growing our own maara kai, which contributes to the kitchen as well, and then the meat was integrated into our model.”
Kete Kai is a food basket subscription service run as a trust, rolled out to three local schools - Te Kura Reo Rua o Waikirikiri, Te Hapara School and Ilminster Intermediate.
The weekly food baskets comprise locally sourced food and come with printed recipes. Each meal can feed a whānau of six.
The children at the schools pack the insulated kete bags and taken them home to their whānau.
“We are proud to be able to offer our Kete Kai subscription service to the community and we want to roll it out into every Tairāwhiti school," Keenan said.
“Again, it is connecting these whānau to their maunga - to the local land we live on. Our food is being sustained by our whenua and it is coming to sustain our people.”
James Pocock joined the Gisborne Herald as chief reporter in 2024 after covering environmental, local government and post-cyclone issues in Hawke’s Bay. He has a keen interest in finding the bigger picture in research and making it more accessible to audiences. He lives near Gisborne. james.pocock@nzme.co.nz.
As the year draws to a close, Waikato Herald is taking stock of 2024.