Our connections bind us to families, to land

People often talk about the three identities that we have as tangata whenua - whanau, hapu and iwi.

The family, the sub-tribe and the tribe fit together like concentric circles of our collective identity.

Whanau are the smallest and most basic building blocks of our lives, they are the ones we have daily interaction with.

While many whanau are complicated in their make-up, nevertheless your close connections to them define much of who you are as a person.

As you start to look across multiple generations, you will find that there are whanau connected by common ancestry which ties them to a place, an awa, a maunga, a marae - these form our hapu or sub-tribes.

Nothing used to give me more joy than when my mokopuna, before she even got to school, was able to identify her maunga, her awa, her marae and to know who she was.

If you start to look back even further into your whakapapa, you start to see the connect between even more whanau and hapu to arrive at our tribal identities, our iwi, which generally unite us all under the one shared tupuna.

This is the beauty of being tangata whenua - our connections that bind us to each other, to the land, and to our turangawaewae.

Each of these identities has with it different responsibilities and roles, they are a precious part of who we are, and we must learn to nurture and value the connection between the three as we move into the future.

I was thinking about these connections recently in relation to Whanau Ora.

While this concept focuses on the smallest unit of our collective identity, the family, we must not forget the wider connections that we have to other whanau around us, and to our wider hapu, and iwi.

You see, it was a different world when I was growing up.

Food was not something we could readily afford, instead you grew it, hunted it, or caught it yourself.

You worked hard, and developed skills that allowed you to be self-sufficient and live off the land, the sea, and the waters.

You took care of those around you, because as a community you knew everyone, and everyone was in the same boat; working hard to take care of their whanau, and take care of each other. The hapu and iwi were not just a part of our identity, they were a part of our day to day relationships and livelihood.

To survive and be happy we pulled together.

By today's standards we would have been considered poor, but we never thought like that.

Collectively we had skills and resources that allowed us to not only survive, but thrive and grow into strong and healthy whanau, hapu and iwi members.

I wanted to remind us all of these connections, and the vital role that hapu and iwi play in our development as whanau.

While the landscape around us has changed the inherent relationships, skills and resources are still there around us.

We must remember to always be mindful of our roles and responsibilities to continue to nurture and support our whanau.

We must work towards restoring aroha, tautoko, manaakitanga and those other concepts which kept us strong over many generations.

If we have skills which could be vital to a whanau's survival, we have a responsibility to share those skills, to teach, and to support.

We have our marae as a valuable resource, our people around us, and the skills that we all bring to the table.

It does not need to be a hard or costly initiative, it can be simple practices such as sharing kai, teaching people how to grow food, to hunt and gather, even running cooking classes at the marae.

There are a number of ways that we can reach out to improve the wellbeing of those around us.

We need to show our whanau that they can do, and can be anything they want.

When I was a young girl, I remember that every whanau believed in their ability to do for themselves, and that attitude translated into a community full of dignity and pride.

It is a wonderful thought that this is what our whanau can be, and I hope that we can all work together to see this restored in our whanau today.