Te Tii Marae embraces solution to protect its digital taonga

Sunday, 5 February 2023

Te Tii Marae has begun the process of storing its taonga digitally outside of the internet.

In today’s world, online storage platforms such as iCloud, Google Drive, Microsoft and many others, are the go-tos to preserve our memories and information.

But this way of storing information, particularly for Māori, has led to concerns about who may have access to such taonga, and could they use and share it without permission from the iwi, hapū and whānau who own it.

With those concerns in mind, Ngāti Kawa and Ngāti Rāhiri – the hau kāinga (home people) of Te Tii Marae – have partnered with Victoria University School of Engineering and Computer Science assistant lecturer Kevin Shedlock (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou, Whakatōhea) to tackle to issues of digital mātauranga.

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Victoria University computer science assistant lecturer Kevin Shedlock, middle, is working with Te Tii Marae to help preserve its data soverignty.

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From the panel in the forum tent at Waitangi on Sunday, Shedlock shared how using hardware that could store up to 120 terabytes of data may be the beginning of an iwi-wide solution so data sovereignty.

“Data sovereignty is a big kōrero and I hear it a lot around us now,” Shedlock said.

February 6 acknowledges the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in 1840.

“It’s a battle out there. There’s a form of colonisation on our doorstep, it’s a hidden colonisation. We don’t really see it, but it’s there.

“The new coloniser out there is technology.”

Following a roadshow Shedlock led across Te Tai Tokerau, Te Tii Marae chairperson Ngāti Kawa Taituha decided it was time to create their own digital repository so that the knowledge held by the hapū could be stored safely.

The hardware would be used to store waiata, karakia, photographs, documents and other mātauranga Māori to ensure it was protected from wider access, but also available to be passed down to the next generations, Taituha told the crowd.

“Mātauranga Māori was a big thing we wanted to preserve and also distribute to our whānau,” Taituha said.

Digitising taonga Māori panellist Hēmi Ruka speaks about the need to protect mātauranga Māori outside the internet. Fellow panellists are, left to right: Te Tii Marae chairperson Ngāti Kawa Taituha, Victoria University Associate Professor Ian Welch, Kevin Shedlock and Te Tii Marae secretary Tana Apiata.

“We’ve got a lot of stories to tell, whether it be pre-colonisation, right back to the Kupe days and all those navigation stories, and even before that, with Rangi and Papa.

“There are a lot of our own who are still learning all that stuff and it’s trying to present it to them, so they can learn and absorb … so they can learn from our own people at home.”

Panellist Hēmi Ruka (Waitaha, Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Pākau) had been working on the project with Taituha and Shedlock.

Ruka’s mahi in the technology space had focused on rangatahi and education before joining the project.

“[Shedlock] brought me along on this waka to help look at solutions for our people to digitise our own information, store our own information.

“We wanted to create our own pātaka [storehouse] to manage that information and keep it secure and apply kawa and tikanga to it to keep it tapu.

“We want some autonomy in that process and we want some mana motuhake on that process. We want to take some control back and set some parameters on who can access it, and when, and where.”

However, it’s not just about finding solutions. There was a need for more Māori to be in the technology space to create the algorithms for the platforms used every day to ensure the data sovereignty of mātauranga is not an afterthought, Shedlock said.

“We have this high-level data, iwi leaders, government approach, however we do not have enough work on the ground being run by our own whānau to match that work.

“We need our own project managers to manage our digital priorities.”