Week 9: 20-24 September: Te Tiriti o Waitangi and Art & Design
Task 1 (5 minutes)
REFLECT: Have a look at your responses to the independent study from week 7, how did this weeks class discussion deepen or help develop and expand your initial understanding? You could write about this in a sentence or two, or you could go back and add to your original notes.
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Task 2 (3 hours)
GROUP ACTIVITY: Assign half your group the first reading, and half your group the second reading, and read your assigned readings (approx. 1hr30m):
1) Ani Mikaere’s discussion of mana wāhine, and its relationship to western feminism, Māori Women: Caught in the Contradictions of Colonised Reality.
2) Kim McBreen’s discussion of tikanga Māori approaches to sexuality, Ahunga Tikanga and Sexual Diversity.
DISCUSS: Then meet up as a group, and present the reading you did to each other, and unpack the connections between them, in terms of tikanga. Does a consideration of gender and sexuality impact your project? If so, how? If not, why not? Keep notes! (approx. 1hr)
EXAMPLE: As a group find some examples of artists and designers from Aotearoa/New Zealand who engage with mana wāhine, feminism, takatāpui, and non-dominant expressions of gender and sexuality. Makes notes, and be prepared to discuss these in class. (approx. 30m)
Ani Mikaere’s discussion of mana wāhine
Wheels within wheels, circles within circles. Now we unpack the inequality of gender relations within current Māori culture, impacted by colonialism and the consequent introduced legal frameworks, and not necessarily reflective of the pre-colonial state. We are asked to set aside, of course, the accounts captured in writing by settlers, and instead re-connect to the oral histories, which tell a different tale.
It’s clear from the article that Māori women played a leadership role in pre-colonial society, and that this role was to a significant degree set aside in post-colonial society, and that this situation continues to the present day. We can see that stereotypical representations of Māori masculinity are rife, and that Māori women are keen to reclaim their power in society.
How does this article influence our group’s consideration of the history of Asians in Aotearoa? Although the experiences of Māori women can perhaps not be directly connected to our topic, they certainly point to the need to assess how gender has played a part. We know that the first Asians arriving in NZ were predominately male – they were Chinese men who came to work in the Otago gold fields. We should seek more diverse sources that speak to the history of women and Queer people in Aotearoa if we’re to tell this story holistically.
Task 3 (4 hours)
INDIVIDUAL WORK: Research your topic and find 1 academic resource. Read this and make notes. (approx. 2hrs)
GROUP WORK: Meet up and share the resource you’ve found (this should give you 5-6 resources per group), and add to the mind-map you made last week. (approx. 1hr) Start to plan what your tool might be, in relation to this. What might be some particular tikanga/ethics/values you might need to consider in relation to your tool. And why are they important to your specific project? (approx. 1hr)
(On a shared Google document – for later inclusion)