Inspiring rangatahi initiatives

Kaihanga Waiata

A group of five students from Hurunui College in Canterbury have created a website raising awareness and knowledge of Māori culture.

“We discovered that it isn’t easy to find Māori haka and waiata material for our own educational purposes relating to performances at school and other events,” says group member 16-year-old Adrian Sparks.

So they set about designing a website with the purpose of being a go-to place to find, learn and discover waiata and haka. 

The website is called Kaihanga Waiata(external link), which translates to ‘song finder’. Each waiata and haka is displayed with chords, lyrics, tablature, audio and visual recordings and step by step guides for playing and performing. 

Maahina

Te Wharekura o Rakaumangamanga student Hana Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke recently launched a new book that encourages rangatahi to take an interest in the stars and the moon to heal themselves.

The 17-year-old Huntly student created Maahina about seven months ago.

“I wanted rangatahi Māori to become more aware of the environment and how it can help us physically mentally and emotionally and help us with the everyday things we do in life like studying and NCEA,” she told Te Ao Māori News(external link).

Part of her journey started when she attended a lecture where Māori astronomer Professor Rangi Matamua, Hoturoa Barclay-Kerr, who is the captain of the oceangoing waka Haunui, and Māori astrologer Rereata Makiha spoke about the Matariki star constellation, ocean navigation and maramataka Māori.

“I was looking around the room and there were not many rangatahi there, and I was like, ‘If our generation was to know about this, I feel we’d become more in tune and it would help us with our overall wellbeing and health’.

“Eventually I want this out there for all my generation because we are the millennial generation, the ones who have all the technology these days, so it would be so good if we could all learn a little something now that this is available to us.”

Hana says she would like to continue studying the maramataka once she starts university.

Copies can be purchased by searching Maahina on Facebook or Instagram.

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