An Introduction To Kaitiakitanga (Guardianship)

By Madeline Hage-Sleiman

In term 2, room 6 and 5 combined classes and watched the movie “From Up On Poppy Hill ''. This was to give us a good example of children close to our age fighting to save their past. On Monday July 25 we watched a filmed webinar (from the previous term). The guest speaker was a storyteller and he played an animation that he made, it was the story of Māui. In the story Māui paddled in his waka far away from his home to go fishing. He set out his fishing line, which was made from the jaw of his grandmother. The jaw from his grandmother is figurative meaning the knowledge in which the elders bestowed upon him. So he was sending his knowledge to the world and he caught a huge fish. He and his crew members got incompasitated after pulling the fish. When they awoke they found the great Te Ika-a-Māui, the north island.

The next day we drew a map of the world and students would tell Mr. Min where their ancestors were/are from. This was to show the importance of knowing our roots. We found that about 85％ of the two classes had European heritage. After that we got introduced to “Thinker’s Keys”. Thinker’s Keys are different activities that you can do around a subject in this case it was Kupe, the first person to find Aoteroa. There was everything from A-Z “we had to find an alphabet of things that Kupe would have found on his trip” to combining Indigonous species with invasive species. Learning about Kaitiaki has been really fun and I hope that this has given you a feel for what we are doing in class.