Tauira by Joan Metge

Author:Joan Metge [Metge, Joan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Māori, Education, History
Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
Published: 2015-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

Handing Knowledge On

From the preceding accounts of learning as adults, it is clear that the pūkenga took their time about passing on the knowledge they held in trust, including what they had learnt from their own experience. The whole process lasted for years and often resulted in a special life-long relationship between teacher and learner.

Several of the kai-whakauru referred to a traditional belief that pūkenga should not teach everything they knew but ‘always keep something back’. If they did not, it was said that they would lose all or part of their knowledge store.

Old Man Tio, he had a family tree, and he didn’t want to give the family tree out, because the knowledge he had, if he had given it out to anybody, he would have lost all the knowledge he had. (Wiremu Hohaia)

I was always told that by teaching everything they are taking everything out of you. One day you look at them and you see yourself – all your skill has gone to that person and you have nothing left. In piupiu dyeing I always use commercial dye when teaching and yet when I’m doing it myself, not teaching, I still use tea-tree and paru [the traditional mordant and black dye]. (Priscilla Manukau)

While they suspected that some kaumātua hugged their knowledge to themselves for reasons of mana and status, the kai-whakauru with personal experience recognised that there were good reasons why pūkenga placed limits on what they taught, when and to whom. In the first place, pūkenga were trustees with a responsibility to protect the knowledge they held from dilution, misuse and misappropriation.

The old folks had a tradition to believe that so the medicine will cure, it’s best not to give it out. That’s their tradition, that’s their belief. I did ask them once, the old people, and I didn’t ask them again. But this is what I asked them: ‘If you knew these things and we don’t know, how are we to know?’ And this is what they say, that ‘We can’t pass too many things on because we will lose the power of that medicine.’ (Wiremu Hohaia)

Learners’ accounts of the process of adult learning establish that pūkenga routinely paused in their teaching from time to time to test their students and make sure they understood and properly valued what they had learnt. Nikora Atama recognised that withholding the most tapu items of knowledge was designed to protect students from the dangers attendant on mistakes and misuse.

One thing I wanted them to teach me and they never did, I got left behind, was Hinenuitepō’s whakapapa. I went as far as Kupe down to me and that’s all. As far as Hinenuitepō was concerned, they said I was too young to learn – and I was in my thirties! I said, ‘How old do you have to be before you learn that?’ ‘Oh’, they say, ‘when you hit sixty, seventy!’ I said to them, ‘It’s no good to you, you are half dead already!’ They said, ‘No. That’s because the brain doesn’t take it in.

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