Te Turangawaewae o te Whakaohooho Mauri: The Conceptual Home-Place of the Re-Awakening Indigenous Spirit

Abstract

Resilience of Indigenous identities, life-ways and knowledge is the topic of my doctoral thesis. To enable the holistic unity of Indigenous being, feeling, thinking, and doing to become visible and meaningfully viable to Indigenous and non-Indigenous people within and without the empirically dominated domain of academic positivism, a cosmologically sourced, ethnographically supported turangawaewae or conceptual home-place has been developed. An Indigenous space of meaning to investigate and provoke a discursive continuum of Indigenous resilience that enables resilient Indigenous identities, and the multiple phases they embody to be conceptualised and incorporated, while also embracing notions of Eurocentric resilience and the comparative psychological implications these unearth. To illumine the global process of re-emerging Indigenous identity resilience by exploring how Indigenous people experience the process of personal and collective reconnection to their ancestral Indigenous identities, tikanga Māori, Mana Wahine philosophies, and kaupapa Māori methodologies complete the home-place developed to receive and care for the research collaborators, and question. A place that enables ethical and congruent cultural interpretations of Indigenous identities and the liberation of Indigenous thought, practices, and discourse. This paper traces the developmental terrain of this turangawaewae or conceptual home-place.