#22. Cultural Embeddedness: Complexity of Māori identity - Dr. Ririwai Fox and Ellie Rukuwai

Multiple factors shape the complex relationships people have with their own culture and identity. This particularly affects indigenous communities the world over and has given rise to a wave of leaders working towards uplifting their communities into mainstream discourse. Rirwai Fox, Principal Kaupapa Māori Researcher, Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand and Ellie Rukuwai, PhD student focusing on the role of identity and culture in perfectionism and NSSI within rangatahi Māori (youth) join Sahir to talk about cultural embeddedness, the importance of community research and the unique challenges Māori and other indigenous people face in terms of identity, culture and navigating through the world. 

Māori Cultural Embeddedness has been defined as: The degree to which actions or behaviours of an individual are aligned with the core beliefs, practices and values of the Māori culture.

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Transcript

0:04

All right, welcome to the Smooth Brain Society. For those who do know us from our podcast, we've had a podcast on for a year on Apple and on Spotify, but is that the right word to start off? Yeah, sure, why not? This is our first attempt at trying to add video recordings as well, because it was suggested to us that we should probably try to put some of these discussions out on YouTube and things like that, which might be more helpful. So, in that regard, this is our very first episode. Now, the idea of this podcast is essentially to take research topics, particularly in psychology and psychiatry, and kind of talk about them in a way which is easy for people to understand. So the way it works is we usually have two hosts, so myself and Eli Rukawa on the screen there. We will act in a way that one of us... has an idea about the topic and the other one does not. And this is to kind of mediate the topic a little bit and make sure the discussion goes forward. And we talk to our main research guest. In this case, it's editor Wai Fox, who is a principal Kaupapa Maori researcher at Te Whato Ora Health New Zealand. Because we are inherently a bunch of New Zealand students doing this. research podcast. We thought that for the first episode, which goes out on YouTube, we thought we would focus on cultural embeddedness and to that regards Māori cultural embeddedness. And Ellie is a PhD student in the field while Ririwai is a lot further along, has done quite a bit more extensive research in the area and they're going to first introduce themselves and then we'll move forward and get into the subject matter of today. So welcome guys. Thanks for having us. I think Ali, you can go first. Thanks. Okay. Kia ora, I'm Ali. Yeah, as Sahil said, I'm a PhD student. I hand in soon. Yay. Soon to be a doctor. Rukawa. Yeah, I guess. Well, assuming that I pass, you know. Um, my research is based on perfection. Well, the experiences and understanding of Maori adolescents, um, in relation to perfectionism and non-suicidal self injury, um, perfectionism being this Western construct that you need to do everything perfectly, get everything right. Um, that kind of, yeah, it can either be. in a specific thing, so like school, sport, or it can bleed over across everything. And non-suicidal self-injury just being self-harm, so things like cutting, burning, that kind of thing. And yeah, kind of looking at how that differs from how the experiences of Māori adolescents for perfectionism and non-suicidal self-injury differ to these Western. ideas of those two things. Yeah, I'm a clinical student as well. And yeah, I am Maori, I fukupapa to Ngāti Tuwharetoa and Ngā Rauru, but I grew up in Nelson, which is in the South Island, my iwi are based in the North Island. Yeah. Anything else I should add? I know you personally, I can add quite a few things, but before we do that, can we, for someone who let's just assume has never been to New Zealand, what are the terms whakapapa, iwi, those things which you mentioned? Whakapapa, like very basically translated is like your ancestry, genealogy, so I come from the iwi or tribe, Ngāti Tuwharetoa. And Naruto, they're two separate ones. Yeah. Awesome. Um, just if we want to add to Ellie's introduction, she also holds multiple swim records, um, national swim records back in her day. Um, so it's not just, uh, a very accomplished academic, but is also, uh, yeah, could have been a pro athlete if things had gone slightly differently. if I hadn't gotten sick of it. Hey, what about indoor netball? Thank you very much. And now to our main guest, Ruiwai, could you please give us a little bit of an introduction about yourself? Sure, sure. Tēnā tatou te whānau. Ko Maungarake te maunga, ko Ruamahanga te awa, ko Hurunui orangi te marae, ko Ngāti Kahungunu ki Wairarapa te iwi. My name is Ririwai Fox. I come from the Wairarapa, born and raised. I am lucky to have been brought up in the era of Kohanga Reo, which is the total immersion Māori preschool and also Kura Kaupapa Māori, which is the total immersion Māori primary school. and I spent most of my secondary school and I total immersion Māori secondary school as well, which is called Wharekura. I wanted to, after giving my introduction, kind of make a note of why I wanted to do that and why it's common for Māori people to introduce ourselves in our language because I have worked as Sahir said. As you said, I've worked in Te Whātua Ora. I work with Māori and non-Māori, and oftentimes when people are speaking in Māori, you always hear or someone writes in the comments, can you speak English or can you translate this for me? So I wanted to just to note that why it's important to speak in Māori to introduce myself is that the concepts that I talk about, which are the places and the people that I belong to, are best understood in a Māori framing, in a Māori worldview, and that's why it's important for me to do that in the language that understands and captures all of the nuances of that concept. It also The reason that Māori people refer to our whakapapa or our genealogy or the people that we connect to and belong to is because we have more of a sense of collectivism, as you may have learned about in other psychology research, which contextualises our understanding of identity. And that rather than being... solely an individual who goes out into the world individually. I take my people, the people who have nurtured me and brought me up and taught me everything that I know, I take them with me into every one of my spaces and also I'm accountable to them for the things that I say. So a big caveat that I wanted to say from the beginning is that everything that I will talk about today is my understanding of cultural embeddedness or things around the Māori culture based on the things that were taught to me, based on my experiences, and those experiences might be different for different people from different tribes of New Zealand, of Aotearoa, and also I don't... want to pretend like I'm an expert in all things Māori as well. I want to put that caveat right up front. I have some really great learning experiences growing up. I know quite a bit about Māori values, Māori beliefs, Māori practices, but there are many, many more very expert people who know the deep details of... even the Māori language. I can speak Māori language fluently, but there's levels, you know, and similar in terms of Māori belief systems. I understand them well enough, but there are deeper and deeper levels. So I just wanted to kind of put that up front. And you may have lost some listeners or some followers right at the beginning because they're like, hey, what is this fellow talking about? So that's kind of why I wanted to share that so that people understand. why it is that we do that. That's cool. Now, don't worry about the listeners. It's probably like my mom and like two other friends. So they'll stay. But yeah, that's an awesome caveat. So how about we start with your understanding or your journey of how you decided to get into the research you do. And then we can probably ask questions from there. Well, that's a great question. And it has a long story, and I will try and keep it as short as possible. The first part of that story I've shared in that I have been privileged to grow up in that kaupapa Māori, total immersion Māori environments in most of my schooling days. So from preschool, primary school, most of secondary school. And so that's the story. is the framing of my world. My world is understood from that context of connection to Māori values and principles, belief systems, customs, things like that. In my last couple of years of high school I went to a boarding school and I did like chemistry and calculus and all those things and apparently when you do those subjects that means that you should do engineering. So I tried out engineering and I failed miserably because one, I didn't like it. Two, I had I moved away from home. So that was the first time really moving away. And yeah, I took a break after that because I was unsure of what I wanted to do. But I remember as I was deciding whether to do engineering or not, I was interested in psychology, know what that meant. I didn't quite know, does that come with a job? Do you become a psychologist at the end of it? The answer is no you don't, not until you do extra study. So I kind of went with the route that I thought was the easiest at the time and then when I was rethinking what I wanted to do, I knew that I wanted to go into a space of something that I was going to enjoy. And as I was kind of reading about psychology, about behaviors, about why people do what they do, it's got culture, it's got drugs, it's got alcohol, it's about so many different things that I thought that is just so interesting. I think if I enjoy what I'm learning then I will be able to do well. So that's the key reason why I came into psychology. And then as I was going through undergraduate psychology, I realized just how much context was missing from most of the cultural discussions. So when we would talk about values, we were talking about the Western values of, I don't know, individualism, what are those other values? I don't know, freedom. pride, just some values that didn't really resonate with me. So that just as an example was my coming to understand that the way that I was nurtured in that Māori environment wasn't present in a lot of the discussions that we were having in undergraduate psychology. So as I moved towards postgraduate psychology, I decided... that I wanted to try and bring my framing into the field. And there are a lot of very strong Māori academics in the field. Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, for example, who has been the poster child of decolonizing methodologies, some very, very strong people in there, but not enough. So I... felt like I wanted to bring what I was nurtured with into that space. And two things that I really was interested in, one of them was the development of identity and culture, and the second one was wellbeing. So understanding that cultural identity and the strength of that from my upbringing was... a protective factor, a factor that was drilled into me that if you do this, you will have a firm foundation when you go out into the big wide world. So I wanted to kind of bring that idea into research. And I guess that's where the idea of cultural embeddedness came about. Because my reading of the cultural identity literature was firmly focused around subjective reflections of how you feel as a person of Māori ethnicity, which is great, but I think I thought that it missed those really important things that I had learned were important, and learning the Māori language, the practices inside of it, the belief systems that it holds. There's a lot of depth in that. and I didn't see that depth reflected in the research. And so... Yeah, that's kind of where that came about. And I can talk a bit more about the specific details of that concept soon, but I guess I just, that's pretty much an introduction overview. Yeah, I feel a bit mean to have asked you to reduce your entire life story to about a six minute rant, but thank you for that. It gives a good. It gives a good foundation to build with. So when you talk about embeddedness, I know you spoke about it a little bit. So how does one, I guess, quantify cultural identity and then, I guess, in general, and then in a Maori context, and then after that, how would you measure such things? How did people measure such things before, say, As you said, there's already a little bit, there was a gap which you wanted to fill. So how were people measuring those things beforehand? Yeah, cool. Cultural identity is a really, really difficult space, especially in the Māori space, because there is the impact of colonization on Māori people, which has led to a disconnection. of Māori people from their culture, because the culture had been oppressed. And there were people who were deciding to keep their children safe, they wouldn't teach them the language or the practices, because at the time it was so oppressive. And so it's really difficult to say somebody who doesn't speak Māori is less Māori, because that's one, it's not true, and two, it's not sensitive. to that colonization process. So I had to try and juggle that with the importance of learning how to speak Te Reo Māori, because it is important, it helps you understand the concepts that are inside of the Māori worldview, and it helps you to feel connected to yourself as a Māori person and your culture. So... So cultural identity as a concept has been focused for so long on the avoidance of that stigma, or the avoidance of, yeah, the stigma of people who aren't connected to their cultural practices. But it doesn't, in my view, it didn't do a good enough job of recognizing the importance of those practices as well. The other thing that I will say is that there has been... a conflation of three key things that I've termed the umbrella of Māori identity. One of them is ethnicity. So Māori ethnicity, as we know, is well, one is self-defined. Whether you have whakapapa Māori, if you have whakapapa Māori, if you have Māori lineage Then you have the. You have the ability to decide whether or not you want to. identify as Māori. That's the key ethnicity criteria. And there are actually lots of people who have Māori ancestry who don't identify as Māori. So that's the first layer of complexity to this Māori identity umbrella. The second one is ethnic identity. So ethnic identity is about how positively you feel towards that ethnicity, which in some cases people identify as Māori but don't feel connected or don't feel positive about that connection. And also, this is usually the case where people can't not identify as Māori. They may have features or they may be identified by others as Māori or they may have like prominent Māori features. And so it makes it difficult for them to not identify as Māori, but they also... don't feel connected to Māori culture. So what that's referred to often is a double marginalization, where people are forced out of the mainstream society, but also not feeling connected to the Māori community. So that's a layer of complexity. And then the last part, in my view, is culture. So culture is about values and practices and beliefs and traditions and things like that. And what's happening in my view in the cultural identity literature is that they are all being conflated under one thing. And it plays out in the Māori identity literature where people refer to whakapapa as in Māori ancestry being the only... marker of Māori identity that you need, which is really true because in order to be Māori the only thing that you need is to have whakapapa Māori, but in doing so it tries to avoid the exclusion of people who haven't been able to engage in culture. So the reason that I've introduced Māori cultural embeddedness was to kind of just allowed those conversations to be had in different places. Where cultural embeddedness talks about the culture itself, the values, the beliefs, the practices, and it talks about them in a strength-based way, in a way where it's about growth, it's about learning, it's about when you engage and connect to those really important facets of Māori culture, you grow yourself into that space. And it doesn't... doesn't seek to be the same as the Māori enough or the Māori identity conversation. That's a different, sorry, the ethnic identity and ethnicity conversation. I've tried to differentiate those conversations. And so that's really important. You mentioned measurement. It's really important to identify that theoretical difference so that we can now start talking about a measurement of cultural... embeddedness, the cultural aspect, devoid of or separate from the conversation around being Māori. So that makes sense. Yeah, it definitely did. So that, that gives us a lot of places to like jump up from. Um, but maybe what would be a good idea is cause you mentioned, uh, how like language didn't necessarily equate to culture for various reasons, um, or where you alluded to it a little bit. Could you kind of, uh, show light onto. the kind of historical context of like this distinct Maori culture versus mainstream society is what you said. I forgot the term exactly what you said. But yeah, so that we could probably get a better overview of the background and Ellie if you want to jump in as well, feel free and then we can go on to your current work and what you expect for the future. Yeah, I guess the best place to start there is, yeah, prior to 1840, we had Māori living as Māori. We had our ways of working. We had our worldviews, our belief systems, and we had our tribal trade ways of living. We had our own language and things like that. Fast forward to 1840, there was a treaty signed between... Māori chiefs and the British Crown basically saying that we would live together, that the Crown would be able to govern its people, being the settlers of Aotearoa, and that Māori would remain and keep its sovereignty. And then over time, following the promises of the Treaty especially, the Māori being able to govern its own people and maintain its sovereignty, those were not kept, those promises were not kept. Land was sold or taken unlawfully. Māori land was sold and it drove people into the urban cities that were being established for employment opportunities disconnect of people away from their homelands into those bigger cities. There was massive land loss, so people weren't able to draw from the traditional societies that they understood, and so cultural practices became a lot more disconnected. Māori language eventually later on was also outlawed, especially in schools. So people weren't able to speak Māori in schools, they were punished for doing so. And all of this, the urbanization, the movement of people away from their home lands, and also the oppression of cultural practices, For fun, you might want to Google the Tohunga Suppression Act as well, which outlawed Māori healing practices. Pepper potting is another thing that might keep you up at night, which was basically Māori were placed in urban cities with less Māori population so that they could basically be... white to wash out the practices basically so there was a whole lot of systemic oppression from the Crown to remove culture from Māori people to make Māori culture and identity feel less important that it wouldn't get you anywhere that it will get you in trouble and So there was a whole, there was a lot of processes that were put in place to basically try and diminish Māori culture and identity in New Zealand. And so it's only been recently that Māori have worked on reclaiming our culture, our practices, our identity, It has come at a massive battle, at a massive cost of trying to... work against systematic and systemic factors and societal... basically racism, societal racism against Māori, trying to, just trying to regain our culture and allow it to be seen and recognised and heard and not a back page, not a secondary factor if you want to, but actually prioritise and the nation. where it comes from. Do you have anything more to add to that? No, I think you're ready. I summed that up pretty nicely. I think that was absolutely perfect. It shows, yeah, well, I guess it isn't much in some ways. It's very similar to what was done in many other colonized countries around the world, but also it shows the uniqueness in how people are trying to reclaim and the amount of effort it takes in. doing such things. Can we talk about your work, Zedewai? So what actually do you look at when you talk about cultural embeddedness? What is your contributions to the field so far? So my work in Māori cultural embeddedness is, as I mentioned before, to introduce a way of understanding the importance of the practices and the values and the beliefs of Māori culture in a conversation of its own. So I had to start with the theory because, to be clear, Māori cultural embeddedness is not a term that is used. It's something that I've named. And so I have to make sure that I'm not trying to pretend like it's a thing that we've already talked about, that we've always known. But it is a language that we can use in the space of Māori identity to ensure that we aren't continuing to conflate the idea of ethnicity and ethnic identity with cultural embeddedness. I've defined Māori cultural embeddedness as the degree to which an individual has utilised opportunities to learn, engage with, experience and integrate the core values, beliefs and practices of Māori culture. There are a couple of really key parts to that. One is opportunities. So not everyone has opportunities to learn and engage with their culture. There are people now who have grown up in places away from anything cultural, anything Māori. And so they haven't had those opportunities and we can't... we need to recognise the fact that not everyone has those opportunities. And then secondly there's layers of learning, so there's you know learning and experiencing and then integrating and it's a spectrum, so it allows for growth. And then the last thing is I identified three key features of culture. in its values, practices and beliefs. There's probably more things about culture, but I wanted to isolate these three key things as really important, at least in the concept of embeddedness. And then I had to, after introducing that theoretically, test it with kaumātua or elders in the Māori community. And I tested it with people who have had experiences observing other Māori people at different ends of the spectrum of their cultural identity journey. And what I was trying to do was test whether or not this idea makes sense, test whether or not what it looks like in people, and then also identify what are those key values. practices and beliefs so that in the next phase I could look at measuring those things. So what we identified, and it might be difficult to go into it in a lot of detail because they are strongly Māori concepts and it's really difficult to translate them in five minutes. But the... We identified five Māori values. Whakapapa, which we all talked about already. Whanaungatanga, which is around relationships and relationship building. Kaitiakitanga, being a guardian, but also looking after things, places and people. And mahi rangatira. some people call it rangatiratanga, but it's the actions of someone who portrays leadership, and I probably missed one. Manakitanga, really important, looking after people. And then identified those values, beliefs. So two parts of Māori beliefs, one is koutrua wairuatanga, so about... or Māori conceptions of spirituality. And Pūrākau, the stories we tell within our Māori culture, which frames some of those belief systems and historical narratives as well. And then with practices, we identified tikanga. tikanga is the way, customary practices or the way that we do things and the right way of doing those things and then being comfortable in cultural spaces. So, you know, in a nutshell, basically what we did was we took this theoretical idea to and with the purpose of disentangling the umbrella of cultural identity. identified cultural embeddedness as a thing, identified the key features of what that is theoretically. And then in the next stage, we looked at, we did interviews to check that concept, identified some key areas that might be measurable. And then in the next stage, we introduced some items to measure those things and did some stats. Can I ask then, because you mentioned so many values and ideas. A lot of them seem to be around kind of collectivist things like guardianship, being okay in cultural spaces, so on and so forth. Has there been anything from, I guess, a Western perspective, which has been used to measure culture, not necessarily Maori culture, but generally? Or are we seeing a very clear divide in terms of cultural identity? If I wanted to say measure a cultural identity of someone who thinks they're French or who identifies as French would or English or whatever, would you see kind of similar features, but translated differently or are they like very different to each other? Well, I guess importantly, um, the reason that I did this, um, and took this approach was that I wanted to. to develop this from the ground up. So I wanted to develop it from Māori culture perspectives upwards, rather than what typically happens is we start at the higher order level, and we try to apply downwards. And so I think that this measure specifically, and the idea, is born out of the specifics of... Māori culture. I think that it's applicable to other Indigenous cultures because it refers to, as you mentioned earlier, the colonisation that is shared, the experiences that are relatively similar across Indigenous nations. But I think it's possible that it can be applied in other the reason for it was to, like I mentioned in the beginning, to bring my experiences and my development into the space in hopes that it will be usable in other places too. You ended off by saying we did a bunch of stats. Can you tell me what the bunch of stats? You don't, don't tell me like the weird numbers because that will confuse everyone, but what were the key takeaways which you found from the? initial work? So basically we took, we devised some items to measure those concepts that I spoke about earlier and then we got people, Māori people to fill out their survey on those items and what we did was we needed to check whether or not those items hold together in that organisation. we had three factors, which were values, beliefs, and practices. And then we had sub-factors, which were the ones that I referred to before. And we needed to test whether or not, statistically, they held together like that. Because it's all well and good for us to say, theoretically, this is how things should hold together. But statistically, we need to check whether or not that holds. And so we had to do some... shuffling of items, so we had to go, well this doesn't load well on this factor, meaning it doesn't quite align with the other items on this factor, so we need to remove that one, we might need to remove this one, and so we did that based on the numbers, but we also looked at whether or not theoretically that made sense if we were to move one to another. Um, and, um, with luck or I guess good planning, um, they held together quite well. So, um, yeah, it was quite a successful process. Um, statistically. Is it okay if I ask for an example of any one item to kind of like get, give me an understanding of the journey. So picking any value and an item. So what a question would look like, or I'm guessing, or are they like very Tereo based. No, no, yep. So an item for say, Māori cultural beliefs and then inside of that Pūrāko is Māori historical narratives and stories relevant today. So it's trying to get at the idea that those historical narratives that some people call myths or legends or things like that. are relevant to us in today's world. And so, yeah, that's one. Whanaungatanga maybe, which is, you know, the importance of relationships. One example item is that getting to know people in your workplace is important. So I guess one thing to note here is that, especially Māori values, they can seem very similar to other values, and that's because they're values, right? Values are quite similar across the board. What I was trying to ensure that I did in this process was identify the nuances inside of those values because while Ma Nākitaanga kind of looks like hospitality, one thing that I learned in my qualitative aspect of this research is that they're not the same. they're not exactly the same thing. There are some nuances within manaakitanga that are different to hospitality. And for example, hospitality might look like offering someone a cup of tea when they come to your house. And that's actually a common example that people give. But manaakitanga, in the depths of it, is once you've given someone... offered someone a cup of tea and then insisting that they have one. It's the discussions around what happens next. So you sit there and you ask them about their life, you ask them about their family, you know, you're actually genuinely trying to care for the person who's come rather than at a superficial level. So with the different aspects of the cultural embeddedness measure and concept, just trying to draw out some of those nuances, cultural nuances. Okay, considering Rewai mentioned nuances or trying to break down nuances within things, how have you found it in your research, Ellie, in terms of perfectionism and the subtle nuances between, I guess, a perfectionism in a Maori context versus the more general well-known idea of it? Yeah, I guess the main difference that's coming across right now is the fact that Māori have been colonized, still are experiencing colonization, that kind of thing, and everything that comes with it. So the systemic racism, the discrimination, marginalization, blah blah. That is really playing into this pressure that Māori adolescents seem to be feeling to succeed to an exceptionally high standard. And that is coming a lot from society as a whole because there are these stereotypes of what being Māori means. And so it's kind of this like, well I'm gonna do well to prove you wrong. But then there's also another kind of. Avenue, I guess I'll call it, of, because of colonization, systemic racism, blah, we have. historically ended up in lower socioeconomic situations. And so for a lot of Māori adolescents, now they are the first to be at university or to finish high school, that kind of thing. And so there is a lot of pressure on them to, or they feel as though there is a lot of pressure on them to... do well in a university situation for their whānau, like Azaraliwa was talking right at the start. We aren't just individual people. We move through the world with our ancestors, our whānau behind us. What we do is for everyone. And so when you're the first to go through a university kind of situation, not only are you doing that. alone because you don't have the support from anyone who's been through it before, who's really close to you. You are also doing it with this weight of this is for everyone who's really important to me, this is for my whanau, my ancestors, etc. Which is just not something that Pākehā, so New Zealand European people experience. You don't. Because that is a more individualistic culture. So yeah, I think there's definitely, that's probably the biggest thing that's coming through right now. But there are also like the subtle nuances of, am I Maori enough to be claiming that kind of thing? And so there's this, yeah, thing of, am I Maori enough? imperfectionism coming through in their like, when they are doing today, Māori courses, that kind of thing, like having it needing to just be perfect. Otherwise they feel as though they're not living up to the expectations, living up, like doing their ancestors and whanau proud, that kind of thing. Yeah. Does that make sense? I feel like I rambled. Yeah, that's great. Sorry, I was just going to jump in slightly here because I was going to. add that part of decolonizing psychology is questioning some of the regarded concepts. So perfectionism is one of those concepts that Ali's looking at and it is taken for granted that perfectionism looks this kind of way when you apply it in a cultural setting like Māori cultural adolescence. you add that layer of complexity to that, and you add that nuance, you add cultural expectations. Those are the things that we, that I personally at least, and Ali too, are hoping to challenge in terms of the well-held and regarded understandings within psychology. Because psychology is old enough where... there are certain sort of cornerstones of psychology, like personality, for example, that people just take for granted as being absolutely, for want of a better term, true. And so, obviously there's more research these days about recognizing that most of psychology is done in weird populations, you know, individual rich, what's the demographic? Democratic. Democratic people. And so there is greater recognition and there's cultural, cross-cultural psychology looking at trying to ensure that those concepts are hold across cultures. But I think that the at least in indigenous psychology or in Māori, Kaupapa Māori psychology, we are looking to do it not from that cross-cultural perspective but from that insider's perspective, contextualizing concepts in psychology from a cultural insider's perspective. That's really cool. That actually gives like a really good kind of understanding of the difference between someone like coming from, let's say New Zealand and studying in Brazil or studying people in Brazil or studying populations in India or something versus from you studying your own culture in a way. And how, again, how you mentioned subtle differences, you can probably learn very different things so you can contextualize things very differently within that. In that regard, do you see any instances where that's probably a good thing versus why you think ground up research is probably a better thing and I guess the negatives of either? Do you have thoughts, Ali? Personally, I'm more of a fan of the ground up stuff just for Maori in general. The top down cross-cultural stuff to me feels a little colonized, I guess, is the word that I'm going to use. I think. It probably has its place. I'm not a cross-cultural researcher. I don't have any expertise in that. I did not take the courses in undergrad either for that kind of reason. But yeah, I think particularly for Indigenous people who have been colonized, applying a Western framework, understanding and just going... Yeah, okay, that's gonna work. If we just change, if we change the word family to whanau is not It doesn't sit right with me, is what I will leave that at. But yeah, I think the positive of ground up is that it is ground up, right? Like you're going to the people who the research is about and getting their input. It's not you as a researcher solely deciding that this is the thing. and working around that, I guess. Negatives is hard. And it takes a long time, I guess, but I don't really see that as an issue. I think that's just part of it. And I think a lot of Māori researchers will attest to that as well. But yeah, those are my very limited thoughts on that. I think, yeah, definitely agree. And I also think that there's a time and a place for different kinds of research. So I understand the want of cross-cultural psychology to understand and apply or see whether different aspects of psychology apply across cultures. But when Again, the word decolonizing psychology. What I think about is what is prioritized and what is elevated. And, you know, if I was to sum up colonization, it would be that we need te reo Māori translations everywhere. Because the dominant language in our own country is English. So if you think about that in terms of concepts within psychology or within just in society, you see what takes a back seat and decolonizing is putting these ground up approaches and processes and outcomes and theories and worldviews in the front seat, in the driver's seat. And so, yeah, there is a, like I said, there's a time and a place, you know, science is about doing everything from every angle. So all of it is important, but what we choose to prioritize is the elevation of indigenous voice into the privacy. That's awesome. Much more eloquent than me. The next thing I should then beg the question is, what are your guys' aspirations for the future of psychology in Aotearoa, New Zealand and the world as a whole? Halle, what are your thoughts? Oh, you're gonna make me go first. I can go first if you like. Yes, please, give me time to think. So my aspirations for psychology in Aotearoa and the world. I'll start with Aotearoa because I can contextualize this by my experience. I came into psychology not really knowing what it was going to be like, and there were no Māori staff. There was no one who was, who looked like me, who was sharing... things from my background, from my understanding of Māori cultural perspectives. And I shudder at the thought of kids out of high school, Māori kids out of high school, you know, finally making it to university and coming into psychology and not feeling welcome. I think Psychology, psychology, I love it. It's amazing. It's there's so, so much fun inside of psychology. There's so many different things that you can look at. And I, my aspiration is for more Māori students to come and to enjoy it and to feel welcome and feel connected to the process. And what that means is that we need more Māori content. We also need more Māori staff teaching that content so that people can come, Māori kids can come through and feel connected, feel seen, feel heard, feel that their perspectives are being taught and that they can resonate with all of that. And then more broadly into psychology in general, I think indigenous psychology. needs to be elevated because for too long we have Indigenous peoples the world over have been sitting in an appendix somewhere rather than you know in the main body of the text on the front page so I would love to see Indigenous perspectives brought into the main conversation in psychology um yeah those are my aspirations Um, yeah, I mean, I think you, again, you kind of just summed it up really nicely, but I thought, seeing as you shared your, your experience when you came to Psych, um, I would give mine, which has a very similar tone. Um, yeah, I started uni in 2016. Um, and yeah, not once did I have a tutor. who looked like me. There was one Māori lecturer. And it is a very lonely process. The nature of psych too is just that it attracts a huge amount of people. It's a really large course and so while there were other Māori students in the course, because there's so many people you don't really get to interact, I guess. Or at that point the uni wasn't doing anything to... support those connections. Like there were Maori study rooms. I had no clue that they existed at all in my undergrad. And yeah, that was, it just kind of sucked. And I think that really. shaped my thinking in terms of going into postgrad of like when I became a tutor. One of the things that just always sat in the back of my mind is I'm going to do this because I want my Māori students to see someone who looks like them, who is doing psychology, who's doing postgrad, so that they go, I can do that too. And I made myself very available to my Māori students as well to make sure that they had that support there that I didn't. So yeah, I guess similarly, like one of my aspirations is really that we just have more Māori people in psychology, whether that's as a tutor, a TA, a lecturer, a Clinton Psych, that kind of thing. So... that are Māori lessons do see, oh, I can do that as well. That person looks like me. I think people really underestimate the effect that seeing someone who looks like you and that position can have for someone. Yeah. Before you carry on here, I think it's really important to point out that the burden of responsibility and obligation that we have as Māori to do these things, you know, sometimes I think it would be a lot easier if I just chose to be a builder and build houses from nine to five and go home and be done, but But because of my upbringing and because I felt the obligation to bring that into the space, and because of Ali's experience, and there's a sense of obligation that we have as Māori that I don't think is present in our non-Māori colleagues. Um, I, the, that was, uh, yeah, that was very, very eloquently put very well put. Um, I can, based on what you guys have said earlier in the episode, um, mainly pointing out what Ellie had said about for a lot of students, um, it is there, the lot of They're the first of their families to go to uni. They're the first of their families to graduate high school because of all the reasons mentioned before. You would hope that we will slowly start getting more people like you guys in post-grad, in positions of more visibility. And hopefully, naturally, the time comes, the time is coming and it's sooner rather than later. I just also want to say that I'm not normally this serious. Sometimes the topics just require some serious. Yeah. I don't, I don't think I've seen Ellie like the series for this long, but that's, that's good. We need, I think you'd never see me tutor. I think true. I, I think every, I think there's a. Time and place for every conversation, like serious conversations need to be had. Yeah, people, I guess, in the world nowadays keep talking on about like identity politics and this and that, but also sometimes you need to realize the power of representation and what it actually does. Of course, it's different politicians and the government's jobs to decide how that works, but it's just as people, as a student, you've... you always look for, you always want people to look up to. And if your idols are only in one sort of sector, then it's very hard. It's a similar line, but not, I guess, the same. I remember Charles Barkley, who was a NBA, was a former NBA player. He, he went on a rant once saying that it's because the only, why not many black people become doctors or surgeons or whatever in that, in the US. is mainly because all they see is athletes and then everybody just wants to aspire to be them. So you need to highlight and show people in certain fields, certain careers. Once you make something visible, then people have like young people, adolescents have someone to aspire to be. And I guess, yeah, that's very important. And hopefully we're moving in the right direction. Yeah. And not as exceptions. Yeah. Not as a token. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Dr. Tia Neha, who did an episode with us, spoke about that quite a bit, about how she was the only Māori girl in her school to being the only Māori lecturer at Victoria University in the psych department for ages. So yeah, we've covered the token part of it. Covered tokenism. Yeah. Yeah, that's good. We can. Thanks to everybody who stayed so far. We can we can end with some of the more the chiller, funnier questions, because this has been generally speaking, this has been pretty heavy discussions and none of us are serious people at the heart of it. So, yeah, Ellie's Ellie, I know, I first forced her to listen to the podcast, and she's also a Swinburne Society member with. Merchant all I should have worn. Yeah, this is the first time this is the first time she's come on the show But she's been in the background helping us for ages So she knows how this works but Ready for you. What I will do is I'll basically Send I'll basically ask a question and you answer just quickly as possible Some of them are shorter some of them are slightly longer, but yeah, we'll kind of have fun with them so Yeah, sweet. So simple cats or dogs? Dogs easy cats Somewhere winter summer bring it down Movies or TV shows TV. Alright, so for both of you guys then, if your life were a TV show or TV series, what genre would it be? Horror. Comedy. I've got the mad dad jokes. So I'm bad. God. Do you have anyone in mind who would play you? No. Ryan Reynolds. I'm going to go with a Zendaya. You say Ryan Reynolds, what do I do? I can see her right now. Get the Canadian in to play. All right. If you were to have a superpower, what power would it be? Instant transmission. that shows my genre. I'd like to fly. Never need to worry about parking or anything. And yeah, don't have to pay for flights places. You hold up there though. You know, can you imagine that you have to fly, but you have to deal with the elements you don't get? Maybe I made an error. Instant transmission, see? Way better. And you can pretend to be Goku. I wonder if the audience... I sometimes wonder if the audience knows what half the older animes are, like Beyblade and Dragon Ball Z and stuff. For the pure reason, and this is the only reason, it's because I was tutoring a class and I realized all the students in the class were born after Finding Nemo was released. And I was like, shit. I remember you coming to me and telling me that. would technically I was a mature student as well technically but just it was in context of trying to show mental health in tv shows and movies and some media and things and I was trying to think of examples and I was like memento no that's too like finding Nemo oh again no what do I have yeah well you and I probably have been at university a similar time it's almost been 10 years since I started. I feel I've been in uni longer than I was in school. It's bad. Yeah. If you could be an animal, what animal would you be? Okay. My wife says that my spirit animal is a sloth. Lots of cool actually. They are. They're very sharp. Um, claws. Sloth or a fox, obviously. Yeah. It's in the name. Got to have it. Yeah. Um, or just a lazy Fox. Is it? Yeah. It's the both worlds. Yeah, exactly. Um, what is something stupid someone has tricked you into believing? Or is what's something stupid that you believe in? Everything. I'm so gullible. Ask Liam. Before I started psychology, there were a few conspiracy theorists around me who were super convinced that humans didn't build the pyramids and also something about the 1% of your brain or something. And so for a little while I was like, a little bit suspect. So I would say that those things. What are your thoughts of? those conspiracy theories to the more current ones. What are the current ones? Flat Earth's a good one. Yeah, Flat Earth. Flat Earth made a comeback because that was the thing in the 1300s. It wasn't a conspiracy theory then. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. I, I mean, I struggle. Um, I know some people like, no, some people who are flat earthers and it's just hard to take them seriously after that. Wow. Yeah. Ma Mark Wilson, um, who, who did an episode with us, or spoke, spoke a little bit to the reasons for people developing conspiracy theories and things. So. Yeah, I'm low key just going to keep plugging previous episodes here so people go listen to them. That's the other thing I've mentioned. COVID-19? Yeah, wokeism actually. We've got Paul Joe speaking about wokeism. That's another one. That was cool. All right, a few more questions. If you were not doing this work, what would you be doing? I would be a baker. I come from a long line of sheep shearers. So I'd either be shearing sheep or teaching high school. my mom was a teacher. What are your thoughts on cheering sheep? Do you is it very, is it very meditative or relaxing? Or is it like painful? It's the hardest job in the world. It's very, very difficult. I've seen videos and I've seen videos and it doesn't seem fun. Yeah. Good way to break your back. What's something which is legal which feels illegal? protesting? My answer was going to be having a cup like out in public, like a mug or something. Did not take the serious part. Mine's definitely walking into a store and then not buying anything and leaving. For the same kind of reason. The amount of supermarkets I've walked into. And you're like, oh, you don't have what I have. So I'm going to leave. And I'm like, are they going to stop me? going to the toilet at a service station without buying anything. Which researcher is most likely to win a drinking contest and why is it a indigenous psychology researcher? Cause we have to deal with racism. And psychology in general, you know, that tracks a certain type of person. Especially clinical psychologists like you guys. Yep. It's severely underpaid for the amount of depressing stuff you guys have to deal with. Yeah. I prefer the term improving people's lives. Sure. I should put a note being like, if you have issues, drop your therapist and link you to line and things there at the bottom of this episode after some of the stuff I said. But yeah, awesome. And the very last question is, if you had to give advice or leave us with one piece of advice, what would it be? just like in general. Just in general, if you have to give to your millions of TikTok followers, Ellie. I don't know, I'm gonna go sentimental and have fun. Like it's not that serious, you know? Like it doesn't always have to be serious. Like we said before, like you can have fun. We're all doing well. really wise handed in as PhD, but we've all done PhDs and we all find the time to have fun as well. Your life doesn't have to be all about one thing. Um, that failure is part of life and that it doesn't have to define who you are or what you're capable of. I failed multiple times. Like I said, I failed in engineering and I also failed year 11 English, like twice. And I've just written a PhD. So it doesn't need to define your capabilities. Just keep going, I reckon. Keep going. Keep trying. Awesome. Thanks guys. And especially Rewai, but as well, if anybody who's listening wants to reach out to you, ask you about you guys' work, how can they get in touch with you? I'm a millennial, so you can find me on LinkedIn and social media. I've listened to a few of the podcasts and everyone puts their email address down and I'm like, yeah, you can email me if you want to, but it'd be easier to find me on LinkedIn. You should do what Adrian ran. Did he was like, Oh, I have a Wikipedia page. That up. But if anyone wants to make one for me, that will be great. You can make your own. Can you? Wow. That's the, that's not the same telling everyone how sweet. But yeah, um, yeah, you can email me or social media is probably easier to be honest, it's all just my name or just hit us up on smooth brain society on most social media platforms and then we'll just forward stuff to Ellie easy enough. My name's unique enough that you'll, if you want to find me, you'll find me. Oh yeah, like the same, my last name. I'm the only Ellie Rookway. It's great. The sad story I learned, so from New Zealand, when I flew over to London, um, or I'm in Glasgow now, but when I, when I landed in London, the first person I met, his name was also Sahir Hussain and I was like, ah, god damn. Flew hard. You went from being one of a kind to. Literally painful. And anyway, uh, thanks so much guys for listening. Uh, sorry about the ramble at the end, but. But yeah, hope you enjoy it and hopefully the video stuff works out well enough that we can post more YouTube clips and videos and hopefully share slides and presentations and things which so that it's easier for our guests to get messages and points across. So thank you. Until next time, the advice of our guests, it's okay to fail and don't take. things too seriously it's good enjoy yourselves take care thanks guys