#41. ‘Ngaruroro’: Understanding Māori Wellbeing - Finley Johnson

Finley Ngarangi Johnson and Colleagues introduce 'Ngaruroro' which is a new model for Māori wellbeing. Fin, who is a PhD student at Victoria University of Wellington and a Researcher at the Ministry of Social Development, talks about the effort put into designing the new measure. the themes it covers and some of the issues faced when designing a wellbeing measure for the complexities of different Māori identities.

Their paper can be accessed here : https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/21/4/445

The episode is co-hosted by Prateek Shankar, CEO, Jungle Publics. He was a guest on an earlier episode about his work on Planetary Melancholia

See Prateek's episode here: https://smoothbrainsociety.com/2024/05/31/38-planetary-melancholia-prateek-shankar-and-valerie-navarrete/

Transcript

0:08

Welcome everybody to the Smooth Brain Society. I'm Sahir. Today, if you guys remember, we had done an episode earlier speaking about a particular research paper. We did it with Europe's Journal of Psychology and Victoria University of Wellington really liked the idea and asked if we could do it. for some of their publications which are coming out. And I thought the first, the one to start off with of all the recent publications I did was the most interesting, which I found was the most interesting, but also one which has been done by one of my really good friends, Finley Ngarangi Johnson. I'll give, he was on before for two episodes as a co-host, but now he's gonna be talking about his work. I'll give you the more professional introduction and then he can give you all his background story. So, Fin's a Kaupapa Māori researcher at the Ministry of Social Development. He is currently getting his qualifications in clinical psychology and doing a PhD at Victoria University of Wellington. His thesis explores Māori wellbeing through the development of a psychometric skill, and he's passionate about research and teaching in the interface between Maturanga Māori and science. He's here to talk about his most recent publication, introducing Ngaururo. Oh, did I pronounce it right? Naruroro. Naruroro, which is a new model for understanding Māori well-being. So, welcome, Fin. Kia ora. Thank you, Sahir, for that extensive introduction. And lovely to be here with you as well, Pateek. Kia ora. And before I let... Fin go on I will introduce a co-host for this episode. So Prateek was on a couple episodes ago I have not decided the order of upload but Prateek's episode will be up before Fin's one So you can go listen to that Prateek is the CEO founder of Jungle Publics He shakes his head at CEO, but we went but if you want to learn about them and their work and how they and Yeah, if you want to learn about them and their work, then go on, check out that episode and all the links to everything we discussed and his websites and all will be in the description and shown us below. So, welcome guys. Thank you. Alrighty, Fin, can you give everybody a bit more of an introduction about yourself? I gave the professional stuff, but there is more to you than that. Yeah, a lot of that was a bit of a funny one. Good evening everyone, my name is Fin. Ngati Kahungunu, O Mahu, Tuahuru Marae, Kia ora everyone, my name is Fin. On my mum's side of the whanau, we whakapapa up to the northeast of Aotearoa, up to Hastings and Te Mahia. And on my dad's side of the family, our ancestral connections go up to Kolkata and Kursung up in the mountains of the north east of India. Yeah, I've... Been lucky enough to know Sahir for some years now. So excited to be able to be here again on the Smooth Brain Society podcast and to be able to come in and answer some questions instead of being one of the people that is asking. But thank you so much for having me on this show and for sharing this time, bro. Awesome. Just a reminder to all those listening or those who are new that the premise of the podcast is we get a co-host on who has no clue about the topic. So in this case, Prateek is our guinea pig here. He has no clue about Fin's work apart from the brief introductions we just did. In that case, I think a good question to start off would be with a little bit of a background of if we are you. You're making a scale to understand Māori wellbeing. What is the need for this new scale? What were your motivations to design this? So if you could give the audience and Prateek a bit of a background to go from. Yeah, of course. Well, I think with most people with their thesis research, I kind of fell into it. I didn't come in planning wanting to do a PhD. I didn't think I could do a PhD and definitely didn't think I was going to come in and do something with stats. Because they do the best with the maths and stats in high school. However, I came in, finished my undergrad and then looking for a master's project, I wanted to do something around Māori wellbeing and specifically around Māori men's wellbeing. And in having a conversation with some of my lab mates, I said, Oh, yeah, I'm going to do Māori men's mental health and wellbeing. And it's going to be like this, this and this. And then one of the lecturers said, all right, slow down there, mate. How are you actually going to measure it? And I was like, Oh, I'll just use the Māori wellbeing measure. I'm sure there's heaps of those. We've had all of these amazing models of Māori wellbeing that have been like dominating and like guiding our countries. Maori health development for the past 40 years. And then I said, yeah, let's use that. She's like, oh, is there one of those? I was like, ah, surely. Then that, you know, surely I get on there and there's nothing. And so I was like, all right. So if I want to quantitatively measure, you know, outcomes around later to Maori wellbeing, then I'm going to have to either use an existing one that's rooted in Western understandings and conceptualizations of wellbeing that don't talk about important. cultural factors related to Wairua or say spirituality or that really talk about the importance of connection to the whenua, land or anything like that. So I was like, okay, guess we're gonna take a step back and maybe think about developing one for ourselves. And so that inspired me to look into what that involves. I have a chat to my current supervisor, Professor Paul Jose, who just happens to be a stats man. that has experience in creating scales and in working with other Māori students who have also gone down that scale development route. And so, yeah, I thought it was a really important thing to do so that we can create some tools that can measure things that are actually important to Māori people. Because, yeah, those existing suite of tools, survey measures just didn't kind of cut it and didn't talk about some of these things that we as Māori know are just super important to our wellbeing. OK, thank you for explaining that to the audience and to me. That's definitely useful. I guess, I mean, I have broader questions about, I guess, your methodology and thinking about quantifying some of these things as well. But before we get into the specifics of that, I guess if you could just broadly tell us. I mean, you've pointed to some of the metrics you were using. But how does this play out? What does the scale look like? Yeah, so the paper that Sahir has talked about today is just the first half of my thesis. So this has been an initial qualitative exploration, which has resulted in the development of the model. And so when thinking about how we want to quantify or bring in such a broad concept, such an important one, we thought that we actually had to go out and ground these and corded all conversations of people from the community. And so what we thought would be appropriate was to develop an advisory group and to have chats with them, with people from the community and multi academics and scholars who are experienced in this sort of thing. Another huge consideration in doing that within the context of quantification and measurement was to think about issues of spirituality. and bringing that and addressing that within this context, which is, you know, very fine line that we all know that we have to walk. And then so what we talked about was establishing a really solid qualitative base and foundation for our survey measure. And so in this first paper that we published, what we talk about is how that kind of unfolded. So first of all, we went and had conversations with people in the community, interviewed and ask them some really broad exploratory questions. What's important for your wellbeing? Thinking about existing models of Māori wellbeing that talk about the importance of the land, to say, hey, this has been identified as a source of wellbeing. Is that important for you? If so, why? If not, why? And after having those conversations, we got to qualitatively analyze the data and explore for different themes of wellbeing that was coming through. Then so after... Generating those, got to take them back to my advisory group. We got to have a real nice wānanga, collective learning process, which we got to make sense of all of these, these different ideas. And from that, we were able to come up with a tentative framework, which had eight themes and a set of items under each of those themes related to wellbeing, which was really interesting. And then what we wanted to do was to take that back out to the community. and ask another set of people, is this an important thing? So first of all, we said, you know, what are just some quick fire, free listing things that are important to your wellbeing? And then they said, oh yeah, walking my dog. Oh yeah, like getting a good feed and eating some chocolate. Another one's like, yeah, it's hanging out with my little brother. And so we got them to come up with these big lists. And then after that, I said, okay, that's cool. You've got these, all these different little things. How would you group? these different items together. Then so we got them to do that, have a think about it. And then after that, I presented them the themes and the items that we had from the first set of interviews. And I said, you know, previously we've just had these chats with people and this is what other people have identified. How does what you produced and your little groups map onto or relate to those? And so just to get their kind of brain juices flowing, got them to do that little exercise before having a... a process of reflecting upon what we had in front of us for them to provide any feedback on it, say what's missing, are the things that are important to you that aren't captured here, is there anything you think really doesn't matter to you that's included in these items, to really refine and rework that model that we had. Then so once again after we got all that information and data back, we synthesized it to go back to our advisory committee. And we had another big chat about making sense of all of these different edits and suggestions based on that feedback. Then based on that, what we had was a final model with eight themes and 41 items emerge. And yeah, leave it at that for now. That's one question. And just go in straight to your other question or other part of it. Yeah, go for it. But yeah, by all means, if you feel comfortable. Yeah. So the next part of the thesis and the work looks at quantifying and how to turn those different ideas into survey questions. And this was a real kind of difficult and tricky process because you'll get look at scales that people will typically use that go from one, not at all, to seven all the time, those sorts of things. And so we had a big think about in that process, how can we actually do this and measure well-being? in a Māori way. And so throughout the whole process, what was really important was taking a Kaupapa Māori approach. So this is a methodology, a way of doing research, in which it would kind of broadly come under a decolonial approach by Graham Smith and Linda Smith, who if you're into decolonizing methodologies, you know, they are them. And part of that is, yeah, critiquing and resisting those dominant forms of, you know, Western knowledge production, dissemination, creation, all of that, while making space for prioritizing and normalizing Maori ways of being and thinking and understanding in those contexts. So we thought, OK, how can we indigenize and decolonize this process? And that was a really big important part of this research and something that we thought was really interesting and important to do. So first of all was, you know, how do we approach this idea and to put the people's experiences first of who is actually interacting with this measure. So we don't want to produce a tool that people can interact with. They'll fill it out and then feel like shit. So thinking, okay, too much of that has been done. Too many quantitative tools have come. and reduced our people's wellbeing and just created all these negative statistics. So of course, the first priority with a lot of people and measures and stuff they're doing now is making it strengths-based, thinking about how we can make it growth-orientated. And the idea for that was to actually utilize a response-scale format that's really familiar to a lot of Māori and that are commonly used within Māori spaces. So like really quick dip in and out quickly, we had our creation story and within our creation story, there talks about this transition from Te Kore, which is the state of darkness and absolute potential and the growth throughout the different stages of Te Pō, the different stages of night, to Te Ao Marama, the state of the lightness of enlightenment and actualization. And so a lot of people, a lot of Māori scholars have used that metaphor. or that story to help people understand different things. And then so for me, it was thinking, okay, we've got this well-established, strengths-based way of getting people to understand, you know, maybe things related to well-being, let's utilize that. So what we came up with was a scale from the seed at one up to the flower at five. And what we do is we get people to think about their well-being or this different item in terms of which stage of growth are you at. And encouraging people to think of that being in the seed stage doesn't mean you're deficient, doesn't mean you're lacking, doesn't mean bad or anything. By getting them to think about it and understand it as it being in a stage of growth and a stage of potential that can be actualized. And so from that kind of foundation, And that idea of we wanted to make it a positive thing that people interact with. We started developing these different items. And so the process was, all right, we have our 41 items and our eight themes. How are we going to take that awesome strengths based approach and turn them into survey items and we ended up doing it. We have so far, yeah, those 41 items. And. We. decided to... turn them into survey questions with framings of them being either connections and how the extent to which a person feels connected to say the environment, to the ocean, to land, also relating to capacities that people feel like they have, capacities to manaaki, capacities to look after other people, capacities to be themselves and to live into the fullness of their identity, and then also lifestyle choices. And lifestyle choices within the context of we live in these different material realities. But within that, we have degrees of agency. And from that, we can make lifestyle choices to improve the quality of life and to improve our well-being. And of course, we have to be really careful because we're not saying, ha ha, you're unwell physically. It's because you make the decision to not go to the gym or eat properly. Because, yeah, we know that's some neoliberal bullshit. but at the same time still trying to empower people and to tow that line. So yeah, the connections, the capacities and lifestyle choices was another way we wanted to do it. Because another important thing for this tool was to encourage people that take it to kind of feel activated and to help them practically take this model and these ideas and think about how they can actually do it and put it into practice themselves. And so... What we want is that this to be a set of items or questions that people interact with that can change the way that they think and it can inspire them to participate and to take action that increases their well-being. So it's a little bit of a different approach to measurement than some other traditional ones that seem to make everything uniform and the same wording and the like on scale. But yeah, that comes down to that Kaupapa Māori approach, which is prioritizing. our people being well, education, and thinking about these big issues within a culturally relevant and familiar paradigm. So yeah, that's the approach so far. And then as we're doing the analyses that we're currently doing, it's been thinking about how... Are we interpreting and understanding the data that we have? What are these different statistical paradigms is useful? What is the information that it's saying that we do or don't have from a specific item due to variance? You know, how is that useful? For example, we have an item that talks about drug use, but in a way that tries to and attempts to destigmatize it. So it talks about drugs being substances that people take when they're looking for a sense of connection or to self-medicate. And then so as you would expect, people respond to either one or five, whether struggling or they're feeling good in relation to it. And then so that lack of variance has meant all of our statistical analyses are yelling at us, this is a horrible item and to get rid of it. But then we're looking and we say, okay, we've got that information. Cool. Thanks for the heads up. But it's actually really important that we get people to engage, to think about these issues in a different way and to change the way they think. So yeah, like kind of looking at those competing priorities and thinking about how we can kind of, yeah, do things a little bit differently to prioritize the people first. Um, yeah. Hope that kind of spoke to some of those questions at the start. Kind of went on a massive ramble. Sorry. No, I think it was a very good ramble. I like the idea of a skill which you can interact with because you would know this, Fin, and I don't know if Prateek has experienced this, but when in like second year or first year of uni when you're doing these scale creation or qualitative analysis research stuff, not qualitative, quantitative analysis research stuff, when you're making scales and things like that, you kind of try to make it so that you can see it exactly at time point one and exactly at time point two and you're not and someone's not necessarily interacting with the scale so the idea that you're getting someone to think wow they filled the scale up so that they could probably have the impetus to you know work towards what they want wish to achieve through these items is a really good way to look at it especially for someone like yourself who's doing clinical work it seems like generally speaking a any client, patient, person who comes for your help or wants to, yeah, treat themselves. Yeah, and I think that speaks to the importance of moving our measurement paradigm and I guess research stuff in general towards more how can we give rather than how can we just take it the most efficient ways. And so that's what something that we think is really important. And of course, in clinical, we want it to be a tool and a survey. that kind of raises people's consciousness as they interact with it. Sure. Do you think that makes it a lot harder? I feel it would be a lot easier to just say an objective measure which you can do. You spoke for a while and throughout the entire time I kind of felt that this is actually a really hard thing to do because you're not just making a four... a four or five word question with like a statement which they can answer from one to five. It's something which they need to think about, which means you need to fit in the shoes of almost everyone who's probably going to take the scale and make it so that it's beneficial. How hard was that process? How long are these meetings going? What goes through your head during all this? Yeah, it's a real difficult, difficult thing. And, you know, in any time you're trying to make something culturally appropriate. Also not wanting to marginalize people who haven't had the opportunities to learn and to engage with some of these ideas or the language. So trying to think about how we can present some of these really core multicultural concepts or values in a way that's accessible, that was definitely a challenge. And so within each of my items, I had my question, and then, you know, maybe the tale has the concept that we're talking about. underneath it has a whole little one or two sentence explanation and giving examples of what we mean by that. Because it also goes to and speaks to the importance of, you know, when you're talking about some of these big concepts of understanding that different peoples from different tribes, from the Māori, you know, so you have a Māori population, we have different understandings of that same concept. And then so part of that also involves providing that kind of a working understanding for people who are coming together to respond to, yeah, how are they feeling in their wairua, in their spirituality, and doing that. So yeah, that looked like having good chats with my advisory group and just establishing a really solid foundation like that. And then of course, my supervisors and my awesome support network of big bros in academia that have already done it. and the other people who help support me. Because you're 100% like, you can't be doing anything like this by yourself. And it's 100% the product of all of the people that have had that help. And for the model, you know, too, that just goes to show with the authorship list. There's a few of us on there because yeah, just so many of these people have just like, helped and supported in so many ways. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's really, really interesting. And you like thinking about the idea of authorship, I think typically surveys or any kind of sort of collection of clinical or even ethnographic data for that matter tends to be really extractive. And this is like desire to standardize. And then you're imposing a sort of standardization on your interviewee as well. I'm kind of wondering in all of this. There's a degree of high variability across everybody that you're speaking to. But there's also, I'm wondering a variability of when you speak to these people. Because I remember the last time me and Sahir were talking, there's a question of what people say they're feeling or how they say what the subjective experience they're having and what they might actually be experiencing at a purely neurological level. And I'm wondering how you account for things like. like that because there's question of agency and then there's question of like Quantifiable data that might not necessarily be aligned Yeah, hundred percent and that's the beauty of doing survey data aye is that you will have people that won't answer honestly or won't as Accurately reflect their reality as it might I guess one way that we've thought about that or how to do things in a way that doesn't encourage uh i don't even know what it's called like favorable responding or whatever is to just really design the questions in a way that doesn't say that this is good or bad or compare people with others or say that there's this benchmark that we should all be reaching. And what we tried to, how we tried to do that was to really emphasize before they began how dynamic wellbeing is and that it's not this linear process. So although we have, um, getting people to understand it through stages of growth. We're saying that there are all these different things that affect your wellbeing and it's all about the ebbs and the flows and ups and downs. And just because you score high at this point of time on this dimension, you know, it doesn't actually mean that, you know, anything about yourself for. And that sort of way, um, to say that, yeah, things do change over time and there is a lot of variability. Um, and we hope that in saying that. kind of fronting the survey with that, that it would discourage that. So it's a lot more of a personalized thing. And so it's a lot more of a reflection process. So there is a lot more inward looking than just trying to fit, race through a whole bunch of things that they can't really connect with and respond to kind of in a favorable way. Yeah. And it's kind of what we want this to be. Yeah. More of just an extractive data. gathering mechanism and more to be a space for people to stop, to slow down, to think about how they're going and feeling and reflect on that. So yeah, a big reflection process. So we hope in doing that, that'll help with that issue. Really happy and blown away by some of the responses we've had so far and the community feedback of people have said that they've really enjoyed. Completing the survey that stimulated great discussions with their family in their homes and that one person said it, their words not mine. They thought it was meditative. And I was like, all right, I don't know about that. But yeah, it's that idea of just having it as a nice, cool, chill, reflective process that's enjoyable, that's empowering. And I think that helps with that a little bit. Yeah, I mean, it sounds to me like you've been approaching this work with a kind of kindness and generosity that you wouldn't associate with, you know, objective research of any kind. I want to talk a little bit again about authorship at this time in terms of your presence in all of this, because that's what makes this very interesting to me, that there's a lot of conversational dialogue. happening in this whole process. How do you situate yourself in these in these processes? Of course you've made the thing and you've been part of like driving this process, this whole process, but are you in the room when these interviews are happening? And that's one sort of more direct way of answering thinking about this question, but I'm also wondering where do you show up even in the analysis because there's a subjective experience that you're bringing to these interpretations, right? Especially there isn't a benchmark to work around. Yeah, great question. So the way that it's happened so far and the development of this has been those initial nine interviews that I conducted myself, um, working with people in the community that I already had existing connections with. And then another set of 15, um, which I conducted myself and then a set of pilot tests for the survey measure. I can't actually remember off the top of my head how many I did. I think maybe 10 that I conducted myself. Um, and through facilitating some of those conversations between the advisory group, the supervision team and other support networks, been really privileged to be able to be part of that process the whole time, but I definitely like in the publication itself, we name all of the people that participated in it we're saying is that like this is not a me thing that I came up with. It's us, it's a we thing that we put together that wouldn't be possible or would have been like really lame if it was just me trying to think of these things by myself. And so that was a really important part. And I think, yeah, you just got to like approach it with humility. And when you're working with an advisory group, when you've got your elders around you, when you've got your family that are involved in this research, like there's no space for, you know, anything but doing it in a culturally safe, humble, positive way. Because dang, you get slapped down pretty quick if not, and rightly so. You know, some of those grandmas are going to come through and like, they'll let you know. And so that's been a really cool, cool part of it is that in doing this and part of this Kaupapa Māori approach is that you work with multiple people who help with the governance of your project, that help go through some of these really sticky situations and issues with you so that you're safe as a research, the community is safe so that you're not having unintended consequences come out, and so that it can all go smoothly as well. And so especially like for me, especially when we have this model and there's a big spiritual component. How to talk about that required a lot of big conversations, but how to navigate it in the right way, how to not step on people's toes, how to not reduce these really important dimensions into like four different items. And that is kind of reflected, I think, in how kind of chunky our discussion section is of our article, which we highlight some of those really important caveats, saying, This is what we mean. This is what we don't mean. We recognize these people, they're the experts and this or that. And kind of, yeah, talk about some of those really important things that you have to do really humbly when coming into this space. Um, so that's helped a lot with that. And yeah, just like recognizing that and with the authorship team as well, you know, like I started on this paper a couple of years ago, I had done my own little writing for it. but oh my God, having all these people that have come through on the authorship team collaborate, share their perspectives, their ideas, how they'll say your sentence in like half the amount of words, but way better. Like all of that just like comes together to uplift the whole process and the research to an extent that I couldn't have imagined. So of course, yeah, for me, like reflecting that, respecting that. Acknowledging all those contributions beyond just a few words in the acknowledgement section at the bottom with the authorship through having the participants names and their tribal affiliations there so that they can own their contributions was big and Doing all of that within enduring reciprocal relations with these people so that it's not a one-and-done thing and it's cool that there'll be people I've interviewed and talked to from like three years ago now, who are my friends in undergrad, that I'm still hitting up for different reasons or the internet publications still catching up with. Yeah, which is really cool. And yeah, all of this has to be done within that wider system of reciprocity and of giving and giving back. Yeah. No, awesome. Thank you for that. I wanted to move on to talking about the actual themes. So we've talked about how you collected the data, the idea of giving back who all were involved, credit to everyone. But then at the end of the day, you and your team had to narrow it down to eight themes, make a scale with limited number of questions so that it's not too long for people taking the skill as well. I was just wondering as to how you ended up choosing these themes and why eight, how, yeah, what were the eight? Maybe we can go through each one by one or something or how you plan and how you plan to encapsulate them in questions. So yeah, maybe we can talk about, yeah, the actual themes now. Yeah, well, in relation to the themes, They just kind of emerged from those items and from how people talked and what they talked about. So it was quite bottom up in that regard. But what's kind of undeniable is the influence of the well-established Māori well-being models on Māori people. So if we're talking about the Te Whare Tapa Whā model. which are for the bit of a context for the audiences done by our pioneer, our Rangatira, our chief, Sir Mason Durie, in which he articulated Māori wellbeing as a house with four walls, talking about the psychological and emotional dimension, the family dimension, the spiritual dimension, and the physical health dimension. And so just the simplicity of that incorporating those different understands has changed how Māori health has been understood, how Māori understand our own wellbeing. And then so of course some of those broader themes and dimensions were always going to kind of be there and influence it. And so some of those themes like physical health, tīnana, was inevitably in my eyes There was inevitably going to be one about Wairua, about spirituality. There was just for sure going to be something coming around to Taiiao, the natural environment and stuff like that. So there is just such a solid foundation of literature and work that has been done, which has kind of talked about those different levels and dimensions of well-being. So we expected a lot of it. And there just happened to be eight themes generated from these different items at the end of it. Yeah, so feel free to repeat your question if I missed part of it. Oh no, that's a good starting point. I just was thinking about going through each of the themes, so you gave a good kind of overview of where they come from. I also, while you were saying this, another question popped into my head, which was, You mentioned that there wasn't any real wellbeing scale, although there are many models as you've described. Is there a reason for this discrepancy? Because I feel generally if you make models for certain things and there is, and as you've described, there has been a lot of work done. Why hasn't this kind of translated into any measurable skills to kind of help with this in, you know, the public domain? Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question. There is work by Dr. Stephanie Palmer, the trailblazer, who over 20 years ago actually started the development of the first Māori wellbeing scale with her PhD. And so it's built off that work of hers for that kind of individual level psychometric one. She also wrote a really amazing paper called Māori Psychometrics, which kind of explores the now kind of like reactionary notion that anything that's quantitative can't be Maori or can't be indigenous or is just colonizer. When in reality, she talked about our ancestors navigating the Pacific, not with just oral traditions and whatever, just words, but like through actually really great complex measurement and understandings like that. And in that paper, she has a fantastic chat about how there is all that alignment and how so many of those know, sort of understandings and approaches already existed within our culture before European arrival. And then so I actually got the privilege to meet her by chance really randomly, which was really funny. Just as I was delivering a presentation to her about her own work, so I had a front of her paper on one of my slideshows and I found out that it was her and I was like... Oh my god, so cool. It's so good to meet. And she was talking about how she started the initial development, but it was just an issue of funding. And for her that she had these really great ideas, like, over 20 years ago, to do this, but struggled with, with getting the resourcing to get it off the ground and to further develop her measure. And hers initially emerged from the kind of maternal well being. after birth and how to look after Māori mums. So it wasn't as general, I don't think. And it was a bit more tailored to those experiences. But over the time as well, we've seen different sorts of measures come out. And those have come out at different levels. So the rangatira, the chief I mentioned before, Sir Mason Jury, He wrote a really amazing paper 20 years ago about measuring wellbeing and measuring Māori wellbeing. He talks about the importance of looking at it at different levels. So the individual, the whānau, the family, the community and the population level, and that we need different measures and tools, understandings at different levels and to bring them all together to properly understand. And so we have seen the development of some more around that community and population level. There's been the development of Te Kupenga, which is the national stats survey done for Māori. And so there have been like a range of little developments, but on that individual level that is like psychometrically tested, there hadn't been that. And I just think, yeah, you have to have and to be in that stats area and to have the time. And yeah, the opportunity, I guess, to do it and to work in the space, pretty niche sort of area. And there's heaps of other really amazing cool areas that people go off and research and work in, which I think understandably takes them away from like what can be boring numbers and stuff like that at times. So I think that contributes to why there hasn't been stuff like this already. There has been other... really cool quantitative work that's been happening in the Māori identity space. So yeah, it's been like, almost like a decade, maybe a decade, since the development of previous Māori identity, and I think maybe wellbeing as well, measure. But yeah, we are definitely seeing a big wave of Māori quantitative research and tools. within the social sciences of NERDGE, which is really cool. So yeah, I think there's definitely a time for it that's having a time now. I also just wanted to point out that when we say 20 years ago, it's still the 2000s. It's like 2004, 2003. So this is very new stuff in that regard. It's when we say ages ago, 20 years ago, it's not, what do you say? It's not like the 60s or 70s. This is after Finding Nemo was released 20 years ago. Love that as a time stamp. Yeah. I was also wondering when you were talking about Māori cultures also having a strong sense of measurement and stuff like that. I find it so funny that the stereotype of the indigenous person tends to be, you know, like they get all their answers from the moon spirit or something like that. But like, no, it's a little more complicated than that. You know, these are also human beings who had to navigate the seas and build things and invent things. And obviously that's... math involved and some physics involved that probably pays it to this. So I have a question which might be a slight digression, but I'm thinking, especially when you think about some of these like decolonial conversations, and there's an assumption that science as it exists right now is a Western conception. And some there are some aspects of it that are, I guess, whatever post-Enlightenment, Cartesian, binary stuff that exists. I'm kind of wondering what your thoughts are having done this whole process and having dabbled in the qualitative and the quantitative. When we keep talking about Western science, how much of it really is Western? Well, I think that's a really great point to hit on bro. And I think that's one that's kind of not really well understood by a lot of people. And they'll say, oh, it's this and that, kind of forgetting, you know, where our numerals come from and where our systems of counting come from, like ancient England, they come from the Middle East. And they come from all these other sources. And I think, yeah, what I always like to say is that Western science is not about like kind of where it came from, but it's kind of saying which worldviews and systems are dominating its dissemination, production, and prioritizing and stuff. And so there, if you have some time after, there's been some real spicy racist conversations that have happened in New Zealand around the inclusion of Māori knowledge within the curriculum, around what counts as science, what doesn't. which has got to do with a lot of old white men being a bit protective of what they think is science, what can count, whose methods are valued and valuable. But what I think is really cool and what I like is this idea of working at the interface of different knowledge systems and ways of being and working. So this is what... our Māori scholars have talked about for a while now, pre-Finding Nemo, about working at that kind of interface, about just going and using different tools for the betterment of our peoples. And the importance of when you're doing that, having them both prioritized and valued to the same amount, so you're not just doing like... psychometrics with a sprinkle of like culture on it with a few Māori words, but yeah, it's like deeply engaging with it and looking at those different like fundamental assumptions and priorities kind of navigating that and So yeah, there's heaps of really great work people from our university people like Ocean Mercier Who have written amazing stuff? About working at that interface and yeah, it is complex Our knowledge systems are complex and are super intricate and well designed. And just for everyone else to kind of know, before we started recording, we were talking about the amazing depth of knowledge of indigenous peoples that say still live out in the jungles and stuff, and their understandings of different mushrooms and whatever. From a Māori perspective, we have a system of organizing these different things in the environment and different interactions. And it all comes under this concept called Whakapapa, and Whakapapa meaning to layer on each other. It's also the word for genealogy. So when I talked about at the start of my introduction, I link genealogy like, I link my ancestral links are to this different place. And then so within that Whakapapa framework, genealogy and Aotearoa, our ancestors organized the entire known world within one giant cosmological family tree. And so it's saying that we have all these different species of mushrooms or sweet potatoes and they all came from this one person through this story. But through those stories, they contain, you know, which one's good, which one's bad, which It will contain some stories about there around the morals and explaining interactions between certain things. And so that's what I think is really cool is when we can take that critical look at our own stories and we can look at it as all of this codified wisdom and knowledge that is just there for us to learn from and to take into apply to our current day endeavors and research and projects. Yeah, yeah, there's some cool stuff there. Search up fucka papa. That's awesome. That's really, really awesome. And thank you for that answer. I kind of want to pick it two strands of what we were discussing. You talked a little bit about now this layering of knowledge, the whakapapa and the idea of like, working with I'm also thinking earlier when you talk about how one of the metrics you have in your scale is a relationship to the land. I'm wondering what does that look like in this context? Where does it sit in the whakapapa? How does it vary amongst the different Māori people? What exactly does it look like in terms of people's relationship to the non-human, more than human world? Yeah, that's a really great question. If we go back to our creation stories, we look at the separation of Ranginui, the sky father, and Papatuanuku, the earth mother and in them some of our Primordial ancestors coming apart emerging from within them and them being different aspects of the environment So you have for say Tāwhirimātea who is the Atua the deity of the wind, Tangaroa, the deity of the ocean, a whole bunch of them. And then so from that whakapapa approach, we can trace through and look at the different generations that have come. And actually, in some people, and in some traditions, can link their genealogy from now up to them. So you have that thing of this is the line of descent. in which we actually come from these people. So there is a very spiritual connection that comes from that and knowing and understanding that. There is the... When we talk about where we fuck a popper too, when we introduce ourselves, we often start off with which ocean, which river, which mountain do you affiliate with, which is those different areas that sustained the wellbeing of your ancestors and even your family today. So even the everyday interactions of saying and introducing yourself, that connection to the land and those different parts of land and land features. are really important. And then like I mentioned at the start, or maybe before we started recording, about the urbanization of Māori and the huge and rapid cultural disconnection that happened when Māori moved from rural aspects of where they or rural places where they traditionally stayed into the cities for work, came that big severance of that connection between the land, between those places that they came from. And then so there are, you know, of course, huge populations of urban Māori that are disconnected. Um, and so that's another interesting kind of dynamic to have in there about relationships with the land, because for some people they'll be like, oh yeah, this is my land. I've been there. I know that like the back of my hand, then there's others that have been like, Oh, I don't actually know where my family's land is from. I don't know which tribe I'm from. Um. And so, yeah, that issue of land can be difficult for different people. And that speaks to what we talk about as they're being diverse Māori realities for all these different reasons. And then another cool thing is that, as I mentioned, there are those different atua, those deities, where some people talk about them being personifications of different domains of the environment. So from some Māori spiritual perspectives, connecting spiritually involves going to those different domains. And so for a lot of Māori, spiritual connection and sustenance comes from the environment. It comes from being in the bush and all those different places. So that's why it got its whole own theme. Because yeah, people talked about how much wellbeing they get from. engaging in those activities in those different domains and areas. So yeah, a real special, close relationship with the land and with the natural environment and that here for a lot of Māori in Aotearoa. You did touch upon this a little bit right now and I'm also linking it back to one of your co-authors on the paper, Ririwai Fox when he came on. He spoke about cultural embeddedness and you did mention that for many historical reasons, the cultural ties or the cultural journey is very different among different Māori people with Māori whakapapa. I wanted to ask how hard is it to encapsulate that in your scale just coming back to the practical measurement side of things because we're talking about people with completely diverse backgrounds I said some can track their lineage to land others can't some can track the lineage back all the way to atua to different atua so yeah could you tell me how you kind of accounted for that or does the scale account for it? I feel it's a very hard thing to do in this regard when you're making wellbeing skills. Yeah, nah, excellent point. That has been probably the hardest thing to try to think about and to account for in this whole process. It was a huge thing that we had to talk about with the model. Um, but what it came down to is that this has to be like just from the get go. It has to say that this model, you know, first and foremost is descriptive and not prescriptive. It's to say that you have your own unique experiences. You've had different opportunities to connect to these different things and aspects of the world. And so therefore, if you're not, you know, if in your seed stage for these different things and this aspect, um, but it doesn't actually mean a lot to you. And it's not that important for your wellbeing. then that's an important thing that people can actually can say and can have a little bit of autonomy over saying. So yeah, saying that just because you don't have, just because connection to the Maori language isn't important to you now, doesn't mean you're not well as a Maori person. And thinking about how we do that and feeling of connection and the measurement thing is another interesting part we've had to consider. And I guess we're taking that strength. based approach and thinking about this measure as more of sources of well-being for people than it's saying that even if you don't feel connected at the moment or even though it doesn't play a big role for you now, it's always there for you if you do choose to engage in it. And it can be a source of well-being for you. So that doesn't mean that... So yeah, the Low scores does not mean you're unwell. It can mean a whole lot of things. And then, yeah, we're going to have to have some chats about how we can, you know, maybe do some weightings or things like that to. Yeah, account for some of those differences and experience and differences and values and stuff, but yeah, huge, huge thing. And I guess, yeah, accessibility was our biggest concern first and foremost. And so getting that into the way we design questions, how we make those constable, those concepts accessible and have a bit of a working understanding for them in the measure was a huge part of that. Um, yeah. No, very good. Yeah, that has to be one of the hardest things. Because when your granddad came on as well and spoke about the Anglo-Indian background, and we discussed about this a bit before we came on as well, that kind of idea of being something different due to either cultural mixes, due to colonialism, or due to being segregated while in the country. your Dr. Richard Johnson, when he came on and spoke about it, said that he wasn't allowed to speak Hindi or in Kolkata, so Bengali growing up, he had to only speak English. That kind of takes away from a certain part of the thing. And it doesn't mean that his well-being is necessarily worse off. It's just that particular aspect of measurement does not necessarily apply. Yeah, 100%. Really important. really important. Because yeah, the last thing we want to do is like, have people experience that double marginalization. And for us to say that, oh, you're not this enough, because you know, you haven't had these opportunities. And Ririwai's work around multicultural embeddedness, which focuses on those opportunities that you've had, I think is just so critical for settler colonialism, all those histories are just like... You know, under everything and not so much. Yeah, and also, I mean, I'm just wondering and thinking that I can't speak for the for the for the Māoris, but as a Tamil person, I don't speak Tamil. And that's been something that's always sort of bothered me in Tamil. People are very, very sensitive to the language, speaking the language very French like in that way. But the sense is, I mean, I'm also thinking that None of these identities are static, right? Like there is no inherent Māori-ness. Like the identity itself is also growing. And perhaps those of us that can't relate linguistically and find other ways to sort of relate to the culture, whether it's through food or song or ancestry or land, I think it just, and the evolution of that land in those relationships, I think it just goes to show that we may just be those people that are expanding what it means to be whatever, Māori, Tamil, Hyderabadi, Kiwi, whatever that means. And I think that's in some ways reassuring. I mean, if you want to have a growth mentality about yourself, you've got to have a growth mentality about your cultural ethnic identity too in some ways. I guess the question on that front is in your engagements with with all of these interviews, I'm guessing this is a question that's come up a lot. How do you balance this question of tradition with Māori-ness and the question of growth and at the same time also the question of being an individual and being part of a community? Yeah, that's a really good question. That idea is talked about a lot. And what I think can often be like in unhelpful ways, some of this idea that you have tradition and the new stuff and that they're separate and that it's ancient wisdom and we're looking at different spaces. But what we really want to emphasize and what a lot of really great Māori academics will talk about is that Mātoranga Māori, that Māori knowledge in our knowledge system, it never stopped growing and adapting. We're not a static peoples. colonization kind of had that a bit of effect where we appeared to be, you know, kind of like halted in some of our progress at one point of time. But our knowledge grows with us, our tikanga, our customs evolve with us, they grow to meet our needs as peoples to help us make our way through these different changing contexts. And so I think that those different... Can you repeat your question one more time? Yeah, I think you started to answer those questions. I'm just trying to think about the balance between being like a traditional sense of being Māori and the sort of like growth mentality of Māoriness expanding and also just you doing that as an individual and being part of the community. Yeah. So I think speaking to that is really important. The bro Ririwai, he did another really important article which talked about the paradox of being Māori. And in there, he talked about the really important distinction between being Māori and being Māori, as it's commonly understood. And so he talked about within a whakapapa sense, which is talking about if you have the ancestry, then you are Māori. But then what's the kind of paradox comes in is where you see people with the Māori ancestry behaving and living in ways that are directly contradicts and harms Māori ways of being and colonizes Māori. And so what's going on there? And that's where his work, looking at Māori cultural embeddedness, which is talking about those opportunities to engage and hold Māori beliefs, practices and values comes in. And so what that does, which is really useful and important, is that infirms that anyone with that whakapapa is Māori and there's no doubt about that but then there are just some of those things within our culture that people associate with being Māori and so that you can be both and you can be in your own different unique way and yeah I think you're so right and it's such an important thing for us to think about in general without ever evolving changing worlds. It's really amazing to see all the diversity, like my brother and I, we will identify as Mindians, Māori Indians. And there are people like us that do exist, that do navigate those different identities, that do look at different cultural obligations. There are Māori Muslims, that's a community that's growing quite fast. And so what's really important and that what I think people can often forget. is that our culture grows with us, our ways of being adapt to our needs and they serve us. We're not slaves to our old ways of being and they come and they guide us as we move forward. And so, yeah, thinking about how that changes over the next years. What does it mean to be Māori in 100 years, in 200 years is really important. It's like that, yeah, I went to a conference and someone said, what would it mean to be Māori on the moon? If you don't have the Whenua, if you don't have the land and those other things and in some of those understandings and questions I think oh, yeah, the Ririwai is on the on the on the money with his beliefs values and practices and Yeah, we're dynamic people dynamic knowledge system that will grow with us Yeah, so I hope that kind of hits a little bit of your question Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. I generally think that's a good place to end because we've been recording for an hour and a bit. But I wanted to get you to, if possible, give a brief overview of your publication because this is about publications for us to use and things. If we let you, you can give a brief rundown of your paper. We didn't even use the term apart from in the introduction when I messed it up. the name of the scale, Ngaru Roro. So I'll give you the floor and you can give a brief rundown off it for the people. And then yeah, we can do the wrap up after. All right, quick fire summary for the people. The Ngaru Roro model of Māori wellbeing, the name itself comes from my ancestral river up in Hiritonga, comes from a conversation and some stories that were passed down from my great grandfather to my great grandmother to my uncle who shared that with us talking about how the Ngaru Roro is a river that has these different interconnected streams or currents moving turbulently and that translates to Ngaru wave and Roro turbulent so it's the turbulent waters and this idea of there being these multiple dynamic interconnected streams and flows. Thought was a lovely analogy to our wellbeing. It is holistic, it involves our connections and our actions, our capacities are related to all these different parts of the world, with our culture, with the environment, with each other, with our knowledges, which comes down. The model and then what this article talks about is that we have eight different themes of our well-being. We have a context in which we're talking about multicultural disconnection due to certain colonial systems and institutions in our country. We talked about the coming together of different Maori scholars and leaders who really paved the way through the development of Kuaipapa Maori theory. and all of our building and rebuilding our indigenous institutions. Leaders like Sir Mason Jury and Rangimari and Os Pere who have come through established their fantastic Māori wellbeing models that have carried us through the past four decades, all the way through to this research in this context now today, where we're looking to measure Māori wellbeing. where we have specific needs and requirements for doing that. And what we aim to do in this paper was to talk to people in the community and ask them what's important for their wellbeing, take a nice intersubjective approach where we take those understandings back to different advisory groups, back out to the community in a second set of interviews and develop something cool and new and something else that can just be another tool. in our toolbox, really stressing that this idea and the goals of this is to be around addition and not competition. And we think that these different models and stuff can all work together and can complement each other for different contexts that they can be applied to and that we need to apply these understandings to. And we talk about here the importance of saying that wellbeing is incredibly subjective. There are diverse Māori realities and that our people are growing and changing. And we expect that our models and tools will. So even though this is a Māori wellbeing tool now, we hope that in the future, other researchers and people will develop their own tribal specific measures of Māori wellbeing so that we can take it close to that ground level and can continue this awesome legacy of work. And Yes, that is my little ramble. Didn't make a lot of sense. Thank you so much for that. Quadeek, any final thoughts? I have more than thoughts. I think I have a lot in me to absorb and process, but I just wanted to thank you for taking the time and taking us through all the nuances of your scale and really what it means and what well-being means. It's a complicated world. It's hard to be a person right now. It's hard to be well. I see you're wearing the kaffir. So I think we know where the world is sort of moving to and I think the sort of work you're doing is really important and really meaningful. And I just sort of wanted to point out without being too self-congratulatory that I'm sort of happy that there are three men sitting and talking about grief and all these things. And I hope more men start engaging with some of these fairly complicated questions. Maybe they're not that complicated, but thank you. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for having me also, Sai. It was fun to be a cohost. Always welcome. Thank you guys for listening to all the rambles. All right. Absolutely. All right, there's one last ramble you need to do. If you had to leave all our listeners with one piece of advice, what would it be? Oh, that's just a nice little quick fire ramble. Whatever you are doing in life, whatever spaces you're moving through, whatever you're accomplishing, because I know you've got cool listeners, do whatever it is with humility and with grace. Just know that there are so many amazing, incredible people out there that know so much that you have stuff to learn from. Because as we said, It's a real complicated world out there. There's a lot of stuff going on and we all have so much to learn. And so as long as we're going that and we're moving with humility and we're learning, keeping that, then we'll be all goods and hopefully the world will be a bit of a better place. So yeah, so we talk about carry forth with you when we talk about a nāko mahaki, a humble heart. I think that's a really important thing that we must do. Awesome. Thank you again, Finn. That was awesome. Thanks, Pratik. Thank you, everybody, for listening. Everybody who follows us, likes, supports us on social media and everything. Thank you so much. And until the next episode, take care.