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SEARCHING FOR CLUES: DR KELLY WAIANA TIKAO
Dr Kelly Waiana Tikao (Ngāi Tahu)
AMELLIA KAPA COMMUNICATIONS ADVISOR
searching for the clues our tūpuna left behind
Taonga pūoro, oriori, karanga, karakia, rongoā; kupu that are ever so slowly weaving their way back into the discourse of maternity care in Aotearoa, but are still far from commonplace. Dr Kelly Waiana Tikao, of Ngāi Tahu descent, is dedicated to restoring these traditions, among others, to their rightful place within her iwi’s birthscape and shares her vision with Amellia Kapa.
Dr Kelly Waiana Tikao: registered nurse, māmā of five, documentary maker and researcher, plays many roles in her ultra-busy life and career. Midwife isn’t one of them, yet last year saw the completion of her doctoral thesis Raro Timu, Raro Take: Ngāi Tahu Birthing Traditions.
She attributes her interest, in part, to attending her cousin Ariana’s homebirth as a young and impressionable student nurse at her whānau papakāinga. Little did she know, the experience would spark questions in her mind that would ultimately become the focus of her academic career.
“She [Ariana] was incredibly placid and internalising a lot, so she birthed really gracefully. And that’s who she is as a person,” Kelly explains. “This baby came into the world with karakia, at home, so gently. I wondered, could it always be as powerful, placid and graceful as I’ve just witnessed? And what makes it like this?”
Even at this early stage, Kelly’s observations extended beyond the recognition that what she was witnessing was instinctive maternal behaviour. Unwittingly, she was already forging connections between empowered birth and self-determination; the kākano (seeds) were implanting. “What I saw was an example of a whānau’s desire being activated. I saw that it was a possibility - to have a birth with cultural elements and have non-Māori support it. And it was a very beautiful experience for both.”
After birthing two of her own pēpi at home and subsequently twins at the hospital, Kelly embarked on a Master of Science Communication with lived experience under her belt. Knowing she wanted to explore a Māori research topic, she decided to formally delve into the world of customary Māori birthing traditions, exploring not only what they were, but why Māori moved away from them. A short documentary, Iho – a cord between two worlds, was born and when the time came to embark on her PhD, Kelly’s pragmatic nature guided her to continue researching the topic she had become familiar with, despite its obvious challenges.
The gap in literature pertaining to wāhine Māori forced Kelly to broaden her approach to resources along the way. “I had to put on my Māori lens and ask, how did we store knowledge? They [tūpuna] must have put it somewhere, so where did they put it? And whether I was pondering this at my marae, or looking at art in my room, I suddenly realised it was right in front of me, and that the task was to find people who could help me understand what it was saying.”
And so began Kelly’s explorative journey into the creation symbolism, sequestered away in toi Māori (artworks). She describes the process as complex, but illuminating. “You’re trying to interpret the symbolism with your ‘now’ brain and trying to think of it in the context of when it was developed
or designed. Why did they place that there? What was it about the creation symbolism that they needed to impart? I constantly came back to survival and identity. Acknowledging the importance of starting well.”
This theme - of ensuring the best start to life - emerges time and again throughout Raro Timu, Raro Take, which is comprised of a literature review, interpretations of Māori art in its various forms, and qualitative interviews of Māori midwives, student midwives, artists and kaumātua.
Perhaps one of the most surprising sections to be found in Kelly’s thesis explores whe (sound) and its role in customary practices, both as a medium for the transfer of intergenerational mātauranga and a method of relaxation and pain relief for labouring wāhine. She shares the views of taonga pūoro (traditional Māori instrument) artist Richard Nunns, who iterated the importance of playing instruments such as the kōauau or pūmotomoto (two types of flute) to a growing fetus as their sense of hearing developed in utero. According to Nunns, Kelly explains, it was not only the sound these ancient instruments produced, but the vibrations they emitted through the membranes, which were of particular spiritual significance.
Diving deeper still, she includes the work of Ngāi Tahu karanga and oriori specialist Raina Sciascia, whose teachings reveal that ihirangaranga (vibrations or sound waves) were thought to be able to access stored information encoded within a child’s mind. This provides a possible explanation regarding the significance of singing oriori (lullabies) or playing taonga pūoro during a woman’s hapūtanga, labour, at the point of a pēpi’s birth, and beyond. Reciting whakapapa in this form was believed to simultaneously connect the child to both its history and future.
Even closer to home, Kelly interviewed kaumātua from her own hapū and explains the challenges were numerous, but worth the yield. “I was asking a lot of my interviewees, to think way back for any snippet, and it only came after lengthy conversations, and often after the microphone had been turned off.”
She relays one interview in particular, where her uncles initially claimed to know nothing of traditional birthing customs, but went on to recall childhood memories of their parents discussing wāhine hapū and their attendants returning to the pā with newborn babies - with no hospitals in sight. “It validated for me that similar to other hapū, we did go away to designated birthing spaces. We had birthing rocks, or birthing creeks, and that’s the evidence I was searching for, but they were so vague. It was just a whisper of a memory.”
Interpreting these whispers was all part of the process for Kelly, and what she has managed to portray quite clearly in the final product is the overarching intention behind every ritual; from pre-conception through to postpartum, every act was a conscious effort to protect the next generation and ensure the holistic wellbeing of the wahine-pēpi dyad.
Armed with a new depth of understanding, Kelly’s vision for the future is to build up the capacity within Ngāi Tahu to rejuvenate these customs through collaboration; a dream that was partly realised at a wānanga she facilitated in April. “I wanted to combine artisans with practitioners and excite both of them,” she explains. “What I realised through my thesis is that artists have similar whakaaro to health practitioners, but they use different tools to do it. By bringing the two together, you can provide a really dynamic approach to customary birthing practices that I think was always there. We can bring it back.”
Dani Gibbs, Ngāi Tahu LMC midwife, attended the wānanga and found the experience invigorating. “It was an exciting connection to make - not just with other midwives, but with artists, and seeing this amazing web of how we could actually integrate and create meaningful change.” Jay Beaumont (Ngāti Rangi, Ngāti Uenuku, Ngāti Apa), a Māori LMC midwife working in the Kaikoura area also attended the wānanga, and found the experience invaluable. “Instead of just reading that Māori have taonga pūoro artists who play instruments to relieve pain and calm women down in labour, we actually talked to the taonga pūoro artists themselves, who could then share their skills with us, and come over to provide that service for us. I think that was the beauty of it.”
The nature of wānanga encourages open discussion and naturally, the topic of an end-goal was raised, with kōrero surrounding the possibility of a kaupapa Māori birthing unit featuring. Both Kelly and Dani are in agreement that the process should unfold organically. “Do we wait until we’ve got all our ducks in a row and we’ve worked it all out?” Kelly asks. “I don’t think we’ll ever get to that point, because it’s unfurling whakaaro and knowledge, influenced by our tūpuna.”
The intention at this stage is simply to keep building capacity, she explains. “What I really want to focus on now is working with midwives and whānau out there by running these wānanga, by building up the interest first. I’m not worried about getting it done immediately, I believe we just need to build the capability by providing opportunities for expansion and learning, and when we reach a point - which we’ll recognise as a collective - we’ll know when to take the next step.”
She’s also aware that midwives are a small workforce who are already time and energy poor. “What we’d love to do is facilitate karakia wānanga, oriori wānanga. Midwives don’t need to be the instigators of these things, they just need an awareness, and if they have a particular interest in one aspect, then that might become their specialty, but they don’t need to know all of it. The tohunga of old had their specialties, and there were other tohunga in different areas, and that’s how I see we can build more of an integrated team that have shared skills.”
Dani agrees, and believes it’s not up to midwives to dictate how such a unit would be developed. “I don’t think any of us have all the answers. We’re all at different levels of understanding and confidence in te ao Māori and our birthing traditions. I think everybody will contribute to it in different ways and whānau will own it. Whānau will bring what feels right for them.”
Dani also points out that assuming whānau Māori all have the same needs is a potential pitfall. “Whānau are on their own journey, and some may not feel comfortable with all of these things at once, because it can be really confronting when you don’t understand them. It can be upsetting for some people to know these things exist, but to not have a true grasp of them,” she explains.
While the specific details of what a kaupapa Māori birthing unit might look like are unclear at this stage, Kelly explains the importance of ensuring any unit of this kind is iwi-centric in design. “It’s very hard to try and create a kaupapa Māori birthing unit that has no foundational or mana whenua attachment. It needs to be - and proudly so - attached to the rohe it’s in, with core cultural values of that iwi and hapū. However, as most urban marae work, when a whānau comes in with Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou, or other affiliations, there is a process to acknowledge that they’re coming in with their tikanga, and just like on a marae, there’ll be a pōwhiri process, so that they can be in that space expressing their whakapapa, under the ahuru mōwai of Ngāi Tahu,” she says.
And in line with the ethos underpinning midwifery, she reiterates that the ultimate goal in this mahi is to empower those receiving care. “The most important thing is you’re validating them as a Māori person, as a whānau giving birth, and validating that pēpi. With our midwives at varying levels of confidence and our whānau at varying levels too, the most important thing is to create a space that’s welcoming of all levels of ability and readiness, and to keep it as supportive as possible.”
As trying as her doctoral journey may have been at times, Kelly is a firm believer that the true gifts lie in the process, saying the real value was never in how much evidence she could collate, but in the humbling experience of searching for the clues her tūpuna left behind. “Just because it doesn’t appear as though there’s much there, it doesn’t mean it’s not worthy of research, particularly regarding our wāhine. The effort of trying to find the information on those who have little written about them is worth the process. At the end of it, with limited material, what you feel you’ve done is honoured their lives.” square
