‘Let Justice Roll Down’: Confronting Injustice in Theological Education for Māori Flourishing

Abstract

Theological education in Aotearoa New Zealand has developed within the structures of whiteness which inhibit the flourishing of indigenous students. This article employs Willie Jennings’s work, especially from After Whiteness, as an analytical frame to interpret the experience of a wahine Māori (an indigenous woman) student and her Pākehā (European) supervisor during the completion of her capstone integrative theology project at Carey Baptist College in Aotearoa. This project, which intersected Māori knowledges with theology to develop a theological account of land, unveiled the structural injustices that often prevent Māori from flourishing in theological education. We examine the historical legacy of theology's role in instituting educational injustice in Aotearoa and detail the shape this legacy takes in contemporary theological education. We reflect on our distinct experiences in the process of change undertaken to address some of the educational injustices and develop a form of assessment that enabled a Māori student to flourish as Māori.

Introduction

Willie Jennings argues that race has a Christian architecture, and Christianity in the West has a racial architecture. ¹ This article employs Jennings’s work, especially from After Whiteness, as an analytical frame to interpret the experience of a wahine Māori (an indigenous woman) student (Jordyn Rapana) and her Pākehā ² supervisor (Andrew Picard) during the completion of her capstone integrative theology project at Carey Baptist College in Aotearoa (New Zealand). This project, which intersected Māori knowledges with theology to develop a theological account of land, highlighted the structural injustices that often prevent Māori from flourishing in theological education. ³ We recount and analyse our experiences in the hope that they might encourage others to articulate their experiences as we work towards justice and human flourishing in theological education.

Jordyn's integrative project broke many moulds at Carey. Breaking is not easy, especially when what is being broken are the deeply entrenched structures of settler colonisation and whiteness. The two of us experience the structures of settler colonisation and whiteness differently. As a wahine Māori, I (Jordyn) am structured by the myth of the natural inferiority of Māori and women. As a Pākehā male, I (Andrew) am structured by the myth of the natural superiority of white men and their unearned privileges. These formations have a long legacy that remain entrenched today, and we set our different experiences during this project in the context of the whakapapa (genealogy) of settler colonisation and whiteness. In particular, we consider the whakapapa of science-engaged theology and theological education to interrogate the structures that inhibit or enhance human flourishing in theological education.

Science-Engaged Theology, Racism, and the Denial of Indigenous Flourishing

In her landmark work, Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues that the word ‘research’ is ‘probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world's vocabulary’. ⁴ Research is ‘inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism’ whose supposed objective knowledge objectifies, represents, and dehumanises indigenous peoples. ⁵

It galls us that Western researchers and intellectuals can assume to know all that it is possible to know of us, on the basis of their brief encounters with some of us. It appals us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations. It angers us when practices linked to the last century, and the centuries before that, are still employed to deny the validity of indigenous people's claim to existence, to land and territories, to the right of self-determination, to the survival of our languages and forms of cultural knowledge, to our natural resources and systems for living within our environments. ⁶

The approaches to research that gall, appall, and anger Smith are deeply entrenched within science, theology, and theological education in settler colonial contexts. Science and theology have been co-constructive forces that have prevented Māori flourishing as Māori. Any account of flourishing from within these fields must address the sedimented issues of racial injustice and consider their dismantling.

Arthur Thompson was a graduate of the University of Edinburgh, and a medical doctor who served as a surgeon in the British army in Aotearoa during the Northern wars. As the conflicts subsided, Thompson was free to research Māori and write about his findings. In his 1859 work, The Story of New Zealand: Past and Present, Savage and Civilized, Thompson included a chapter on ‘Physical Form, Disfigurations, Language, Mental Faculties, and Character of New Zealanders’. ⁷ In this chapter, he contrasted what he called the two characters of Māori. One was an acquired character formed in relation to European missionaries and traders, and the other a natural character formed in relation with other Māori. These characters, Thompson argued, must be described in relation to ‘the higher faculties of the mind’. ⁸ Thompson drew upon the insights of phrenology, which was a prominent science at the time, to reinforce his predetermined racial hierarchy that held Māori at one end of the scale and Pākehā at the other. As proof, he compared the quantity of millet seed that a Māori skull could contain with the quantity an English skull could hold.

It was ascertained, by weighing the quantity of millet seed skulls contained and by measurements with tapes and compasses, that New Zealanders’ heads are smaller than the heads of Englishmen, consequently the New Zealanders are inferior to the English in mental capacity. This comparative smallness of the brain is produced by neglecting to exercise the higher faculties of the mind, for as muscles shrink from want of use, it is only natural that generations of mental indolence should lessen the size of brains. In support of this inference, intelligent travellers have already detected that the heads of the negro race in the United States are becoming more developed from the intellectual career they are now pursuing. ⁹

Thompson was not especially fervent about Christianity, yet he employed ranging insights from scripture, missionary records, and Christian theo-logics to uphold his racial science. ‘The civilising influence and blessings which Christianity has conferred on New Zealand cannot be weighed in the scales of the market. Like musk in a room, it has communicated a portion of its fragrance to everything in the country’. ¹⁰ The credit for Christianity's influence was due to the missionaries, and Thompson noted that Samuel Marsden, the pioneer Church Mission Society (CMS) missionary, has left a name which all admire, but few can rival. Just as religious people gave greater glory to the name of Gregory than Caesar for the conquest of Britain, so too will the religious class esteem Marsden more highly than Captain James Cook. ¹¹

Whilst Marsden held Māori to be noble savages, his understanding of racial hierarchies owed much to racial science. He employed the insights of phrenology to authorise his racist views of indigenous Australians.

If the New Zealander stands highest in the scale of savage nature, the native Australian occupies perhaps the lowest place. So low, indeed, was their intellect rated, that when the phrenological system of Drs. Gall and Spurzheim began to occupy attention, some forty years ago, the skulls of several of them were sent over to England to be submitted to the manipulations of its professors, with a view of ascertaining whether the Creator had not thrust into existence a whole race of idiots—men who had neither reason to guide them on the one hand, nor well-developed instinct on the other. ¹²

In the nineteenth century, phrenology was regarded as an important scientific endeavour. Popular Science published reports that phrenological insights into head-types were useful for selecting professions, and some employers requested phrenological profiles for their workers. ¹³ Collecting and comparing the different shapes of skulls, especially the skulls of different races, provided supposed empirical evidence that reinforced a racial hierarchy which positioned whiteness as the goal. Phrenology has long since been debunked as pseudo-science. ¹⁴ It is now proven that there is no correspondence between skull curvature and brain function. ¹⁵ Yet phrenology, and the wider work of racialised science, was very influential, and, as Terence Keel details, it developed in collaboration with Christian theology. ¹⁶ Discussions of human flourishing from the perspective of science-engaged theology sit within this whakapapa and must reckon with the legacy of racism to which it contributed.

In his work on Orientalism, Edward Said argues that we must think critically about the nature of authority and power. Authority and power are not natural, nor are they mysterious. They have histories, statuses, they have canons of taste and value, and ideas of what is true. These form traditions, perceptions, and judgments that are then shaped, transmitted, and reproduced. Such arrangements can, and must, be analysed. ¹⁷ We cannot, Said urges, seriously understand ideas, cultures, and histories without also studying their force and their configurations of power. ¹⁸ The preceding section highlights an aspect of the history of science-engaged theology and its structuring power. What follows details some of the history of mission schooling and theology's role in structuring educational injustice in Aotearoa.

Theology, Whiteness, and the Structuring of Educational Injustice in Aotearoa

In his recent analysis of theological education, Jennings highlights its longstanding affair with the white colonial imagination. ¹⁹ Theological education has not reckoned sufficiently with its fusion with whiteness that entrenched the myths of white supremacy, and indigenous inferiority, into the institutions of education and theological education in colonial contexts. ‘Theology was there at the very foundations of the formation of western educational institutions in both the colonies of the new world and the metropoles of the old world’. ²⁰ The admixture of theology and British imperialism ordered education towards the formation of the white self-sufficient man, the paterfamilias, whose identity is marked by control, mastery, and possession. It also set the indigenous other under the colonial gaze and its evaluation, born of whiteness, which deemed there was nothing to learn from indigenous peoples, only instruction, exorcism, and eradication of anything that appeared different or strange. ²¹

In the context of Aotearoa, mission schools were the first sites of British education, and are the structural beginnings of British education in Aotearoa. Before detailing our experiences in Jordyn's integrative project, we want to explore the beginnings of theology's fusion with whiteness in mission schooling that entrenched educational injustice for Māori and bequeathed this legacy to the sector in general, and theological education in particular. Examining this fusion and its legacy helps to interpret the issues we encountered personally and structurally during the project and the ways in which theological education conspires against Māori flourishing as Māori. As Jennings argues, ‘we Christians created a problem that we are obligated to address’. ²² Addressing this problem begins with understanding its whakapapa.

Establishing mission schools ‘among the heathen’ was a key strategy of British missionary societies to extract children from the polluting influence of their heathen homes and train them in the knowledge of Christianity and civilisation. ²³ This strategy was co-constructed with the British government, many of whom were Christians with strong connections to missionary societies and believed in the importance of missionaries as imperial educationalists. ²⁴ Writing from a Māori perspective, Ranginui Walker holds that the Anglican missionaries who came to Aotearoa were ‘the advance party of cultural invasion’, and their mission schools were predicated on the notions of racial and cultural superiority that sought to convert Māori from barbarism to British civilisation. ²⁵

The first site of Christian theological education in Aotearoa was Thomas Kendall's mission school at Hohi. It was established following Ruatara's ²⁶ request to Samuel Marsden for a school to educate children in the skills of reading and writing. Education, civilisation, and evangelism were basically synonymous in the school. Learning to read and write meant learning to read and write Christian scripture, catechisms, prayers, and hymns in te reo Māori (the Māori language). Whilst the language was Māori, Ani Mikaere stresses that the ideas were European and asserted the myth of the natural inferiority of Māori and the natural superiority of Pākehā. ²⁷ Education and conversion were out of Māori (and heathen) ways of knowing and being and into British (and Christian) ways of knowing and being. ²⁸ Whilst Marsden believed Māori were a noble race, he also believed British education would provide Māori a vital source of relief ‘from the influence which Satan exercises over their minds’. ²⁹ For his part, Kendall believed that education would raise Māori from the deplorable state of barbarity and superstition in which Satan held them captive. ³⁰ As Jennings observes, the posture was critical, always critical, and ‘too many peoples never got the chance to do the discerning work before everything was shattered into pieces’. ³¹

Kendall gave himself to the study of Māori culture and customs in order that he might find ways of converting Māori to Christianity and Britishness. He wrote to Thomas Hassall, a fellow missionary educator in Australia, describing his understanding of the nature of the work. ‘I have taken hold of the dirty cart ropes and dirty cart wheels of their abominations; have been shewn, as it were, the secret lurking place of Satan, which I trust through mercy I shall yet be enabled to expose’. ³² In missionary strategy, education was not limited to the school. All forms of British life were understood as pedagogical, and every encounter provided opportunity to convert Māori into British customs, culture, and Christianity. ³³

The mission was badly under-resourced and wracked by divisions, rivalries, and bitter feuds among the missionaries. In the wake of his wife's infidelities, and the breakdown of the mission, Kendall became increasingly isolated and sought solace among Māori. He moved to live in a Māori pā (village), and became close friends with Hongi Hika, the powerful Ngāpuhi leader. He learnt Māori tikanga (customs), waiata (songs), and sacred knowledges, became fluent in te reo Māori and engaged in a sexual relationship with a Māori woman. Alison Jones and Kuni Jenkins suggest that Kendall's openness to learning from Māori made him, rather than the students, the star graduate of the school. ³⁴ But this was not Kendall's view. In fact, his nearness to Māori and his increasing knowledge of Māori culture and customs became the source of embarrassment and greater self-loathing. Kendall eventually confessed his infidelities, and blamed Satan for his fall. Kendall's sense of sin was not only of the flesh, but, as Judith Binney maintains, also an attraction to the Māori world. ‘All their notions are metaphysical and I have been so poisoned with the apparent sublimity of their ideas, that I have been almost completely turned from a Christian to a Heathen’. ³⁵ For his part, Marsden was scandalised by Kendall's sexual liaisons, but he was also outraged by Kendall succumbing to heathen influences. Kendall's ‘mind has become greatly polluted [sic] by studying the abominations of the Heathens, and his Ideas are very heathenish’. ³⁶ Education was designed so that knowledge and learning flowed in one direction: from superior British Christianity to the inferior Māori heathenism, and not the other way around.

Mikaere highlights that the mythological assumptions of the natural inferiority of Māori, and the natural superiority of Pākehā, were turned into educational practice, policies, and reality that remain entrenched in the sedimented structures of education, and her analysis can be extended to theological education. ³⁷ Jennings observes the impact of such institution building in theological education, and asserts that this work of institution building has not reckoned with its deep embeddedness with cultivating white male self-sufficiency. He utilises an image of plantation worship in South Carolina in which slaves are at worship amidst the oppressive presence of the slave master and his household codes. The image of the racial paterfamilias as the organising centre of the household system of the slave plantation haunts theological education in the Western world and its pedagogical formation. ³⁸ ‘We theological educators have never reckoned sufficiently with the racial character of institutional life in the colonial West, and because of this failed reckoning we have never fully understood how distorted has been our work of building’. ³⁹ The issue is not simply a single practice or behaviour, but the building of an institution that is energised by whiteness and shaped towards the racial paterfamilias. ⁴⁰ Attending to the racial paterfamilias requires attending to, and even destroying, our buildings—not just our architecture, but our educational structures, pedagogical technologies, and scholastic edifices.

On the walls of the first school, Kendall hung portraits of William Wilberforce, Lord Gambier, a robed King George, paintings of Adam and Eve, Christ, and various London landscapes. These were pedagogical technologies that spoke of a white male world. For more than twenty years, I (Andrew) have studied and worked in theological education at two theological colleges in Aotearoa that have each been in existence for nearly 100 years. At various times over the last twenty years, both colleges had photo portraits of the principals hanging on the walls. All of the portraits were of white males. This is not a comment on the principals, many of whom I know personally, it is a comment on the structures of theological education and how they form us. ⁴¹ Our aspirations at institution building are displayed in the required and recommended readings that steer the student's gaze; library resources; guest lecturers; diversity of faculty; lecturer's bookshelves; bibliographies; chapel sermons; PowerPoint quotations; meal tables; classroom design; and the (in)validation of particular knowledges. The whakapapa of the racial paterfamilias that orders theological education extends back to Kendall's school, missionary societies, the British government, and beyond, and shapes theological formation today. In the following reflection on Jordyn's integrative theological research project, we imagine education within these structures as a vase, a very colonial British vase. The oddity of the image will, we hope, become clear. To maintain our distinct, yet shared, experiences as a Māori student and a Pākehā supervisor, we will distinguish our perspectives where necessary.

(Dis)Integrative Theology and Educational Injustice

My (Jordyn) journey with Carey Baptist College began in 2014 in response to a call I felt from God toward theological study and to mission and ministry in Aotearoa—particularly to indigenous communities. I quickly learned that Carey was not designed for me, a wahine Māori. I learned that upon the completion of my degree, I would be equipped to engage and lead in mission and ministry in Pākehā Baptist churches, but not in Māori communities and certainly not in Māori ways, customs or spaces. I was not the only one who learned this. Another wahine Māori studying at Carey felt the same struggle. Whilst I got by because English was my first language, her first language was te reo Māori and she struggled to feel at home at Carey. Within the design of Carey, a theological institution in Aotearoa, there was no space for her to thrive as a Māori speaker engaging with theology, and, sadly, she left.

As an undergraduate student, who was barely wrapping my brain around the language of systematics and exegesis, I knew this was an injustice. Although I had positive relationships with staff, who were always supportive and open to help, there was an existing undercurrent that discouraged me from thriving as a wahine Māori. It was implicit in the curriculum, assessments, the physical set up of the buildings and classrooms, the resources, and the lack of diversity of the staff and leadership of the college. In Jennings’s parlance, Carey was preparing and equipping me to emerge from the degree programme as a white self-sufficient male. The problem was, for obvious reasons, I was never going to be able to fulfil any of those descriptors.

In response to the injustice of not being able to flourish as a Māori speaker at a theological institution in Aotearoa, I wanted to push back. If I cannot flourish in my indigenous language at a theological institution on my indigenous lands, there is nowhere else in the world I can flourish. There is no place in the world for me. At the time, I did not have the depth of knowledge and research to detail the extent of these structural injustices. But I knew this system, these borders and boundaries around my learning, felt intentional. It certainly felt calculated that in order to flourish in the Carey space, I would need to stop thinking and speaking as a wahine Māori.

We use the image of a vase to describe the order-building project of colonised Christianity that organises theological education. We fully understand that a vase seems odd and out of place in this context. But that is wholly the point. This system, or vase, does not emerge from our context in Aotearoa, it did not grow from this soil. This decorative vase would be made from the coloniser's whenua (land), rather than being formed from the whenua of Aotearoa, and kept in colonial homes as a homely object to admire.

Imported knowledges or ways of being are not, in and of themselves, oppressive. Tainui tūpuna wahine (female ancestor from Waikato) Whakaotirangi brought kumara (sweet potato) to Aotearoa on the Tainui waka (canoe) and established a kumara garden in Kāwhia. What we import must be tested in the land and the soil, in the context, to ensure that it is life giving. This can be measured by the cost of sustainability. The cost of sustaining the growth of kumara is time and energy spent learning, in depth, the soil and the context. It requires learning the rhythms and seasons of the environment as part of the skill of gardening. A colonial vase, as an imported object, symbolises the displacement of these systems. The external form, contours, borders, and art of this vase are imprinted with the values and ideals of colonial knowledges and ways of being. The vase allows flowers from anywhere to flourish, even those that do not come from the soil of this land. But they can only flourish for a limited time before they wither and die. If the vase is an image of the building of theological education, the cost of sustaining this system is my indigenous identity, my language, my knowledges and ways of knowing, and my histories which come from the soil. The cost of sustaining these imported colonial structures is me.

In approaching the integrative project, I initially discussed writing it fully in te reo Māori with Andrew. Carey agreed to the importance of me being able to write in te reo Māori, and Andrew began investigating processes for how this might be done within the existing assessment. What I thought might be a simple form of resistance and a practice of mana motuhake (self-determination and cultural sovereignty) brought with it far wider implications as the depth of theology's entanglement with whiteness was revealed. At the time, we had no idea that this decision would be the start of an upheaval that revealed the entrenched and calcified designs of colonisation within the college.

What was immediately made visible to us were the arrangements that gave no pathway to creating, researching, presenting, and assessing this kind of project in a way that was culturally safe for Māori and upheld academic integrity. It felt like there was a consistent compromise: either uphold cultural integrity or uphold academic standards. We had to forge a new pathway, as a form of mana motuhake, and push against the systems that were not allowing indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing to thrive in theology. Central to this resistance was centring Māori knowledges and ways of knowing and allowing them to shape the project. ⁴² In his contribution to a symposium on Jennings's After Whiteness, Anthony Reddie observes that ‘[whiteness] operates as an overarching construct that assumes a central place in all epistemological and cultural forms of production, thereby relegating other positions or perspectives to that status of “other”’. ⁴³

Halfway through Jordyn's integrative theological research project, Dr Sandy Kerr joined the Carey staff team as Kaiārahi-Rangahau Māori (Māori research guide) and brought her experience as a kaupapa (theme/topic) Māori researcher. Sandy joined us as a co-supervisor in the project, and together we drew on our different experiences, knowledges, and networks to devise a pathway for Jordyn's project, and its assessment, that tried to uphold mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledges and ways of knowing) and kaupapa Māori. Throughout this experience we had to try and break the vase without knowing what we were forming in its place. A critical approach to history, or theological education, may unveil and dismiss some of the structures, but as Tuhiwai Smith notes, ‘it does not make them go away, nor does the critique necessarily offer the alternatives’. ⁴⁴ In his account of institutional formation in theological education, Jennings maintains that God sometimes takes our building, and our breaking, and draws our work of building into the building of God. Sometimes this takes the shape of joining God in building, but it also includes breaking, tearing down, or even abandoning what we have built towards death so that we may follow God in building towards life. ⁴⁵ Rebuilding, tearing down, or leaving are equally valid actions in overcoming the building of the racial paterfamilias.

Resistance, Mana Motuhake, and the Journey towards Educational Justice

Jordyn's integrative research was a development of a Māori theology of land, for which there were a lack of theological resources. Whilst there were resources on theology and land, as well as commentaries on Genesis (the textual focus of the project), Carey did not have resources that addressed these questions in a unified way. It was not necessarily that these resources did not exist, but they were not in Carey's sphere of resource. The questions I (Jordyn) was asking were quite specific to Māori contexts, particularly in the small town of Pukekohe where I lived at the time—a town where racial segregation existed into the 1960s. ⁴⁶ I was investigating the correlation between the land and the people of the land, their histories, their experiences, and the impacts of those experiences. As a third-year undergraduate student, I had learned that academic resources meant books, chapters, and journal articles. But as a Māori, I knew that our knowledges were held in stories with people, and that mātauranga was shared through relationship and wānanga (relational conversations).

As I sat with Māori kuia (older Māori women) who shared stories with me and helped with the work of translation, I felt like I had to sacrifice ‘valid’ knowledge in order to prioritise Māori knowledge. Māori knowledges and ways of knowing are vastly different to the institution of academic theology. Not only that, but the knowledges within whakataukī (proverbial statements), which the kuia taught me, hold implicit knowledges that can only be understood through a Māori lens. I was not sure these were going to be understood by the markers or how to translate them into writing in a way that did justice to the depths of their meanings. In a conscious decision for mana motuhake, I chose to break the vase and prioritise Māori knowledges. I chose to forgo a potentially good grade to uphold and prioritise indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing.

Upholding the knowledges and ways of knowing Jordyn had received required a change in the form and function of the assessment. As Jordyn's research was being shaped through kōrero (speaking) and wānanga in which the kuia shared their mātauranga, Sandy suggested that the mode of delivering this research also needed to be through kōrero to avoid doing violence to the knowledge. What began as a request to write in te reo Māori evolved into the need for an oral presentation to uphold the integrity of the mātauranaga. The pathways to deliver an assessment orally in te reo Māori were not established at Carey at the time, so there was a need to tear down and rebuild. Sandy and Andrew researched how kōrero presentations are assessed in other institutions but found few examples that aligned with this integrative project. Instead, Sandy designed an assessment process that sought to uphold mātauranga Māori (traditional Māori knowledges) and tikanga Māori (Māori practices and values derived from Māori knowledges) as well as Carey's assessment guidelines and marking rubrics, which were then approved by the academic committee.

At the heart of this journey of resistance were relationships of trust across our differences and amidst the unequal power structures of theological education. There is, as Jennings states, a need to centre gathering, joining, and communion, but our imagination is diseased by the exchange networks of colonial communion in which the white paterfamilias uses people as transactional commodities. Dismantling colonial communion requires us to address the social fabric on which our relationships form. It is the social fabric that ‘deserves much more attention and reflection first for the ways it has been deformed—creating the illusion that we are only actually connected by choice—and second for the ways it may be remade, making possible a reality of intimacy, communication, reciprocity, and mutuality that builds from a deepening sense of connection’. ⁴⁷ Theological education is concerned with the formation of people in relationship, and such formation does not discriminate between teacher or student. In the project, we were all learners and it was through a commitment to learning together in relationships that changes were made. Such an approach captures the Māori concept of ako (reciprocal learning and teaching) in which all teachers are learners and all learners are teachers.

Sandy brought with her a wealth of research expertise as a specialist in kaupapa Māori methodology and qualitative research. Her presence as a co-supervisor introduced us to the work of Linda Tuhiwai Smith and kaupapa Māori research methodology. This was groundbreaking for Jordyn's integrative work, and Carey as a theological college. It validated Jordyn's research and prioritised Māori knowledges and ways of knowing as an academically sound methodology and challenged the unjust structures of theological education. The work of resistance pushed the borders open, it broke the arrangements around us that only upheld colonial knowledges and ways of knowing. It opened up the resource pool and began a journey of us all having to be learners alongside each other. We had to commit to moving forward with this integrative project with an unknowingness and openness to learning. We were committed to forming a space that would allow Jordyn to flourish as a wahine Māori doing theology without yet knowing how we were going to do that. We did not have a clear path ahead for doing theology among the shards of the broken vase.

Doing Theology among the Broken Shards of Colonisation

Doing theology among the broken shards of colonisation requires us to build from different sources, and to build when we do not know what we are building. In our experience, it forced us to centre our relationships and the politics of those relationships within the whakapapa of colonisation. As the integrative project took shape and Māori knowledge was prioritised, I (Jordyn) felt confident in my research and it was the most empowering assessment I accomplished in my undergraduate degree. Ray Totorewa, a Māori Baptist leader and te reo Māori speaker, wove the event together based on tīkanga Māori. Instead of throwing open the doors for all to attend Jordyn's presentation, Sandy and Andrew asked that the presentation be limited to her whānau, iwi (tribal group), and those involved in the project. The knowledge shared was sacred to Māori, and it was not Carey's decision to determine who heard it. As I stood to deliver the assessment orally in te reo, I was surrounded by the interviewees, the women who contributed so much to my research and the work of translation. My family was there to support me and our mātauranga a iwi (knowledges of our tribal group). My Samoan grandmother was able to witness the assessment, and the collective spirit in the room felt exactly right for the place and context. This could have only happened in Aotearoa: a Māori student, delivering a kōrero presentation in te reo Māori for assessment in a theological institution. It felt momentous. It felt like justice was finally playing out in a way that encouraged my flourishing as a wahine Māori. For the first time at Carey Baptist College, I experienced the potential for indigenous flourishing in a theological space.

For Māori to flourish in theological education, there are significant issues of structured power and injustice that Pākehā must address. There is not space in this article to explore the wide range of related issues, but what follows is a consideration of the politics of knowledge in theological education. As we constructed a way to do this assessment that valued Māori knowledges, I (Andrew) had to consider the politics, limits, and boundaries of my knowledge. From her experience co-teaching with Kuni Jenkins, Alison Jones notes that whilst Pākehā affirm an interest in cross-cultural learning, they often react with anger when they must learn from Māori and Pasifika lecturers and engage with different knowledges. Such reactivity comes from the Pākehā experience of ignorance about Māori knowledges and the realisation that some things are out of one's grasp. ⁴⁸ Such ignorance highlights the boundaries and limits of Pākehā knowledge and challenges the will to mastery. In the experience of Jones and Jenkins, some of the Pākehā students refused to engage with the learning, and preferred a passion for ignorance. The passion for ignorance, Jones argues, is not simply the refusal to transgress cross-cultural boundaries, but the refusal of boundaries. There is a deep belief that all things are knowable for Pākehā, or should be so. The not-known is understood as the not-yet-known, rather than being unknowable. Any glimpse of the unknowable threatens the will to mastery of the autonomous Pākehā subject. A passion for ignorance refers, therefore, not simply to a Pākehā lack of knowledge, but the denial of ignorance. ⁴⁹

People ignore what is inconvenient or traumatic. Georgina Tuari Stewart extends Jones's work on a passion for ignorance in relation to the colonial myth of the inferiority of Māori knowledge. Stewart employs insights from agnotology (the study of ignorance) and argues that agnotology requires an acceptance of the politicised, historicised, and biased nature of Western epistemology and its logics.

The problem seems to be the claim philosophy makes to the laws of logic, which are universal in the natural world and human cognition, but utterly dependent on meta-theories, which have invariably been Eurocentric/White, for being elaborated and applied in domains centred on practice, such as education [and theology]. Whiteness is woven into dominant thought through the enormously complex relationships between the basic laws of logic + science, and their application to human society through fields such as education [and theology]. ⁵⁰

She asks: can Pākehā teachers recognise the politicised basis of the knowledge we teach in school, or, more pointedly, in theological education? Can Pākehā embrace the discomfort of being confronted by the educational injustices that theology created and structured into reality? These challenges are not addressed by the Pākehā fantasy that desires unity-through-knowing. Protecting Pākehā from their ignorance may protect Māori from Pākehā anger and reactivity, but it comes at the cost of confronting Pākehā myth-making and redemptive strategies that fail to address the unjust systems embedded in theological education. ⁵¹

In place of knowingness, Jones suggests the productive possibilities of not-knowing in a relational context. The desire to learn, understand, and know the other risks another transactional assertion for mastery by the racial paterfamilias. Rather than the desire to master the other, not-knowingness acknowledges the other can never finally be known. This requires that Pākehā adopt the politics of disappointment in such work, which embraces the uncertainty that shapes all forms of knowing and understanding the other. ⁵² What is required is an apophatic relationality that maintains the necessary ignorance required for the other to remain other. ‘This ignorance of the other is productive because it demands the ongoing openness of intersubjective relationality as the primary form of knowing and being known. What is needed is not a redemptive solution that homogenises the otherness of Māori and Pākehā, but a commitment to engage in the relational struggle of otherness-in-relation’. ⁵³ For me (Andrew), this meant stepping aside and embracing the position of a learner in a Māori process that I did not control. I was the student, and Jordyn, Sandy, Ray, and other Māori led us on a journey towards greater faithfulness to God, one another, and the knowledges encountered.

Once the integrative project was delivered, we had to think through how it would be marked. The disintegrating impact of colonisation became clearer as we realised there was no one person who could grade the work. Some had skills in theology, others in te reo Māori, or mātauranga Māori, or kaupapa Māori, but no one had all these knowledges. Colonisation had smashed these knowledges into pieces, and we had to work among the broken shards. Jordyn's integrative project made theology among the shards as difficult as it ought to be. Assessing the research required a broad range of people with different knowledges to engage in kōrero and wānanga in person and online. Some were translators, some were mātauranga interpreters, some upheld kaupapa Māori methods, some were theologians, and all were involved in an ongoing kōrero. When it came to giving the final grade, Jordyn, Sandy, Ray, and Andrew met in a marae (sacred Māori meeting house) and engaged in wānanga to consider the feedback given by those involved and determine a grade. But grading was a blunt instrument that could not capture the learning we had all encountered throughout the year. Carey's smaller size enabled us to be agile, but it was a long and complex process to develop a bespoke form of research, delivery, and assessment. This process highlighted the educational injustices that are entrenched in theological education and it opened the door for future changes for the sake of Māori flourishing in theology.

I (Jordyn) went on from my undergraduate degree to a full year of te reo Māori immersion, and I have continued to be a learner. I am now a teacher of te reo Māori, and a lecturer at Carey, as well as working through my postgraduate studies. I am much more equipped for the journey at Carey, and Carey has undergone much change in the time since. ⁵⁴ Working among the shards takes time. It takes time and sacrifice for indigenous people to reclaim knowledges, identity, and language, and even so, there is still a sense of unknowingness for the way ahead because everything must be up for discussion. Are we rebuilding with the shards? Are we leaving the rubble completely? What are the other possibilities? Where are the places that these calcified structures are still present in our institution? Confronting the racial paterfamilias means that everything must be up for discussion.

In the last ten years there has been a substantial growth of Māori students and staff at Carey. With this growth, Sandy reminded us to consider how Māori energies are being used and who benefits from them. Are they used to satisfy Pākehā cries for help in facing issues of racism that Māori did not create? Are Māori expending their energies educating Pākehā on Māori perspectives about theology, land, or love? Or are Māori being encouraged to reclaim their language, knowledges, and relationships and enabled to construct education and training that benefits Māori students in Māori spaces? There is plenty of heavy lifting that Pākehā can do without Māori needing to be in the room. We sit together differently among the broken shards of colonisation.

Since this integrative project, Carey has been working among the shards, building and tearing down. Māori are now involved at every level of the organisation as students, professional staff, lecturers, management, and governance. The presence of Māori staff and students have reformed and reshaped many aspects of Carey. The pedagogical issues that were addressed during Jordyn's integrative project gave permission for further creativity in assessments. It is now quite common for students to submit cultural artefacts like mōteatea (chant) composition, haka (sacred dance/performance), and taiaha (carved wooden staff/weapon) as valid products of integrative theological research and knowledge. Carey now has a compulsory first year te ao Māori class, in which every undergraduate student is required to participate. A course in the history of the gospel in Aotearoa has also been developed, and its impact was such that students petitioned the principal to have the English and Māori versions of te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi) as the wallpaper for the main classrooms. In wider structural changes, there has been the development of Ngā Pou Amorangi, a Māori leadership training track, that equips Māori students for pastoral care, leadership, ministry, and mission in Māori contexts. Level 1 and 2 te reo Māori language classes are offered as a resource for language learners. Staff have undergone training in te reo and te ao Māori in Māori spaces that have forged and extended relationships with Māori beyond the college.

There have also been important changes to the physical space, including the development of Te Whare Oranga (the house of wellbeing and eternal life) that provides a Māori learning space at the heart of the college for hui (gathering), wānanga, and classes—a learning space that is oriented differently to the usual lecture rooms. Recently, eight new whakairo (carvings) panels designed by Peneamine Werohia were unveiled. The whakairo use traditional Māori designs to tell the story of Carey and the values that shape us. ⁵⁵ They stand at the heart of the college, and connect the wharekai (dining hall), Te Whare Oranga, and the whare karakia (house of prayer/chapel). And yet, Carey has not arrived. The long story of educational injustice in theology means that there is much that remains in need of renewal, and there are still many sources of pain. Working in the shards means there are regular splinters and cuts. But we have centred whakawhanaungatanga (becoming family together) and the quality of relationships amidst our complex history as the basis of our theological formation, pedagogy, and theological method. It is in and through these relations that we keep ourselves accountable to God and one another as an act of discipleship in the land.

Carey's te Tiriti hikoi (treaty journey) moves at the pace of power. Currently, the college's leadership sees an urgency and importance for this journey. But if the leadership changed tomorrow, would we still be on this pathway? The journey, as Sandy often says, is always fragile for Māori. It relies upon Pākehā who want to do this journey. Our te Tiriti hikoi is always optional for Pāhekā, but it is not for Māori who must function in the Māori world and the Pākehā world. Any green shoots that appear remain as fragile green shoots. We have not arrived. We are still working in the rubble, trying to do theology among the shattered shards we have inherited from the structures of whiteness and colonisation.

Kia Whatatōmuri te Haere Whakamua: Walking Backwards into the Future

Recent archaeological excavations at the Hohi mission station have uncovered Kendall's first mission school. ⁵⁶ Among the archaeological fragments, they have found slate pencils, tablets, beads, fish hooks, and toys. Archaeologists found 607 shards of ceramic at the Hohi mission site, the large bulk of which was earthenware. Among the shards of earthenware found were fragments from decorative vases. ⁵⁷ These vases adorned the missionaries’ homes and provide physical evidence for our metaphor. Ian Smith, one of the project leaders, notes that what is striking in this civilising mission is the lack of material representations of Māori culture or artefacts. ‘Indeed, one of the most striking features of the artefacts is that they are almost exclusively made from imported material’. ⁵⁸ Indigenous materials make up only 0.77 per cent of the total number of artefacts found. The Hohi investigators note, ‘The material world of the mission was predominantly an imported one, despite the political world around it being predominantly indigenous’. ⁵⁹ Moreover, food remains show a scarcity of indigenous animals such as fish or native birds. Instead, 67 per cent of the remains were pig, with a handful of cattle, sheep, and chicken bones. Smith concludes, ‘For the missionaries, Māori living and working at Hohi, and those who visited, there can have been no doubt that this was a Pākehā settlement and different from the Māori world into which it had been placed’. ⁶⁰ The flow of knowledge and culture at this first site of Christian theological education clearly moved in one direction: from Pākehā to Māori, and not the other way around.

In their dig, investigators were surprised to find the remains of a small traditional Māori whare (house) within the bounds of the mission station. Dating of the whare suggests it was erected on the site after the mission station was abandoned. When later missionaries visited the abandoned site, they found carvings depicting a dead child and a lizard, which is often a symbol of death or a sign of a religious tohunga (priest). Smith argues that given the missionaries’ rejection of Māori religious practices and their disdain for such carvings, it seems unlikely the missionaries would have allowed this building to exist within their settlement. ⁶¹ More likely, it seems, is that after the missionaries left, Māori reclaimed this space into the Māori world and erected the building. At the first site of British theological education in Aotearoa, there are remains from te ao Pākehā (the Pākehā world) and te ao Māori (the Māori world), but the structures of colonisation and whiteness prohibited their co-existence.

The vases found at Hohi were made from colonial soils at a time when there was no Māori pottery tradition. The image of the vase opens windows to a potentially different future. Sandy Kerr, now working as a potter, suggests that the shards offer us a metaphor in which the colonial fragments may still be useful. ⁶² Over time, the old ceramic pieces from the whenua of the coloniser are ground down so that they no longer retain their shape or integrity. As the colonial structures are ground down, they can become grog ⁶³ that in turn is integrated into a local clay body, providing strength for the creation of brand-new vessels. They can be used to form a mosaic or rearranged with other broken pieces to make something entirely different. Or, perhaps drawing from the Japanese art of kintsugi, the old and new fragments can be joined together with gold, to create something similar to the old without attempting to disguise the breakages. As we sit among the broken shards we have inherited, we want to explore how these two worlds might differ, mingle, dialogue, disagree, co-create, and flourish in this whenua with God.