TE KAUPAPA

Whānau Ora With, Against, and Beyond the State is a historical research project that seeks to understand how Māori have held to their aspirations for whānau ora while engaging with the twentieth-century welfare state. It has been supported by the Marsden Fund Council, from government funding administered by the Royal Society of New Zealand. 

Much of the history in this project will be told through the stories of women, children and their families who directly faced Maori welfare policy – whether early generations of nurses, mid-century welfare reformists, or the families of children taken into care from the 1970s. So, although researching government and other archives is part of this project, whānau voices are central. They both reframe and re-contextualise current disjointed accounts of Māori people as either hapless victims or resistant recipients of state-provided services. In doing so, the project aims to understand the changing contexts in which Māori worked with, against, or autonomously beyond the reach of the state in order to maintain or improve the wellbeing of their children and whānau.