Building mana from the moana: Rangatahi dive for big moments and life lessons as well as kai

For us it is health, it’s just not a Western or clinical view of health

The programme was lifechanging for the boys and potentially life-saving

Fiona Cassie backgrounds a unique discovery journey for rangatahi Māori of Wairarapa

Taking home kai moana you caught yourself, and sharing it with whānau.

No longer regarding police as the enemy but a possible career path after meeting an officer with a story that reflects your own.

These are some of the big moments experienced by Wairarapa rangatahi taking part in a pilot programme teaching cultural and life skills through the sea and diving, says the programme’s kaitiaki Dalkeith Matiaha (Ngāti Kahungunu ki Wairarapa, Ngā Puhi).

These experiences are not easily measured in clinical outcomes, Mr Matiaha says, but are central to the kaupapa of Hi Ika, a programme with a holistic approach to health and wellbeing.

Six at-risk teenagers took part in the 12-week Tū Ora Compass-funded pilot earlier this year. The feedback from their schools and whānau has been unbelievably positive, he says. Boys diligently filled in workbooks, turned up rain or shine, and put in the hard mahi to not only learn to dive but take steps towards meeting goals, such as getting their driver’s licence. They had previously been seen as boys who “don’t do that sort of stuff”.

Hi Ika is the brainchild of Mr Matiaha, who started diving as a child off the Wairarapa coast.

After many years in Australia, he returned about 10 years ago to his turangawaewae wanting to use his love of the moana, diving and fishing to help others bridge the cultural disconnect he’d felt as a young man.

The first step was founding the volunteer dive crew Brothaz of Tangaroa, with a kaupapa of helping people grow and learn through diving.

“All Māori who whakapapa to the Wairarapa in some shape or form, whakapapa to the coast,” says Mr Matiaha. So he and the crew took people back to the sea and taught fishing and diving practices to help reconnect them with traditional Māori knowledge and values. Such as the kaitiakitanga values of sustainability and guardianship of moana resources, and the caring and kindness of manaakitanga.

“Another one of our values is kotahitanga, the collective action as a whānau of doing things together. And lastly whānaungatanga, building relationships and connections.”

Funded from their own pockets, the crew’s programme wasn’t structured but they found re-establishing cultural connection “a good base point of healing” for people going through mental health, addiction, trauma or cultural disconnect issues.

“Over the last eight years we’ve started seeing really awesome outcomes,” Mr Matiaha says. “It’s been creating leaders and those leaders go back into their whānau and communities and share with friends and whānau.”

Mr Matiaha began discussing with Tū Ora population health team leader Rawiri Blundell how the crew’s kaupapa might fit into the health system.

“Because for us it is health, it’s just not a Western or clinical view of health,” he says.

Mr Blundell says integrating an indigenous world view of health into a mainstream PHO had its challenges. But Tū Ora backed the approach and just over a year ago took on Mr Matiaha as part of the population health team to design Hi Ika.

The programme’s aim is to help young Māori men in their transition to adulthood using the sea as a platform for learning and growing skills of everyday life.

The initial intake drew six high-needs or high-risk rangatahi aged 14 to 17 from across Wairarapa; four were still in school.

Boys whose engagement with school had often been poor were motivated to get up in the early hours. At the Masterton pool they delved into their whakapapa and learned breathing, snorkelling and water safety.

They made their own diving weights from scrap lead donated alongside other gear by the local community. “It was important for me to teach these boys that nothing is just given to us,” says Mr Matiaha. “We have to work to get the things we want.” The idea was also to teach about giving back.

So the programme ended with the boys gathering pāua, kina and crayfish and giving a proportion to the community that supported them.

Mr Matiaha says all the boys are whakapapa Māori but none had a clear understanding of their lineage: “They lacked confidence in talking about it or in fact anything ao Māori because of their level of knowledge.”

The programme opened them up to “pūrākau, karakia, discovering and building pepeha, kawa/tikanga and traditions practised by our tipuna” and ended with the boys regaining mana and being proud to be Māori.

Sessions on the course involved fishery officers, commercial dive operators and police divers. This aimed to teach pathways to getting “mahi that aligns to the sea”, says Mr Matiaha. It was also important to him that they meet Māori role models they could relate to.

“Before these boys came onto the programme they saw [police and fishery officers] as the enemy,” he says. Most had had bad experiences with police.

But a local police sergeant whom the boys met on the course had come from a whānau of gang members and had grown up with drug raids. “Suddenly these boys thought…he’s just like me.”

The next day, the boys visited the police national dive squad base and spent the rest of the week “fizzing”, Mr Matiaha says.

“These boys are thinking for the first time in their lives, ‘I’d love to be a police officer’ or ‘I’d like to be a fishery officer’,” he says.

All the rangatahi “smashed” their immediate goals of completing their workbooks and gaining skills in diving, tikanga and their own whakapapa.

Other goals ranged from the shortterm achievable, such as creating a CV, to “crazy out the gate” goals they thought they’d probably never achieve.

Most have achieved their short-term goals, including better grades that improve their career prospects, part-time jobs and, in one case, changing his mind about quitting school.

Their “crazy” goals include travelling the world, diving the Mariana Trench or owning a home. These are now seen as achievable, Mr Matiaha says, if they follow a process and take the right steps.

Mr Matiaha and Mr Blundell say the programme was life-changing for the boys and potentially life-saving in a region with a high youth suicide rate.

Three of the boys lost a friend to suicide in May with the tangi held the day before the programme’s graduation ceremony. “That’s enough to derail anyone…it speaks volumes that these kids did what was expected of them, to finish up our pilot’s kaupapa, by all still coming to graduation,” says Mr Matiaha

Mr Blundell says all the boys completed the programme because of the whakapapa and connections built in a learning environment conducive to them as rangatahi and as Māori.

“I think the boys also realised that we do have skin in the game with them,” says Mr Blundell. “And our commitment didn’t just finish at 3pm when the course finished.”

The Hi Ika team keeps in regular touch with the boys to help them keep on track with their goals.

“And if the boys have got a passion for the moana, they’ve always got access to coming out with the crew, continuing their growth in the sea, the kaupapa itself…they are all part of that now through Hi Ika.”