After an afternoon sharing sacred stories of land, family and soul food, the Anglican Indigenous Leadership Initiative’s second day moved focus to the building blocks for Anglican Indigenous Leadership.

Ven Dr Hirini Kaa guided much of Tuesday’s wānanga looking at indigenous knowledge as the foundation for developing genuinely Indigenous Anglican leadership models.

Hui members took part in interactive learning activities that helped them tease out ideas collectively while building relationships, sharing korero, challenging assumptions and discussing how Indigenous worldviews might engage with the Gospel in ways that help enflesh Indigenous leadership in the church.

Archdeacon Kaa introduced the concept of mātauranga Māori as an all-encompassing worldview, system of knowledge and set of underlying values that weave through Māori tikanga, education and philosophy. He shared a video presentation that also introduced mātauranga Mihinare, the mātauranga that arises from the unique experience of the Māori Anglican Church, it’s history, its knowledge and its people.

Hui participants then examined how theological knowledge is accessed and by whom.

As an example, Dr Kaa laid out the statistics of Indigenous participation in the institutions in the North American Association of Theological Schools (ATS).

Amongst its 270 graduate theology schools with more than 38,000 students, only 262 are native or First Nation students, totalling 0.7% of students. Amongst teaching staff that gap grew even wider, with more than 2000 non-indigenous faculty, compared to four native teaching staff who make up only 0.02%.

Dr Kaa pointed out the stark reality of those numbers for anyone wanting to draw on indigenous knowledge in the existing theological education structures.

“Future theologians need to be native, they need to be hired and they need to be nurtured. But even if every theologian hired from today forward [in North America] was, in fact, native, it would still take many hundreds of years to change. So we are going to need white faculty to step up and embrace mātauranga within a framework of indigenous leadership in this knowledge space.”

Hirini then delved into the nature of tapu, explaining how in the Māori language, tapu refers to the sacredness of all beings within creation.

Hui members tested how a range of scenarios might diminish or enhance a person’s tapu, for example birth order, living on one’s ancestral land, or experiencing the loss of one’s given name.

Archbishop of Melanesia Leonard Dawea embraced the wānanga mode of learning and suggested it offered a challenge to Melanesia.

“I think we need to start writing about our local concepts and integrate them more into our theological discussion spaces.” he said.

The alternative mode of education has made Archbishop Leonard wonder too about tapping into the wisdom of the chiefs, whom he says hold the empirical knowledge of how both culture and society works.

“Our bishops are more like the Pākehā bishops focused on governance, academic theology and administration.”

For me, I want to base my leadership on the way of the Māori bishops that know both sides. It’s good to have the knowledge from the books as well and have that concept of weaving together the two.”

Afternoon sessions focused on what it means to be indigenous, and on theological reflections on leadership understood through themes of peace, joy, love, healing and humility. 

Dr Jenny Te Paa Daniel, (Te Mareikura and Interim Director of the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at Otago University) warned that Indigenous women in leadership have to navigate violent opposition, which she has tracked in recent attacks on Māori women in political leadership. As she flagged the problem, Jenny encouraged the church to promote peace by supporting female Indigenous leaders.

Professor of Systematic Theology at Candler School of Theology at Emory University, Prof Kwok Pui-Lan held up the example of two clergy who had modelled leadership of love to her, Rev Jane Wong and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and lamented where love now sits in the popular imagination.

“Today love has been so commercialised, romanticised and individualised. I want us all to think of a pedagogy of love that is beyond the captialist society and works across the three different dimensions: personal, interpersonal and institutional.What does the leadership of love look like in those three places?”

Dr Haaheo Guanson, who is Dean of Waiolaihui'ia Center for Ministry in Hawaii, recounted her personal story of joy when she received female indigenous leadership experienced as diligent care, care that demonstrated love in action as the grounding of leadership.

Rev Canon Cordelia Eaton of the Episcopal Church in Navajoland whose daily work centres on healing for Indigenous women, shared a story of leading as healing through reconnection with traditional customs – such as sitting and eating with her mother in her grandmother’s traditional Navajo mud and cedar ceremonial house (hogan) to reconnect with the blessings of her ancestors and the earth.

Archdeacon Susan Wallace wrapped up the conversation with reflections on the benefits of leadership shaped by humility, mentoring by female forbears, upskilling in governance, practising generosity in giving (manaakitanga) and the need for patience.

Guests also deliberated on what it means to be indigenous. Descriptions ran from academic statements to flowing lists of ideas to drawings of kūmara vines and rākau(trees). Definitions of what it means to be Indigenous shared the influences of land and sea, purpose within Creation, to a beautiful overview of the role of storytelling from Ven Rosalyn Rosalyn Kantlah^nta’ Elm, Six Nations Archdeacon in Canada’s Diocese of Huron.

“We are story people, people of songs, dreaming, dancing, art, connection to place,” Ven. Rosalyn said. “We cultivate a community, reflect on history, we are people of God - although we have different names for God in our languages.

We hold connections to nature, the trees, bushes, animals and medicines - our mother the sun, our grandmother the moon, and the maps given to us by the stars. Indigeneity is not a linear concept. We are ever rotating circles, travelling together.”