Māori consultant Te Wehi Wright to run two Treaty workshops in Wellington

Te Wehi Wright will share a Waitangi Day tradition with workshops in Wellington.

Senior Māori cultural consultant Te Wehi Wright and his whānau will share a Waitangi Day tradition with whānau based in Wellington.

‘Te Tiriti and I’ is a series of workshops leading up to Waitangi Day to educate about te Tiriti o Waitangi. This year they’ve decided to open these workshops to the public due to the current increase of misinformation and give context to how the Treaty relates to our daily lives.

Wright says as a child, he and his siblings never knew Waitangi Day was a public holiday as they were constantly learning about Waitangi Day in their kura on those days.

He says the most rewarding part is seeing how the context these workshops give people, has a flow-on effect for transformational change in their lives.

Te Wehi Wright will run two workshops on the Treaty of Waitangi for interested people in Wellington. Photo / Supplied

“They [people attending the wānanga] are constantly looking for, not blame, but there’s a lot of guilt or there’s a lot of animosity or an anxiety and not knowing where to direct that, and so part of the kōrero is going digging in a little bit deep just to say, you know, a lot of our people, they’re exactly how they were intended to turn out. They are the successful products of assimilation and colonisation, that has come through deliberate acts and legislation put by the Crown and successive years for over 180 years,” Wright told Waatea.News.Com.

“That context is almost like a lightbulb moment for a lot of whānau and it’s quite empowering. Because it gives them a lot of comfort and closure, knowing that it wasn’t their parents’ fault that they didn’t speak Māori to them. It’s not their fault that for some reason, they didn’t just go out and they feel anxiety in those te reo Māori classes because what we’re trying to do is deprogramme ourselves through over 150 years of colonisation and strategic acts to make us the way that we are now.”

The first workshop is: Getting a greater understanding of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and how it relates to us today (wānanga/workshop style) – January 24 (full immersion reo Māori) from 6pm-8pm and the second: Learning waiata for and about Te Tiriti o Waitangi. – Sunday, January 28 – 3pm – 5.30pm.

The workshops will be held at Te Kura Kaupapa Māori ō Ngā Mokopuna in Seatoun.

Waatea.News.Com