Hoki mai anō.
Welcome back.
Kia ora. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
What are we talking about today?
Well I thought we could talk about the office powhiri, the whakatau.
The whakatau.
In an office gathering or an office space you might be marking a particular occasion,
or maybe even the sensitive issue or someone passing away, and how that’s dealt with.
And of course, Māori have such a great deep culture in dealing with that which we can
all learn from.
So maybe we can go through some of those terms?
Yeah, let’s do that.
I think that our office kawa, protocol, is changing so much in the last couple of decades
that I’ve been working in newsrooms.
We’ve gone from nothing really ceremonial, and the old boss stands up for a speech and
then there’s silence and no one really knows quite what to say, to offices really embracing
tikanga Māori to address things like new babies, and like you say, someone passing away.
So pōwhiri is the very long version of a ceremony, and so in an office, unless you’ve
got lots of space and you’ve got lots of really amazing people who can do karanga and
the rest of it, you don’t usually have the pōwhiri.
So whakatau is a very short version of that.
You can use it for different kinds of things, and it can be long or it can be really short.
Maybe even welcoming staff back at the beginning of the new year?
That would be fantastic.
Schools do it.
They have a whakatau for the new students and the new teachers.
So if RNZ was willing we could organise a whakatau to bring in some new staff, and everyone
who’s been on holiday to bring them back in.
And that might just be that everyone comes into the staff room and I might stand up and
say ‘tēnā koutou, nau mai hoki mai, ki te tari’, welcome back from the holidays,
welcome back to the office, we’re going to have this great new year.
And if anyone wanted to respond, there might be Shannon Haunui-Thompson who wants to say
‘thank you Mihi’.
So she might stand up on the other side and say ‘thank you for your welcome back, it’s
great to be here, we’re glad to be here’.
She might even do a karakia or a waiata.
Yeah, she’ll have a little waiata that goes after her speech, which is her whaikōrero.
She wouldn’t really do a whaikōrero, she’d do a little mihi, and then she’d do a waiata,
a song, that followed it.
And then anyone else would say to them ‘kei te tuwhera tonu te papa’, ‘the floor is
still open’.
And if anyone wants to speak English, or whatever they want to speak or however they want to
do it, they can join in.
And then I would close it because it’s important that the mana comes back to the people who
started it, so I’d say ko otinga kōrero, it’s all finished, let’s have a kapū tī.
And so what we’d do then is we’d finish that off with a waiata.
Depending on where you are in the country and who’s leading your whakatau, you might
have someone from up North or someone from Waikato, it all changes.
And we’re here in Tāmaki Makaurau, so the whaikōrero would finish on my side and then
we would have a cup of tea, because food is really important.
It’s actually part of the protocol to finish off and just to make everything noa.
So ‘noa’ is not ‘tapu’.
Noa is when the tapu has been lifted.
So it’s important to have the kai to make things noa.
And we might have a lot of kai, like a feast?
We will have a hākari, a feast, definitely.
Because there’s so many great bakers here at RNZ.
We do it pretty well here at RNZ.
But before we have that, what we do normally in your experience?
We would have a karakia.
A karakia, a prayer.
To bless our food.
To make sure all those bakers have prepared their food right and it goes down well.
And we would then have a kai and probably lots of katakata, laughing, and story-telling.
Great.
Yeah.
Should we do that?
I think we should do that.
Put the proposal through.
I'll put a RNZ proposal through and see what comes of that at the end of it.