November 15, 2012
Churchill fellowship to help share matauranga
A senior environmental advisor with Ngāi Tahu’s Toitu Te Whenua natural resources team has won a Winston Churchill Fellowship to find out how the indigenous people of Scandinavia manage their matauranga.
Takerei Norton gets $6000 to help him travel to the Sami University College in Norway and the Sami parliaments in Norway, Sweden and Finland.
He wants to learn about their methodologies for the collation, storage and dissemination of traditional Sami knowledge to their communities and the wider public.
He says it grew out of his work helping Ngāi Tahu marae to protect historic and cultural sites.
"That has led me to implementing a project recording and researching traditional knowledge associated with place names, mahinga kai, wāhi tapu and mapping this onto a tribal geographic information system that will be available for our people to use for whatever they feel is appropriate, whether it is for education or wānanga or resource consent hearings," Mr Norton says.
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