Day 54: Te Mana Ākonga

Tuesday, 24/8/10

Didn't do much. Today was the first day back to school at UH. Haha! Hoped everyone's semester started off good. But by the looks of it on their Facebooks, it didn't look good. Skyped with my Māori teacher for about 15 minutes. I am continuing my Māori 201 at Mānoa online for the remaining time I am here at Waikato. It is going to be a little challenging for me. But if in doubt, I currently live among Māori, so it should be all good. My 2 friends (Chai & Nick) are still continuing our Māori. There are about 15 students enrolled in Māori 101, so I hope it would be good for them and they continue, so that the Māori program can expand. Had our final kapa haka practice for couple hours.

I just wanted to share more about Te Mana Akonga. Information taken from www.students.org.nz <=Click for see information.

Te Mana Ākonga is the National Māori Tertiary Student Body. Arising out of the Māori protest movements of the 1970s and emerging from the national Māori student collective Ngā Toki o Aotearoa, they became an Incorporated Society in 1995 and took the name Te Mana Ākonga. For the next 9 years, Te Mana Ākonga represented the interests of Māori Student Roopū (group, association) at Universities. In 2004, the korowai of Te Mana Ākonga also came to embrace Māori students studying at Polytechnics and Colleges of Education and their interests.

Purpose

The purpose of national representation is to bring these collective interests to the table in a wide range of settings with the objective of:

making tertiary education more accessible and affordable to Māori;

improving its quality and accountability to Māori students;

changing and transforming institutional environments so that our participation can be successful;

promoting the use and education of te reo and tikanga Māori;

working with our own people, community groups and government to achieve the above goals.

Te Mana Ākonga is grounded by and asserts mana Māori motuhake and tino rangatiratanga, as reaffirmed in both the 1835 Declaration of Independence and in Te Tiriti o Waitangi. As a voice for tauira Māori that is independent of both the institutions in which we study and of government, we are able to advocate strongly for Māori and student issues and exert pressure to make real the guarantees made by the Crown to hapū in these nation-to-nation documents.

Te Mana Ākonga is the parallel body to the New Zealand University Students' Association (NZUSA). We have a Te Tiriti o Waitangi-based Memorandum of Understanding whereby each organisation recognises the autonomy of the other and strives to reflect the economic and political equity envisaged in Te Tiriti o Waitangi. While the respective memberships have many similar concerns such as rising fees and levels of student debt, being organised as two autonomous organisations allows the distinctive focuses and issues of each to be addressed.