Puke Ahu: articulating a place-based, university campus identity

ABSTRACT

Universities in Aotearoa New Zealand are public institutions established on lands purchased or acquired by government since 1869. As particular sites in the built landscape, they each carry a history and geography. A project at Massey University’s Wellington campus seeks to open-up diverse identifications with the ‘place’ of the campus and has produced resources, established fora, and built relationships that differently recognise aspects of place and identity. The Pākehā authors reflect on the theoretical frameworks that have influenced their work on the project including geography, critical pedagogy, and discourse theory. As Pākehā academics engaging with the indigenous history of the land through which they work, the authors discuss the implications of this knowledge and the difficulties and responsibilities of working in a project that seeks emancipatory outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• University
• place-based
• critical pedagogy
• geography
• discourse theory
• treaty-based
• Treaty of Waitangi

Introduction

Universities in Aotearoa New Zealand are public institutions established on public lands purchased or acquired by government since 1869. As particular sites in the built landscape of the cities and towns in which they are set, they each carry a history and geography that is not always obvious to the present day staff and students who occupy the buildings. The histories of these universities reflect the relatively recent influences of Anglo-European colonisation in Aotearoa. Their location, in what are now cities, points to direct connections with indigenous settlements. Colonial cities were established in the prime locations indicated by harbours and navigable rivers that had also served local Māori. While it is perhaps more common for public institutions like city or regional councils to acknowledge the importance of place in defining and identifying their jurisdictions (Auckland City Council 2010), it is less common for individual workplaces to do so. After all, people do not make their ‘homes’ or their ‘selves’ at work. Or perhaps they do? Or perhaps they could, in more conscious and deliberate ways, if there was a different sense of what their work ‘place’ comprised? In Aotearoa New Zealand this acknowledgement of the colonial history of the places in which we work can be seen as part of our commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, which is regarded as the founding document of Aotearoa New Zealand. Te Tiriti was signed in 1840 between some Māori iwi, or tribes, in Aotearoa New Zealand and the British Crown, and established principles for guiding Māori and Crown relations.

The authors are two Pākehā academics, part of a working group of Massey University staff who have contributed to the Puke Ahu Initiative: a project aimed at producing and facilitating teaching, learning, and research opportunities that explore the stories of the Wellington campus from pre-colonial times to the present day. The group has helped create teaching and learning resources that may be used in different disciplinary contexts as stimuli for projects, activities, and group actions and has developed relationships with a wide range of external organisations including local schools, local government, and non-government organisations. To date, the initiative’s website (Puke Ahu: campus identity initiative 2015) hosts an archaeology report, a cultural impact report, a photo gallery, a place-based anthology of waiata, poems, essays, and fiction about Pukeahu, and catalogues a list of available resources connected to Puke Ahu. The initiative contributes to Massey University’s Living Lab platform (Living Labs at Massey University 2015) as an example of a collaborative, research and innovation space and was awarded a Strategic Innovation Fund Grant in 2013. This paper describes the experiences of two of the Pākehā staff in the initial stages of the campus identity project.

In the summer of 2012, one of the authors read Ihimaera’s (2011) The Parihaka Woman over the end of year break and was confronted with the realisation that Ihimaera’s narrated fictive history was also intimately bound to the campus. This confrontation with unknown history was later discussed with a Māori colleague. It was not new knowledge for him: rather it was a bitingly familiar family history. The awareness raised through this conversational moment was the re-realisation of ‘absent’ and ‘differently experienced’ histories and this, in turn, produced a desire to create opportunities for more staff and students (both Māori and Pākehā) to be able identify more strongly with the campus through engaging with its ‘place’. Gavala and Flett’s (2005) earlier Massey University research on the Manawatu campus confirmed initial assumptions that a university campus which explicitly supported Māori student identity could lead to increased Māori student well-being and motivation. And we assumed that highlighting history could enhance engagement across spaces of belonging. Rather than experience ‘paralysis’ (Tolich 2002), in the face of expressing our response to the challenge of our ignorance about our own history we sought to initiate a project that could help us identify cultural meanings beyond our own immediate knowledge.

The ‘campus identity project’ that resulted had four aims, to: establish a steering group of staff and students who shared and supported the idea and were prepared to act; develop a digital archive of historical and contemporary artefacts that communicated about the site; identify and facilitate teaching and learning activities relevant to the site to be enfolded in existing curricula; and develop scholarly and creative activity amongst staff and students that reflected the aims of the project including possibilities for campus pathways and signage. A Kaitiaki Roopu/steering group was formed with staff representatives from across the campus. The cross-disciplinary and across the institution collaboration has generated unanticipated opportunities for new ideas to emerge.

Background to the place

History identifies Kupe and his people as the discoverers of Wellington harbour around 950 CE, and Tara, and his son, Tautoke who travelled south from the Mahia peninsula as the name givers to not only the harbour, Te Whanganui a Tara (the great harbour of Tara), but also Puke Ahu, the small hill at the south end of the inner coast. From Kupe through to the Wakefield settlement of British colonists, Māori iwi and hapu travelled through, fought over and settled in and around the strategic location of Puke Ahu. It straddled routes to the fisheries of the southern coasts, the secure island fortress of Te Motu Kairangi (Miramar Peninsula that was originally an island accessible only at low tide), and the kainga (food gardens) around the area now known as Adelaide Road. While little has been documented about pre-European occupation of the site, there are suggestions that Puke Ahu may have been a strategic or sacred site close to kainga and pa sites (Raukura Consultants 2010).

An online commentary suggests the early tribal groups associated with Wellington and Puke Ahu were Ngai Tara and Ngati Ira with other iwi such as Ngati Kahungunu, Ngai Tahu, Muaupoko, Rangitāne and Ngati Mamoe. By the nineteenth century, however, iwi migration from Taranaki and Kawhia bought Ngati Toa, Ngati Ruanui, Taranaki, Ngati Tama, Tainui and Te Atiawa into the region (Great Harbour Gateway). A complex geography of inter-iwi contact, settlement, cultivation, warfare and trade amongst Māori preceded any European engagement in the area.

When British colonists arrived under the 1839 Wakefield settlement an extensive land purchase alienated many Māori from traditional lands in exchange for the set aside of one tenth of the overall body land sold ‘in addition to retaining their pa sites, kainga, cultivations and mahinga kai  … reserved by … the New Zealand Company … and held in trust by them for the future benefit of the said chiefs, their families, and their heirs for ever’ (Tekau Māori n.d.). In 1840, parts of Puke Ahu, or Cook’s Mount, as it was renamed, was set aside as one such ‘native reserve’ or ‘tenth’ for Māori. However, it was subsequently deemed to have strategic significance and was reappropriated for colonial use. There have been two prisons, military barracks and a brickworks on the site. The prison was used to house some of the Parihaka prisoners in 1879 (O’Keeffe 2014). These were Māori involved in passive resistance against the incursions of white settlers onto Māori lands in the Taranaki area. The area is now an educational precinct with New Zealand’s national war memorial adjacent to the new national war memorial park opened in 2015.

Becoming enmeshed in this project as a kind of phronetic social science (Clegg et al. 2014) meant that we needed to reflect, not just on what we could know about the site, but to clarify our own values and interests and uncover power relations held in the site and in our approach to the ‘sense of place’ that was our implicit focus.

In the following three sections of the paper, we set out some of the theoretical frameworks that are informing our thinking about the importance of place in relation to campus identity. The first section deals with geographies from a humanist standpoint, while the second examines ideas relating to critical pedagogies of place. The concluding section surfaces the postmodern ideas of pluralities of place and the open and contingent nature of identity building.

Geographies of space and place

The Puke Ahu initiative aims to create opportunities for deeper connections to space and place. Concepts of place and space (and scale) are, in the language of geography, core to how we understand location, distribution, pattern, and spatial interaction between peoples and their environments. Sack (1997), in his influential humanist book Homo Geographicus offers one, very western, set of ideas about how we might begin to consider Puke Ahu as a ‘place’ of relationality connected to our identities as citizens, scholars, and workers. Sack’s humanism has appeal in the context of this project as he integrates notions of axes and forces: things epistemological and things ontological that are bound ‘in place’. For Sack, ‘human agents are the primary place-makers, both as individuals and as members of collectives’ but ‘agency neither presupposes a completely unconstrained, autonomous actor nor privileges consensus and cooperation over resistance and conflict’ (Sack, cited in Entrikin & Tepple 2006, p. 35).

Epistemically, Sack (1997) argues, we distance ourselves from awareness of both the material world and the partiality of individual sensibilities of that world, as we move out and along trajectories of abstraction connected to aesthetic, moral or discursive modes of awareness. What we move out from, in the pursuit of abstract idealisations, are what he calls ‘the realms of force’ relating to nature, meaning, and social relations. In Sack’s terms, space is a physical property and is invoked by the natural sciences through the tropes of the natural, biophysical world. Place, on the other hand, is both physical and cultural in its effects and, furthermore, place and self are mutually constitutive. Place is not merely a container or a location, but is agentic: ‘Place is a force helping to constitute the self’ (p. 253) and is connective.

The modern university is archetypically a ‘thin’, ‘porous’ and often ‘empty’ place. It is partitioned, segmented, specialised and governed by an ‘exquisitely detailed set of rules, regulations, and customary practices’ (Sack 1997, p. 9). The challenge of partial and porous places is to recognise the ways they constrain and enable our identity and belonging. If the university is a ‘thin’ place in which we partially live our lives, how then do we make place matter? In an attempt to make identifications with a bicultural university, at least from Pākehā perspectives, we need to ‘thicken’ the space – make place that is deeply connected to its histories, its topographies, its stories of habitation and use.

One potential approach to thickening space is to acknowledge geographies and histories in order to better recognise the materiality of the spaces through which we order ourselves. Rochberg-Halton (1981, cited in Nippert-Eng 1996/2008) suggests that:

Men and women make order in their selves  … by creating and then interacting with the material world  … the things that surround us are inseperable from who we are  … they constitute the framework of experience that gives order to our otherwise shapeless selves. (p. 35)

One perspective on Puke Ahu’s history is that it begins with trees. The pre-habitation landscape seemingly comprised dense forests of matai, rimu, kahikatea, miro, totara, maire, kowhai with a dense understorey of creepers, ferns. A shoreline, far closer to the hill than now, would have supported tussocks, harakeke, sedges and tii kouka. Visible waterways demarcated the hill on either side, and the hill itself would have been at least 30 m higher than it currently is: the hill was artificially lowered twice in the latter nineteenth century to aid construction of barracks (O’Keeffe 2014). Thickening the geography and biogeography is more challenging than much of the human histories and these will require different archaeologies to realise our understandings of how the memories of trees, forest, ngahere and streams continue to order ourselves.

The present day artefacts of ‘plantings’ on the site are complex orderings of colonial and post-colonial influences. Endemic species rub branches with introduced indigenous flora alongside European, Asian and North American imports: tii kouka, pohutukawa, cherry, camelia, birch and oak rise as decorative isolates from lawns and tarmac. These emplaced, thin plantings loop us back to the absence of the primeval forest.

A second ordering is taking place through the work of Māori scholars. Morris Te Whiti Love (Te Atiawa, Taranaki, Ngati Ruanui), Chair of the Wellington Tenths Trust and author of the ‘Cultural Impact Report: Massey University’ is currently doing more detailed research on the material and spiritual significance of Puke Ahu from a Māori perspective – or, more specifically, from Te Atiawa, Taranaki perspectives. According to Love, it is possible in earlier times it was neither a kainga nor a pa, but simply an ‘ahu’ – a spiritual place (M. Love pers. comm. 2014). Sack (1997) acknowledges that ethnicity and gender ‘affect the very conception of self’ (p. 127) and points to a number of ways in which ideas of the self are generated through place including the idea that someone can be ‘born of this place, and it served as their womb’ (p. 138) and where ‘place and self are fused and conflated’ (p. 136). For Māori, Puke Ahu is already a thick place in which oral traditions remember the landscape as ‘part of memory … that must remember everything about itself and its practices’ (p. 136).

O’Keeffe’s (2014) ‘Puke Ahu Archaeology’, opens possibilities for interrogating the subsequent settler records as it allows us to look at the cadastral and ideological ‘remaking’ that occurred and re-occurred when the ‘Cooks Mount’ was originally set aside as one of the 10ths (the 10% of Wellington’s town acres set aside for ‘native reserves’). The evidence points to the strategic remaking of the tenths land, first as a barracks and then a gaol and then a barracks again, all under a special grant to the Ordnance Department; and then to its remaking as a technical school and the Dominion Museum; and finally to its present incarnation as an educational precinct supporting Massey University’s Wellington campus, Wellington High School, the Polyhigh early childhood centre and, connected across the valley and Adelaide Road, St Marks, Wellington College, and Wellington East Girls’ College on the flanks of Te Matairangi or Mt Victoria with Mt Cook primary school nearby on Tory Street. This archaeology has the potential to thicken our sense of Puke Ahu as a settler place. The geographies of colonisation are laid out in the construction of a trade weighted town: the maps, the grids of streets, and in the purposing of the general location for defence and strategic advantage.

From this vantage, it is possible to consider the extent to which the place is constituted by the geographies of moral orders that Sack (1997, p. 193) identifies: truth, justice, and the natural. Discussion of the Puke Ahu as a spiritual site, a strategic locale, or a colonised space allows us to search for meanings of ourselves in place in an active, rather than passive sense.

As a spiritual site it can be invested in ideas of the natural – as a place whose mana or wairua could or should be restored; as a place, in Sack’s (1997) terms that ‘will remain when we are gone, and its underlying forces are there now, beneath or behind the artifice of culture’ (p. 203). As a strategic locale it challenges our sense of justice: it was a prison, a barracks, a memorial to war on occupied land. The fringe of pohutukawa trees symbolise both the blood of sacrifice and the colonists’ need for what Agnew (2011, p. 319) describes as ‘social rootedness and landscape continuity’ – some symbolic representation of Christian Christmas holly in a tree offering red flowers in December. Its colonially present past invokes, for the settler inhabitants, the materiality of recognisable objects: buildings of brick and stone, museum halls of Chinese and English patterned crockery, taxidermied birds. Such belief in facticity underpinned the geographies of truth espoused by the university: the belief in science, deduction and objectivity.

The presence of such moral geographies contributes a further ordering to the selves who inhabit the current university and, in part, the Puke Ahu project sought to bring these affective realms of force to our collective attention. However, the intellectual and embodied snare nestled in the heart of humanist geographies is the presumption of intrinsic value in abstract conceptualisations of place. Sack is not immune to this valorisation of the abstract, indeed, his thesis depends on it. So, having conjured the possibility that the Puke Ahu project gives staff and student access to a knowable history and a tangible identity connected to their sensibilities of this place, we now take a more critical turn, hinged, still on the concept of thickness.

Critical pedagogy of place

Bowers (2008) offers a useful critique of any conflation of ‘critical pedagogy’ with ‘place-based education’. He does this by invoking Geertz’s anthropological exposition of ‘thick description’ in which:

Thick description involves challenging the abstractions that carry forward past misconceptions, prejudices, silences and stereotypes that are encoded in metaphors such as decolonization, critical inquiry, emancipation, individualism, tradition, woman, planetary citizen, American, Canadian, British, Muslim and so forth. (p. 330)

In our work, therefore, for this project, we were challenged not only with how we might go about articulating, or encouraging articulations of the campus as a ‘thick’ space, but also what strategies would ensure that ‘thick descriptions’ of the place were mobilised. While we saw one of our main tasks as ‘facilitating meaningful relationships to place’ (Tuck et al. 2014, p. 14), we acknowledged that it was not up to us to manage or determine what meaningful relationships to the place might be, but to offer forums, teaching resources, events and activities to develop these; opportunities that have not generally been previously available. Thus, while Gruenewald (2003) stated that critical pedagogy of place is needed so that people can be challenged to reflect on their relationship to their cultural and ecological environment, we wanted also to mediate processes which engaged staff and students in the process of thick description that would lead to more meaningful relationships and communication between different groups on campus (Bowers 2008).

Thus, we have been careful to acknowledge that ‘spaces’ are ‘always under construction’ (Massey 2005, p. 9), and that relationships to Puke Ahu were already happening around us, without our involvement. We decided it was not up to us to necessarily challenge others’ relationship with place, as Gruenewald (2003) describes, but to provide more opportunities for identifications to occur and for these to be recognised in different, and perhaps more public ways than before. We also acknowledged that, as staff, we were in relatively powerful positions in determining ‘semi-official’ identifications with the place in that we were continually making discursive decisions about how we articulated the project. Therefore, albeit unwittingly, we could be seen to be legitimising and delegitimising particular identifications with the place. Such challenges are a welcome and necessary part of a project that sets out to reveal and unfold place, identity, relationality and learning.

Despite these caveats, support for the idea of place-based education on campus came from different quarters and more enthusiastically than we had first imagined. Most staff we spoke to indicated interest in the resources produced, collated, and disseminated through the online site by the kaitiaki roopu (steering group). The initial resources included O’Keeffe’s (2014) archaeology report, Raukura Consultants’ (2010) cultural impact report, and the archival image gallery of photographs of the area. These resources have been extended to include six Heritage Reports (Wellington City Council) on specific historic buildings, 13 additional online resources from a range of authors and perspectives, and an introductory resource for students that is included in their orientation package. Two major creative projects undertaken under the auspices of the Puke Ahu campus identity project now include the commission for the Massey University Jubilee sculpture commission, Poutaha undertaken by Sopelemalama Filipe Tohi and Pukeahu: an exploratory anthology (Horrocks et al. 2015).

In less than a year there were 13 either completed or proposed specific teaching/research uses of Puke Ahu resources, and by the end of the second year two significant creative projects had been completed. Funding is available for a further project to embody elements from the anthology in a ‘past to future pathway’ that would give further presence to the Puke Ahu project on campus. Some staff, when surveyed, indicated a desire to use the resources, but, as yet, were unsure of how to incorporate them into teaching and learning activities. Also, by the end of year one the resources had been promoted to all three local high schools who share the broader site and were being put to use in teaching and learning. Wellington City Council and Ministry of Culture and Heritage were engaged with the process and also interested in working with the initiative in various ways. Wellington High School, which physically shares Puke Ahu, had instigated its own ‘history project’ prior to the work described here, and inspired the idea of a ‘walking tour’ of the site that has been emulated.

The availability and use of the resources may constitute a strategy for thickening the understanding, appreciation and awareness of the campus as something more than simply a site of work and study. Williams (2012) suggests that using the university itself as content for teaching ‘has immediate relevance to our students in their own lives, as well as to their understanding of our society. It bears on substantive questions about citizenship, the idea of the public, and the humanistic tradition’ (para, 23).

Using the university in place-based teaching is a novel approach, as much of the place-based literature discusses where we live, not necessarily where we work and study. Further, there is also research indicating that cultural commons are a critical facet of place and that ‘there are aspects of the cultural commons that do not require “re-education”’ (Bowers 2008, p. 328). Work, such as that of Gavala and Flett (2005) suggests that ‘cultural congruence’ (p. 56) is likely an important predictor of Māori student wellbeing on campus. Discussions surrounding the future of the university marae (Kuratini) that have played out in the background of the Puke Ahu project exemplify these kinds of ideological and epistemological tensions. Does a marae (a ‘traditional’ meeting place for tribally affiliated Māori usually associated with a specific ‘living’ place) have a place on a university campus? According to Ka’ai (2008)

The land on which the complex is built is an important factor in understanding the concept of the marae and its function, as it is linked with other cultural concepts such as turangawaewae (a place for the feet to stand) and identity and of course matemate-a-one (condition or state that elicits certain cultural responses). (p. 196)

Developing capacities to understand cultural congruence at a sophisticated level may well require interrogation of the root metaphors that structure how we understand the nature and purpose of the university as built on Platonic traditions and prejudices that marginalise tacit, intergenerational, oral and craft-based learnings. Responding to this more demanding challenge through the Puke Ahu project led us to consider the project’s unfolding through a discursive lens.

Discourse theory

We wanted to promote an environment that encourages plural identifications with ‘place’. Laclau and Mouffe (1985/2001) help illuminate how ‘objects’ such as the university campus, and indeed its site, Puke Ahu, can be articulated in different ways. Contemporary universities, for example, may be linked to the corporatisation and marketisation of public education (see, for example, Slaughter & Rhoades 2004; Lowrie 2007; Schrecker 2010; Cruz 2012). Concurrently, even by the same identities, the university may also be articulated as the ‘critic and conscience of society’ and as a place of critical work that questions power relations (Hearn 2013). Therefore, the same object can be constructed (even by the same identities) in quite different discourses. Massey University Wellington could be seen as a collection of buildings housing teaching and research, and/or it could be seen as intimately connected to the stories, histories, and cultures of Puke Ahu. It could be seen as a site of cultural colonisation, resistance, or liberal education. These different identifications need not be antagonistic to each other, indeed these discourses may be articulated by the same identities in seemingly compatible ways. A sense of compatibility may also underwrite a reluctance to fully question the ways in which language constructs and constrains understandings of what is ‘real’ (Reinsborough 2003, n.p.).

The discourse of ‘heritage’ is a compelling one in the Puke Ahu context. Not only did we need to understand and make sense of the links with the University’s 50th anniversary celebrations, but also with the wider and more potent commemorabilia of the recently opened Pukeahu National War Memorial Park, Peter Jackson’s Great War Exhibition, and the WW100: Remembering WW1 – 100 Years On centenary memorialisation. By linking with other ‘available’ discourses (Laclau 1996) the idea of what Puke Ahu – the place – is, becomes a complex of differences that are much more than a site from which to celebrate the history of the university.

The disputable ‘heritage’ is further exemplified in the simple name, Puke Ahu. In the newly minted park, the name is Pukeahu. In university usage and in the context of this project it is Puke Ahu. While its name is attributed to Tara, he left no confirmatory written record and the oral pronunciation does not change. The correct, colonial grammar of its spelling is as opaque as its translation. Perhaps controversially, as Pākehā using te reo (the indigenous language), Puke Ahu/Pukeahu takes on signification as being ‘of Māori’ and therefore stands in as a possible ‘thick’ alternative to an otherwise culturally ‘thin’ name of ‘The creative campus’.

As Pākehā academics, we were conscious that although we sought to honour the indigenous name for the university campus site, we could be accused of co-opting te reo Māori, concepts from Te Ao Māori and even Māori aspirations for our own agenda, potentially disassociating them from their Māori heritage. It has been argued that place-based education can be an attempt to relieve settler anxiety and dislocation (Tuck et al. 2014). Tuck et al. (2014) argue that the idea of an ‘unsettled imaginary’ (p. 17) should inform settler relationships to indigenous land. For us, the ‘unsettled imaginary’ meant a ‘way in’ to discuss and acknowledge the potential anxiety around being on what has been articulated as a sacred site. We found, that between us, being asked to identify with Puke Ahu, resulted in a framework for asking questions about our existence and presence on site.

Discussion in partnership with Māori colleagues under the auspices of a more bicultural approach, while not providing any satisfactory resolution to the settler problem could provide a place to start a different conversation. Such a conversation would be premised around Māori concepts such as manawhenua (those who derive spiritual connection through time with the place), kaitiaki (guardianship / the making of care over the place), wairua (the spirit) and would draw on linguistic resources such as whakatauki (words of wise guidance, proverbs, aphorisms) to ‘thicken’ the view through a bicultural lens and challenge the language through which understandings of space are articulated.

Laclau and Mouffe (1985/2001) claim that we cannot possibly reconcile all ‘needs’ within discourse and that there will be ideas that are possibly antagonistic to particular claims, or be ‘outside’ of the available discourse of, for example, place-based education. What this means for the Puke Ahu project is that we need to be open to competing, and perhaps changing, articulations of what Puke Ahu can mean for different identities.

Pluralities of place

What, then, is our pedagogic responsibility in facilitating a plurality of voices? We have discovered that it can be difficult to explain, or communicate, to others what the project is and the opportunities it can offer. We have been reluctant to be prescriptive and rather been open for others to decide what the project offers for them. Our first impulse, that it offers opportunity for multiple audiences, has been borne out in some of the very different ways staff and students have responded so far, but it is tempting to want it to do more. It is tempting to cross over into marketised public space to draw attention to the project through ‘soundbites’ and branding techniques offering ‘quick’ and limited snapshots of what an organisation can offer (Lowrie 2007; Shearer 2013). It has been tempting to develop a logo that might point to Māori significations, or a more literal hill capturing settler sensibilities. It has also been tempting to formalise the kaitiaki roopu in a more ongoing way so that the initial impetus not attenuate. However, all of these strategies of simplification, codification and institutionalisation tend to go against the ethos of the plural, self-sustaining organisational identity that this project hopes to facilitate.

In terms of how others identified with the Puke Ahu project, it has been illuminating to hear feedback from staff about the project. Many have found the resources we have produced meaningful and engaging. Barriers to implementing the use of the resources were cited: high workloads, a reluctance to write in new materials because of time constraints, and lack of time in general. There is opportunity for further organisational research to determine how and in what ways the imperatives of the ‘marketised’ university confound innovation in more holistic approaches to identity and well-being.

The initiative was also originally less successful in recruiting student representation to the group given the lack of any established staff-student forum where the ideas could have been mooted and discussed. Towards the end of the second year, the dearth of student input was addressed through advertised awards to students for project-related work. This strategy resulted in a cross-College group coming together to produce Pukeahu: an exploratory anthology. Once again, a reflection on the position of students as workers could be informative here. There is scope to explore the use of Puke Ahu resources as part of a ‘writing across the curriculum’ initiative in ways that might integrate literacy instruction beyond serving the needs of established disciplines (Parks & Goldblatt 2000). This further opens the intraorganisational structures and functions of the university to wider community engagement.

Conclusion

Puke Ahu is a place. It is interpellated in the oral archive of the original inhabitants and in the cadastral records of the settler colonists. It is a memorialised and contested place that embodies power relations and assumptive practices. We argue that ‘knowing’ something of the place has the capacity to inform our identities as citizens, workers, students. The knowing may inform our being in ways that can be emancipatory, as well as confronting and provocative. Creating and collating permissive place narratives provides opportunities for articulating and identifying with less official discourses of the place. However, a project such as this is contingent on our capacities to articulate what a bicultural, place-based, university campus identity entails and what follows from this. In this we are just beginning.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the support of Massey University [with a grant] that made the project possible, the Living Labs project in the School of People, Environment and Planning that provided collegial and administrative support, the Office of the AVC Maori, Pacific and New Settlers that endorsed and supported the concept and activities. The project was enabled by the energy, enthusiasm, and initiative of all of the members of the Kaitiaki Roopu (Steering Group), and the staff and students who have responded to the initiative in such positive (and often unanticipated) ways. Thank you to the two blind peer reviewers who provided humbling and thorough feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Massey University Strategic Innovation Fund