Webinar reflections: Tīhei Wāhine Ora - Wāhine from Gang Whānau Healing Intergenerational Trauma
On 1 July CEWH hosted a Lunchtime Learning webinar which explored Tīhei Wāhine Ora: Wāhine from Gang Whānau Healing Intergenerational Trauma.
This presentation draws on findings from Tīhei Wāhine Ora, a research project that centred pūrākau shared by 20 wāhine Māori over two years in Aotearoa and across the Tasman.
Paora has shared their beautiful and moving reflections following the webinar. Paora's reflections capture the courage, wisdom and leadership of wāhine who have shared their stories and expertise and the importance of creating the conditions for their voices to be heard.
Wednesday’s presentation of Tīhei Wāhine Ora at the Coalition to End Women's Homelessness webinar confirmed what the findings already show: this is landmark research.
What stayed with me most was the power in Paula Ormsby's kōrero. Every time she speaks, she knocks it out of the park because her words are brutally truthful. She named something we all need to hear; we all participate in keeping these women on the margins of the margins, and we are not doing enough to challenge the ministries, institutions, and services that keep them there, targeted and surveilled.
The work is thorough, raw, and intelligent. These wāhine hold back nothing when telling the truth of their lives, and they are able to do so because trust was built over time, through relationship with the researcher and with the process itself. That points to something the wider research landscape in this country needs to reckon with. There are too many people calling themselves experts on communities they have never lived in. These wāhine are the experts on their own lives. Our role is to make space for whānau to speak for themselves at every opportunity.
They are telling their lived realities so that other people, everyday New Zealanders who have never had to think about these systems, can begin to understand what their lives are like. They are doing this to heal harm that has moved through generations so their mokopuna can have different futures. That is the whole premise of the project.
We are grateful for the opportunity and for the doors this work is opening for these wāhine to be heard on their own terms.
The research, Tīhei Wāhine Ora: Wāhine from Gang Whānau Healing Intergenerational Trauma, is being launched in the first week of August - look out for it!
Please feel free to share this webinar summary with friends, whānau and colleagues.
If this kōrero moved you to take action, please sign and send the CEWH Open Letter, which calls for a national, Te Tiriti-based strategy to end women’s homelessness.
