28 posts tagged with "Māori GIS"

One of the recurring problems with conferences is that they finish just as everybody is getting useful. For two or three days there is energy, conversation, practical demonstrations and people discovering that somebody else has already solved the problem they have been wrestling with for six months. Then everyone packs up, drives or flies home and returns to their own organisation, where Monday morning has been patiently waiting.

The history of Māori GIS over the last two decades is partly a history of finding ways to keep those connections alive after the event. Conferences mattered, but so did the things that appeared between them: practitioner networks, mailing lists, workshops, outreach sessions, online groups, Indigenous Mapping Wānanga and eventually regular Ngā Poutama Matawhenua sessions. The technology changed repeatedly. The underlying need did not. People wanted to find one another, learn from one another and get practical help when the real work started.

Over time I came to understand that the important infrastructure was not really the email list, website, Facebook group or webinar platform. It was whanaungatanga: the relationships between people who kept turning up, shared what they knew, introduced others, hosted events, answered questions and made space for newer practitioners. I do not use that word to claim that I was building Māori relationships according to tikanga. I use it because the ordinary technology language of “networking” does not adequately describe what I observed. The connections were not simply contacts in a database. They carried trust, reciprocity, history and obligations to one another.

That relational quality is one of the things that made the move from conferences toward wānanga important. A conference can transfer information. A wānanga can also create space for collective learning, questioning, kōrero and knowledge moving in more than one direction. The practical Māori GIS community gradually became less about one expert presenting to an audience and more about people bringing their own kaupapa, experience and questions into the room.

For a long time I thought the obvious measure of a GIS project was the thing it produced. A map was finished, a map book was printed, a database was delivered and a set of layers worked. Outputs are comforting because they can be counted, photographed and put into reports. Māori GIS work gradually taught me to ask a much less comfortable question: what happens after the mapper leaves?

That question changed almost everything. A map can be excellent and still leave the people who need it dependent on the person who made it. A GIS can be technically sophisticated and still become useless when the one person who understands the folders moves on. A training event can be inspiring and still achieve almost nothing if the participant returns home and cannot reproduce what they saw. The real test of capability is not whether the system works while the expert is standing beside it. It is whether the work can continue afterwards, under the authority of the people who need it and in a form that can be carried forward.

Over time I came to see that this was more than a sustainability problem in the usual project-management sense. In Māori settings there was often an intergenerational dimension to the work. Whenua, place names, histories and community information were not temporary project assets. People might be using them for a Treaty claim today, environmental planning tomorrow and something quite different in ten or twenty years. The question was therefore not only whether the system survived the funding period, but whether knowledge, context and authority could survive changes in staff, software and organisations.

I am not Māori and do not claim a Māori worldview as my own. What I can describe is what working alongside Māori practitioners and communities taught me about capability. The strongest projects were not simply those that delivered technology. They were the ones that increased rangatiratanga over the work, reduced avoidable dependence and left people better able to make their own decisions about their information.

GIS has a habit of making uncertainty look tidy. Put an old plan on a screen, add a modern cadastral layer, draw a line and label it, and suddenly the result looks as though somebody has settled the matter. The line is crisp, the coordinates are precise, the parcel beneath it is authoritative and the aerial image may be sharp enough to see fences and buildings. Everything about the screen tells the viewer that the answer has been found.

A great deal of Māori claimant mapping taught me the opposite. Sometimes the most accurate result is to admit that the answer is not known. Historical land blocks do not always line up cleanly with modern parcels. Rivers move. Surveyors make assumptions. Names change. Plans disagree. Natural features disappear. Areas recorded on paper do not always agree with areas calculated from geometry. Some source plans are missing altogether. The software is always willing to draw a line, but that does not mean the evidence is willing to support one.

In one of the Northland mapping methodologies we had a very useful description for this: State of Unknown. It was not grand terminology. It simply meant that the available information did not justify pretending there was one certain answer. Over time I came to think of it as one of the most useful professional disciplines GIS can offer, particularly in Māori GIS, where whenua is not merely a parcel to be measured and knowledge of place does not become more authoritative simply because it has been converted into coordinates.

I am not Māori and I do not claim to speak from within te ao Māori. What I can describe is what repeated work alongside Māori claimants, practitioners, researchers and communities taught me about the limits of a purely technical way of looking at land and information. GIS tends to begin with objects: points, lines, polygons, parcels and layers. Much of the Māori mapping work I encountered began somewhere more relational, with people, whenua, whakapapa, history, responsibility and the authority to say what a place means. The map could help represent parts of those relationships, but it could never become the relationship itself.

One of the first things GIS teaches you is confidence. A line appears on the screen cleanly, precisely and apparently without argument. You can zoom into it, measure it, colour it, calculate its area and print it at A0. Once information has travelled through a computer, it acquires a peculiar authority. It looks as though somebody, somewhere, must know exactly where it is and exactly what it means. One of the first things Māori claimant mapping taught me was almost the opposite. Historical land blocks did not always line up neatly with the modern cadastre. Old plans could disagree with one another. Rivers moved. Survey descriptions depended on natural features that had changed or disappeared. Names varied between sources. Areas written on historical records did not always agree with areas calculated by modern GIS. Sometimes a plan was missing altogether, and sometimes two apparently authoritative documents contradicted one another.

In one of the Northland mapping methodologies we had a wonderfully unfashionable description for this: State of Unknown. Rather than forcing the available information to produce an answer simply because the software was capable of drawing one, we recorded that the answer remained unresolved. At the time it was a practical classification for awkward historical geography. Over the next twenty years it became something closer to a professional philosophy. The temptation in GIS is always to resolve, align, categorise and complete. State of Unknown was a reminder that sometimes the more professional thing is to preserve the uncertainty.

What changed more slowly for me was the way I thought about the thing underneath the map. In conventional GIS the land can easily become a surface on which information is located. Parcels sit on it, roads cross it, rivers run through it and points are placed where events occurred. Working alongside Māori claimants, practitioners, researchers, iwi and hapū repeatedly challenged that habit. Whenua was not simply the backdrop to the information. It sat within relationships, whakapapa, occupation, memory, responsibility, history and identity. The map could help represent parts of those relationships, but it could not contain them all.

I am not Māori, and I do not claim to explain te ao Māori or speak for the people whose knowledge shaped the projects I worked on. My part in this history has been much more practical. I have built maps, recovered old plans, configured GIS systems, organised workshops, trained people, supported conferences, found data, developed resources, fixed broken things, produced programmes, dealt with government agencies and occasionally discovered that an ambitious twenty-first-century mapping project was being held together by a cardboard box of DVDs and somebody remembering where the extension lead had gone. What changed my practice was being in rooms where somebody else understood the place, history or meaning far better than I did and learning that the technical role was most useful when it supported that authority rather than competing with it.

The June 2026 Ngā Poutama Matawhenua wānanga, Kōrero ā-Mahere: 3D StoryMaps for Kaupapa Māori GIS Mapping, focused on bringing maps, photos, data and kōrero together in an accessible digital story.

Open the current LINZ recording/resource link

The session was held on Friday 19 June 2026 and covered practical StoryMaps techniques rather than requiring advanced GIS experience. The more important point, though, is that the technology should follow the kōrero rather than determine it. A 3D scene, fly-through or swipe map is useful when it helps people understand relationships between places, whenua, awa, maunga, change through time or the sequence of a story. It is not automatically better because it is more visually impressive.

The May 2026 Ngā Poutama Matawhenua wānanga, AI Haumaru, AI Motuhake mō te Māori GIS kaupapa, focused on practical uses of artificial intelligence while protecting Māori GIS data and maintaining control over sensitive information.

The recording and related material are collected on the Ngā Poutama Matawhenua resources page, where the current links can be maintained in one place.

The session was held on Friday 22 May 2026 as an extended online wānanga. The framing matters. AI haumaru is not only a cyber-security question, and AI motuhake is not simply a technical setting. For Māori GIS, the deeper issue is whether people retain practical authority over what information is supplied, what the system is allowed to do with it, how outputs are checked and whether the technology strengthens or weakens rangatiratanga over the mahi.

A useful 2026 Ngā Poutama Matawhenua recording looks at how to find and use council GIS information: Accessing Council GIS Maps, Data and Resources: Bay of Plenty Regional Council BayMaps, a Case Study.

Watch the recording on YouTube

There is also a companion StoryMap on accessing council GIS maps and data, published in March 2026.

Council GIS can be extremely useful because iwi, hapū, marae, Māori trusts and whānau regularly have to work with planning, hazards, infrastructure, environmental monitoring and regulatory systems. The important caution is that a council viewer represents the world through council functions and datasets. It can tell you a great deal about planning zones, infrastructure or monitored environments, but it does not become the authority on whenua, whakapapa, local history or cultural relationships simply because the layer is official.

The 2026 Ngā Poutama Matawhenua series includes a practical session on using earthquake and earth-science information in Māori GIS work: Te Mārama ki ngā Rū Whenua - Using Earthquake and Earth Science Data for Māori GIS & Mapping Kaupapa.

Watch the recording on YouTube

Hazard data is often presented as if the important thing is the finished technical layer. For Māori GIS the useful question is usually closer to home: what does this information mean for the people, whenua, marae, access routes, taonga and responsibilities connected to the kaupapa? A fault line or shaking model matters because of the relationships and decisions around it, not because the polygon itself is impressive.