"We want our children to go out from school confident of who they are, where they come from and who they represent."

"It's important the stories people tell about themselves," Hāromi Williams says. At her office at Tāneatua near the Urewera, where she is Executive Manager of the Tūhoe Education Authority (TEA), she explains it's a lesson she first learned forcibly when teaching adult migrant students in Sydney's western suburbs learning English as a second language.

People from Cambodia or El Salvador found common ground in talking about family and the daily things of life. But what mattered most were the stories they told of a shared cultural heritage. And when she returned home to where she had grown up in Ruātoki she found that was a legacy at risk of being lost. Tūhoe kaumātua were declining rapidly in number. Indeed, the 2001 Census confirmed just two percent of all Tūhoe were aged over 65.

TEA was established in 1998 as a community driven initiative. Hāromi and her team with the Ministry of Education are working on lifting the capability of 13 local Tūhoe schools. It's been one of many initiatives she's led in a 32-year teaching career. And now in a research project, Te Ahikāroa, supported by Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, she is recording kaumātua stories of ten hapū that will become a teaching resource and go on the Tūhoe web portal.

"We want our children to go out from a Tūhoe school confident of who they are, where they come from and who they represent. And that makes them accountable," she says.

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