New ties or an unravelling thread?

A collaboration of Matauranga and Science, could it mean a new future or a replaying of the past?

Rebekah Tolhopf (she/her) - Ngāti Porou, Te Whānau-a-Apanui, Te Whakatōhea

Whāia te iti kahurangi, ki te tuohu koe, me he maunga teitei’

Seek the treasure you value most dearly; if you bow your head, let it be to a lofty mountain’

A classroom not made for us. A teacher praising the ways of the coloniser while standing on land whose stories they do not know. For generations, the curriculum has told us that Western science is the ‘real’ science, the only valid way of understanding the world. Anything outside of it, especially our own mātauranga, has been treated as lesser than, unscientific, or simply irrelevant. We grew up learning that knowledge from our ancestors belonged at home, at the marae, but not in educational or professional spaces.

So now, why are there sudden efforts to bring the two together? Is this a genuine attempt at reconciliation, a recognition that the land needs Indigenous ways of knowing? Or is it another performance, another way to take our knowledge, repackage it, and present it as modern innovation without acknowledging where it really came from? These questions sit heavily in the space between hope and caution.

As a science student, I was taught early on that Mātauranga and Western science were separate worlds. Mātauranga was cultural; Science was academic. One belonged to my identity, the other to my grades. Assignments and rubrics encouraged us to conform, to learn in a way that fit the system rather than challenge it. For many of us with mixed heritage, this division felt like a disrespect, a separation between cultures. To succeed academically, it was expected to separate that part of myself. To honour the community that raised me, I had to question the very system that I relied on to succeed.

This contradiction is not just personal; it is structural. Western Science has long positioned itself as objective and universal, yet it was built within a colonial worldview that dismissed indigenous knowledge as simply storytelling. When Mātauranga and other ways of indigenous knowledge are finally invited into scientific spaces, we must ask: On whose terms? Who will benefit? Who leads? And who is still being asked to compromise?

A New Dawn - or another cycle?

We don’t want to be treated with tokenism or reduced to footnotes in someone else’s story.

We don’t want our knowledge to be acknowledged only when it is convenient, only when it can be used to make institutions look progressive. Mātauranga is not a decorative border for science to frame itself with. It is a full, complex, intergenerational system of understanding the world, one that has guided our people and our environments long before Western science arrived here.

If this moment is truly meant to signal a new dawn, then it must begin with more than just symbolic gestures. It requires honesty about the history of exclusion, about the ways our knowledge has been dismissed, extracted, and repackaged. It requires acknowledging that collaboration cannot happen while one system still holds all the authority and the other is expected to fit in and conform.

A new dawn means shifting power, not just shifting language. It means Māori leadership in research, policy, and environmental decision-making. It means classrooms where our stories are not side notes but foundations. It means scientific institutions recognising that mātauranga Māori does not need validation from Western science to be legitimate. Whether this collaboration becomes a genuine turning point or just another cycle of appropriation depends on what happens next. It depends on whether institutions are willing to listen, to step back, to share authority, and to let mātauranga Māori shape the future rather than simply decorate it.

Breaking a new dawn means breaking old habits. It means refusing to let collaboration become another colonial trend woven through our knowledge. It means demanding more than inclusion, demanding respect, autonomy, and real partnership.

Because we are not footnotes.

We are not tokens.

We are storytellers, scientists, descendants, and future leaders.