TĪPUNA ME NGĀ TANIWHA
OCTOBER 2025 by TEAH ANNA LEE CARLSON
Within Māori cosmology, taniwha are powerful supernatural beings, renowned for their shape-shifting abilities and deep association with water, caves, and other liminal spaces. Their forms range from animal, to other parts of the environment or to supernatural beings, but their most enduring role is as kaitiaki, guardians for iwi, hapū, and whānau. Their role is not simply protective: taniwha wield a dual power, offering guidance and warning of danger when respected, but also capable of enacting punishment or disaster when tapu is breached or the environment is threatened, thus maintaining spiritual and social order (Walker, 2006).
The theme of kaitiakitanga is central, taniwha act to maintain order for the wellbeing of the earth, embodying ancestral power and enforcing respect for land, waters, and sacred protocols. Their presence, sometimes felt as an ongoing, haunting reminder, reinforces collective responsibility, ensuring human actions remain accountable to the environment and whakapapa. In contemporary contexts, taniwha continue to be invoked to protect sacred sites and waterways.
Rather than focusing purely on dismantling colonial systems, Tā Moana Jackson advocated for a positive, values-based approach that seeks to set right the relationships damaged by colonisation - an ethic of restoration (Jackson, 2017). Rather than focusing purely on dismantling colonial systems, he advocated for a positive, values-based approach that seeks to set right the relationships damaged by colonisation. This ethic is grounded in restoring balance, justice, and relational harmony between peoples, with land, and among all living things, a deeply whakapapa-based worldview that foregrounds interdependence and repair.
Through TTP’s methodologies, te roopū Māori have begun to inhabit spaces that feel like home, while acknowledging that they remain irreducibly haunted, spaces where power and its critique extend to the source, transforming both research practices and ways of being in the world. This sense of haunting forms the foundation for our methodological innovation, honouring ancestral wisdom and power while enabling contemporary transformation. It creates spaces where the freedom to encounter both tīpuna and taniwha becomes essential to constitutional and decolonial aspirations.
Within TTP, haunting is embraced as an active engagement with the impacts and influences of the unseen, serving as a witness to complex realities. This process of “wearing the wound rather than covering it up” is understood as a living and ethical ecology: a continual negotiation with spirit, mind, matter, microbe, mycelium, nature, and culture, where there is potential for tīpuna, ancestors, bodies, and forms to decolonise. As we embark on this work, we recognise that power is attained through truths; when we name and reclaim our truths, both historical and contemporary injustices, we reclaim the truths in our own power, grounding our kaupapa in the transformative potential of honest, collective remembering (Jackson, 2017).
In these moments when the world trembles beneath the weight of colonial resurgence, when legislation seeks to sever the sacred bonds between tangata whenua and whenua itself (Jackson & Mutu, 2016), when the very foundations of Te Tiriti are under siege, it is precisely now that we must learn to dwell differently, to breathe into the spaces between certainty and collapse, to make sanctuary in the cracks where our tīpuna and taniwha are already dancing.
