PhD Researcher: Hineitimoana Greensill (Tainui, Ngāti Koata, Ngāti Porou) (UoA)
Primary supervisor: Associate Professor Aroha Harris (UoA)
Project summary:
Hineitimoana’s research is a critical biography of her grandmother, Tuaiwa (Eva) Rickard, a Tainui Ngāti Koata woman known for her influential role in the Māori land rights movement of the 1970s. This work is an opportunity to tell a more holistic story about Hineitimoana’s grandmother’s life with the aim of understanding the connections between her life experiences and her intellectual and political work. In this project, Hineitimoana considers the ways in which her grandmother’s story can be recast by working across both public and private archives, and by making visible her relationships to whānau, whenua, and wider Pacific and Indigenous networks. Methodologically, Hineitimoana explores the challenges of subjectivity in historical research, whakapapa and access to knowledge, and story sovereignty as a mokopuna engaged in tupuna-centred research.