Te Au o Te Moana – Voice of the Ocean: Dr Jason Mika

Kaimoana gatherers, Rangitukia. Photo credit: Dr Natalie Robertson

 

Can you share a memory or moment that you felt connected to the moana?

My earliest memories of the moana are going to collect pipi at Maketu with my kuia, my koro and my aunties. What I understood of the moana was the place where you get kai. Other people go there to swim and that, but for me, it was always a place where you got kai.

As I got older, I had other experiences, and one of them was with my dad. He had an 80-year-old ketch parked at West Haven marina under the Auckland Harbor bridge. A beautiful location, and if you go there, there are million-dollar yachts, and then there's my dad's ketch, barely afloat. He and I would visit the ketch. I was about 18 or 19 at the time, we’d crank over the motor, and have a bottle of stout, which I hated. I mean, I don't know what that stuff is. It's a liquid golden syrup kind of Marmite-flavoured beer! But anyway, that's what he loved.

One day, he says, why don't we take her out? That boat was called The Vagabond. It was a bit of a rough as boat. We took it out into the harbor, and I had no clue what I was doing sailing. We had no lights, no navigation equipment, no communications gear, and no kai, just stout. And so, we were sailing around the harbour, and it felt pretty good for a while.

Then we’re getting pretty close to Rangitoto, and I say, uh, we'd better turn around and go back. He says, oh no, no, we’ll just go a bit further. At this stage, it was getting dark, and he said oh I think we’re stuck here for the night, and I said, I think you’re right. So, we think, where are we going to park this thing… got no lights, no nothing, and ships are passing us. He said, Let’s get as close as we can to Rangitoto. I said - How are we going to know when we’re there? Dad said When you can hear the water breaking on the rocks, let me know, and we'll stop. So that’s exactly what I did. We spent the night on the boat. When I woke up, the rocks were right next to the boat, and I thought, oh my goodness, we could have been stranded there!

 

 

What is the biggest challenge that you see in marine management?

There are two. There’s the biophysical challenge, which is how climate change affects the moana and its ability to sustain itself. Then there’s the human challenge. How do we manage our responsibilities in our relationship with Tangaroa?

Who gets to decide that is the critical question. Right now, we have enough excellent science and research to make judgment calls about the best approach to managing the health of Tangaroa. If we just pause and figure out the best approach to managing our relationship with Tangaroa, so Tangaroa is healthy, and we are healthy, well then, we’ve got that knowledge.

The issue is how we decide which approach is best and how that is implemented.

The current institutional setup is that the Crown decides what’s best. Local government will decide what’s best. Those institutions do not always consider their partnership responsibilities with Māori under Te Tiriti o Waitangi. As institutions, they tend to go with what everyone else thinks is the best thing for most people. This can lead to average solutions, or just above the average, rather than what is the best.

Having been a public servant and a policy analyst, what you see in that sort of position is that the government policy process works within a set of parameters defined by the Crown's and the government’s view of the world. Legislation and policy limits are well-defined within that framework. To step outside of that and say, well, there’s another way of seeing the world, especially if we're engaging with Māori enterprises and Māori people, we need to see the world from a different point of view. It’s tough to do that because the government gets a bit nervous when you say there’s a broader way of seeing the world than what the government says there is. So, when you try to develop any policy program that’s publicly funded that supports Māori, it’s questioned. Why Māori? Why are we supporting just Māori from these sorts of publicly funded initiatives? And how does this fit within the broader goals of the government?

 

How does the research help increase understanding across cultures?

The best solution may not be only a Pākehā solution. It may be a combination of Pākehā knowledge, Māori knowledge, and international knowledge about what’s best for our moana. Some institutions find it hard to accept that there are other knowledges and other solutions that may be better than the ones that represent the majority view.

Ecosystem-based management (EBM) is a central concept for the Sustainable Seas Challenge. It is a way of encouraging different stakeholders and institutions to think more broadly than the standard, conventional, or past approaches. To allow other voices to be heard and other knowledge to be part of the decision-making process.

We need to ensure that the EBM framework can sufficiently deal with power relationships—the imbalances between Māori and the Crown and how we work together in partnership to solve future challenges. The Challenge research program is looking at the role of the Treaty of Waitangi, jurisdictional issues, and management and governance issues. Hopefully, we will uncover alternative pathways and partnership-based approaches to EBM.