Module 1 of 6
Whakapapa o te raraunga
The whakapapa of data — where does data come from, and who does it belong to?
unfurling fern frond — new life, growth, renewal
This module carries the koru — the unfurling fern frond. The whakapapa of data is itself an unfolding: tracing each dataset back to its origin, its relationships, its people. The koru reminds us that everything has a beginning, and that beginning matters.
He kupu whakataki — Introduction
In te ao Māori, whakapapa is not merely genealogy — it is the framework through which all things are understood in relation to one another. Every entity has connections: to ancestors, to the land, to community. This module applies that framework to data itself.
When a corporation collects health data from a Māori community, or when a university harvests oral histories from iwi for a research database, something profound happens that Western data law barely registers: a whakapapa is severed. The data becomes decontextualised. Its origins — the people, the wānanga, the whenua it came from — are erased from the record.
Whakapapa as data ontology
The concept of whakapapa gives us a richer ontology of data than anything offered by GDPR or the New Zealand Privacy Act. Where those frameworks ask "who owns this data?", whakapapa asks: "what are this data's relationships, and do those relationships remain intact?"
Māori data scholars at Te Mana Raraunga have argued that data about Māori is, in an important sense, Māori data — regardless of who currently holds it. This is not merely a legal claim but an ethical and relational one. It flows directly from the logic of whakapapa.
- Data about a person's whakapapa belongs to that whakapapa.
- Data collected in a community context carries obligations to that community.
- Removing data from its relational context is a form of extraction — analogous to removing taonga from a marae.
Colonial data extraction: a short history
The theft of Māori data is not new. Colonial governments collected census records, land survey data, genealogical records, and geographical information about Māori communities throughout the 19th and 20th centuries — often without consent, and always with the aim of control. This data was used to enforce the Native Land Court system, to administer land confiscations, and to implement assimilationist policy.
Digital colonialism continues this logic. Machine learning systems trained on Māori linguistic data, cultural knowledge, or health statistics — without iwi consent — are a new expression of an old pattern. The technology is different; the underlying relationship of extraction is not.
What is the greatest thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people.
Key concepts
- Raraunga Data; information
- Whakapapa o te raraunga The genealogy and relational context of data
- Mana raraunga Data sovereignty; the right of Māori to govern their own data
- Raupatu matihiko Digital dispossession; the taking of Māori data without consent
Pātai — Discussion questions
- How does the concept of whakapapa challenge Western property-law frameworks for thinking about data ownership?
- Identify one example of historical colonial data collection from Māori communities. What were its consequences?
- Is there a meaningful difference between a colonial survey of Māori land and a tech company training an AI model on Māori language data? Discuss.
- What would a data collection framework grounded in whakapapa look like in practice?
