Pūrākau

A personal account about a life lived in service to whānau across Aotearoa, and how that life became a PhD – Paora Moyle

I am Ngāti Porou, takatāpui, nonbinary, neurodiverse, and a survivor of state and faith-based care and abuse. I did not choose those positionings. They were gifted to me, and I have come to understand why. My tīpuna were asking me to see from the inside, speak from the inside, and survive long enough to write it down. That is what I have spent my life doing.

I know what it is to be removed from your whanau and placed with strangers in a loveless environment that carries no recognition of who you are or where you come from. I know what it does to a child’s body to be severed from everything familiar. The loneliness. The emptiness of a life stripped of meaning and belonging. I remember knowing it was wrong. That it hurt. That it was not only happening to my siblings and to me, but to tamariki all around us, being forced through the same machinery. I carried that knowledge in my body for years before I had the language to put it on a page. When I finally did, thirty-plus years of evidence confirmed what I had always known.

My whakapapa runs through this work. My great-great-grandmother Keiti Te Ahurangi was one of the most well-known repositories of local knowledge in Waiapu, repeatedly called to give evidence in the Land Court on the boundaries of claims and the whakapapa of northern Ngāti Porou. Her authority was well recognised across the rohe. And then, as colonial men entered academic and institutional life and began writing about themselves and each other, that authority disappeared from the record.

My grandmother, Marseilles, was left to raise eight children alone after World War II, going to work in the shearing sheds to keep them fed, her children separated and sent to different relations because she could not be in two places at once. My mother, Inumia, was raised in those conditions of separation and diminished mana, married to a Pākehā man, living in a rural white community with no whānau support, no connection to the networks that might have sustained her. She became increasingly unwell, and the state deemed her unfit to care for her children. It was the system that produced those circumstances. It was the same system that was then used against her. I needed to understand that, document it, and say it straight up; none of it was her fault.

I was a single parent in the early 1990s, raising my son on a domestic purposes benefit, escaping a gang prospect and a violent relationship. I was fearful of child protection catching up with us because I had been through state care, and I knew the system tracks you. It looks for you again and your babies. I kept moving, kept finding wherever I could go to be safe. The Women’s Refuge saved my life and my son’s life. So, I started volunteering for them.

That volunteer work became fifteen years of community service before I had any formal qualifications to my name. Rape Crisis trained me as a volunteer sexual assault counsellor. I taught women’s self-defence through the Women’s Self-Defence Network and trained other teachers. I did community law work to understand the orders that protected women. I helped wāhine move out of violent relationships and tried to keep tamariki safe. It was full-time mahi 24/7. I was doing the work for a PhD before I knew what a PhD was.

Looking back now, I understand that time as wairua at work. Serving whānau, helping lives, even saving lives. My tīpuna were guiding me through the things I needed to become. The greater swell of the women’s movement was carrying me.

The decision to get a formal qualification came from necessity. I could not sustain my life, and my boys’ on volunteer work, renovating houses, and bar shifts forever. In 1997, I enrolled in the Diploma of Social Work at Victoria University of Wellington, knowing nothing about formal research writing, and spent hours in the National Library teaching myself what research was and how to go about doing it. One of my placements was with Matua Moana Jackson in his law firm. He told me that to work effectively with Māori, you must understand your own makeup, your community, and the historical forces that have shaped both. That teaching struck home and told me exactly what I needed to do first. Before I could strengthen others like me, I had to do that work for myself.

My grandmother Marseilles had passed in 1990, and at the back of a drawer I found a manuscript of Crawford whakapapa, written in her own hand. That manuscript and Moana’s teaching sent me back to Te Araroa. For two years, while studying full-time, I interviewed whānau members, recorded oral histories, read Land Court testimony, and built a picture of four generations of my own people through colonisation, land alienation, forced migration, and state intervention. What I found was that the mana and matriarchal authority of wāhine in Ngāti Porou had been supreme, and it had been deliberately erased as colonising men took over the academic and institutional record. I documented that erasure. The whakapapa report was completed in 1998, assessed at a Master’s standard, and it gave me what I needed to tell my siblings the truth. That our mother was not to blame for what happened to us in state care. That is the argument every publication in my research programme has been substantiating since.

I was offered a social work job at Wellington Child Youth and Family (CYF) in 1999, and I was good at it. I worked from a humanitarian position; thorough assessment first, evidence-based practice, whānau as the experts on their own lives, uplift as the absolute last resort. The whānau I worked with needed help, and ignorance and judgment do not help. I had learned that from being on the other side of it. Family and Youth Court judges sent letters about my “good” practice. Police gave accolades. And then the reprimands started. My social work managers told me I was drawing attention to myself instead of being a team player. What I understood, even then, was that doing the work effectively made visible what the standard practice was producing. You bring light, and the institution closes around it. You can become unsafe.

When there was no FGC Coordinator in our site, I was pulled in. First for youth justice, then for care and protection. I saw the FGC model from the inside and what was wrong with it. The outcomes were determined before anyone sat down. Whānau were brought into the room not to prevent removal but to witness it, to sign off on a decision the state had already made. Mothers sat through those processes and watched as they formalised the removal of their babies. Instead of removing the perpetrator? I became good at FGC coordination, but the better I got at it, the clearer it became that the model was corrupted in its use.

In 2005, a position opened in Kent, England, to head the development of family group conferencing as a decision-making model for vulnerable adults. Older people and people with profound learning and physical disabilities are at risk of being forced into institutional care. I applied and got the role. I spent five years there, implementing the model. I loved doing this work. I was good at it. Sheffield University evaluated it. It saved Kent County Council twenty-two thousand pounds per person per year. It is still operating and has spread across other areas in the UK.

The whole time I was there, I was aware of what the same model was doing back in Aotearoa. In England, FGC was voluntary, without mandate, and it worked. People stayed in their homes and communities as much as possible. Back in Aotearoa, the same process rubberstamped the removal of tamariki from their whānau. The same tool. Opposite outcomes. Because the interests it served were opposite. That question became the subject of the Master of Social Work and of everything that followed.

I returned to Aotearoa in 2010 and to Women’s Refuge work. I did non-statutory social work to keep the bills paid. I also completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Social Service Supervision, and Massey told me to go straight into a Master of Social Work. I did. And while I was completing it, I was becoming increasingly visible on social media and in activist networks for naming something that Indigenous communities across the colonised world already knew but that the mainstream sector kept refusing to hear. That removing tamariki Māori from their whānau at these rates, through these mechanisms, was not a policy failure. It was genocide carried out in the language of care and the performance of cultural responsiveness. I said this publicly and consistently. People were listening. I developed an international reputation in Australia, Canada, and the United States. People were ringing me. Inviting me to speak and lecture. People called me a leader and a change agent. I thought I was just doing what I was born to do.

And then the backlash came again from within social work. Not openly, because it never comes openly. It came through organised campaigns on social media, through some people in social work counteracting my messaging, accusing me of targeting them and the profession. I understood it. You bring light into a space where people benefit from the dark, and they will work to put it out. They said I was giving them a hard time. What I was doing was calling out white saviorism, calling out the inability to see that in taking children away from their collective life, you isolate them physically and spiritually from everything that belongs to them intrinsically. And the response was white fragility. I’m a really good social worker, and I have tamariki best interests at heart. They could not hear it. It was a triple whammy, physically, mentally, and spiritually. I was reminded of where I had come from and what the work cost. I was starting to get tired and unwell.

The MSW was completed in 2013 and awarded in 2014, first class. It named what was happening as proactive monoculturalism and documented what Māori social workers already knew from the inside. That is the FGC, predetermined outcomes, patch-and-dispatch practice, and the systematic failure to investigate the whakapapa of tamariki Māori. Massey offered me a PhD position after that, with a fifty percent lecturing role. I took it. I tried to link the FGC research to the autoethnographic truth of what I had lived through; state care, the whakapapa report, the practice years, all of it woven together. The institution received it the same way every institution had. Quietly, with plausible deniability, with the message that my past made me less credible rather than more. Should you really be talking about that, Paora? Is it a bit TMI, isn’t it? You cannot be both the person it happened to and the credible voice naming what it does to others. You can lecture our students, but do not shine the light too close to what we ourselves participate in. After roughly a year, I gave notice and left to take care of myself. It was the same pattern I had encountered in statutory social work. The same pattern I had lived as a child in state care. Speak the truth. Bring the light. The institution closes around it.

Personal circumstances took me to the far north for a couple of years. I lectured at a social work school there, designing teaching that took students into the taiao, asked them who they were and why they were there, andbuilt the self-awareness that Moana had taught me was the foundation of everything.

I was still formulating. The PhD question was shifting as my understanding deepened through practice. I knew the shape of the argument but not yet the final form it would take.

From around 2018, the survivor advocacy work that had been running underneath everything else for the better part of twenty years came fully to the surface. I had been part of survivor and faith-based abuse networks lobbying for a Royal Commission of Inquiry since the late 1990s. When the Labour government approved it in 2018, I became a principal adviser to the Commission and held that role through to 2024.

It was my testimony, my evidence, that secured the Waitangi Tribunal’s approval of an urgent inquiry into Oranga Tamariki practices. I was the lead claimant in WAI 2915. And at the same time, whānau were coming to me directly, asking me to sit with them at their FGCs because they did not know their rights, could not navigate the process, and had nothing with which to fight the Ministry. These people were poor, as in no resources. The Ministry’s practice depended on that powerlessness. On the information asymmetry. On the fact that people who have nothing cannot afford to challenge an institution with everything. That made me furious in a way that clarified rather than clouded.

I was not writing much during those years because I was hard out in the field every day, earning just enough to pay the bills. What I was doing was accumulating the evidence that would make the later publications possible. That included co-authoring Hāhā-uri, hāhā-tea: Māori Involvement in State Care 1950–1999, prepared for the Crown Secretariat, which established the historical foundation for understanding how state care had reached into whānau Māori across generations.

In 2022, the Royal Commission commissioned me to conduct independent research with Takatāpui, Rainbow, and MVPFAFF+ survivors of state and faith-based abuse, after that community had specifically requested a kanohi ki te kanohi wānanga with Commissioners following an inadequate online hui. That research became As a Kid, I Always Knew Who I Was. Doing that work confirmed for me that I loved research, I was good at it, and I was particularly good at creating conditions in which people could tell their pūrākau with some agency over what happened to them. Research was a form of social work and working socially. It created the possibility of change by producing the evidence that made denial harder.

From 2022, I was also developing the research unit at Te Whāriki Manawāhine o Hauraki, helping Hauraki whānau build data sovereignty and tell their own stories on their own terms. Not from a bunker in Wellington. From inside the community itself, in response to what the community said it needed. The research that came from that work, the housing research with wāhine in Hauraki, the Cyclone Gabrielle research, and the work with wāhine from gang whānau, contributed to the PhD.

By 2025, people I had begun studying alongside years earlier had their PhDs. I had done the weight of a lifetime. I knew my PhD was a lifelong journey, the whole argument, every piece of research threaded together and held by the autoethnographic account of who I am and why I have done all of it. I could not return to another institution that would repeat the familiar colonial pattern. I was not willing to work from scratch another three or four years. So, I am doing it as a PhD by Prior Publication. That is where the critical analysis that accompanies the six publications comes from. Not from a gap in the literature, but from thirty years of a lived life.

Also, this work does not have office hours. When you understand that the state is the perpetual perpetrator, that the smiling assassin is always operating, you do not get to clock off at 5 pm. That is what the years between the publications were. Just the work, unrelenting and unrecorded, until it became impossible not to write it down.

I believe this journey was given to me by my ancestors. My positioning and my experience were designed to allow the insider journey, to speak to what was happening with the kind of precision that comes only from having lived it. Lived experience is true knowledge. Everything else is merely information. The research began in my body, in a loveless welfare home in the 1970s, long before it reached a page. That is the thesis. That has always been the thesis.

Paora Crawford Moyle KSO

paoramoyle5@gmail.com