What are the biggest tikanga mistakes you see people make around the marae without realising?

People don't mean to but they’ll dump their bags and their jackets somewhere completely inappropriate, like the table.

Sitting in our wharekai, I’ve also seen people brushing their kids’ hair while, you know, we're setting up food.

The third one is people crossing over other people's legs and bodies. 

I'm well aware that I'm—and my mother and my kuia and my aunts are also—quite strict around things to do with hair and clothing but those are all real no-no’s for my family. They’re things that we’ll most probably growl if we see but we try to do it very gently. We're trying to encourage our families to come back to the marae. We don't want to make it hard for everybody to exist there.

Can you buy your own pounamu?

Oh, heck, that's an excellent question. The thing is, I've never heard anyone in my family say, ‘you can’t do this’ but I've also never bought anything for myself. 

In fact, I questioned my mother, sisters, and aunties on this and none of us could think about an instance where we'd bought anything for ourselves and none of us could tell you why, other than it just never ever felt right!

I mean, mum's 92 and she cannot think of an instance where her parents, her aunts, her uncles—who would have all been born at the beginning of last century—have bought pounamu for themselves in our whānau.

Is there some kind of formula for figuring out what an appropriate koha is?

I’ve been in larger groups where the process isn’t anything more than someone saying, ‘Ok, I've got $20 on me. How are you getting on?’ Everyone will generally put out a $10 or a $20.

Sometimes it’s just my husband and we’ve gone, ‘Ok, are we comfortable with $100?’ 

And sometimes we’ve attended something and then actually gone online afterward to give more because we could see that it was needed.

It really depends on the kaupapa and the mathematical calculation in real time is acknowledgement of our own financial capacity versus what's needed.

Why do we perform karanga/callings as people walk onto marae?

At its simplest level, it’s literally to call people to come on now. We're ready.

At its more esoteric level, it’s the first practise of whanaungatanga—the first greeting, the first acknowledgement of whenua/land, of Rangi, of Papa, of manuhiri/visitors which attempts to start the process of building a relationship.

And then, of course, at an atua level, well, in my tiny corner of the universe the first karanga came from Tane. When Tane had not yet been able to create something in our own image, he was looking for the female element and he went to his father for advice. His father said to go to his brother, Tangaroa, and look in the water and that he would see the image he needed to create. So he went to Tangaroa and he called and, well, at least in my family, we acknowledge that as the first karanga, literally to call his brother up.   

If we’re going onto a marae in a small group and no one can karanga or perform whaikōrero should we wait to join a bigger group with people who can do those things or go on without doing them?

Before I was allowed to karanga (it was still my mum’s role), we used to wait for someone else to come in and then have a quick discussion to see who's who, who can do what.

Sometimes we've waited, and no one has come and we’ve been a bit caught, but we always still had someone with us who could sort of figure out a way to clear all the pathways and make it sit comfortably for tangata whenua.

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Got your own pātai/questions on tikanga that you’d love to ask Ngapera? Check out the free tikanga programmes on offer at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. She’s one of the kaiako/teachers!