This month Te Haana Jacob of Matapihi celebrates her first year working as Pouārahi at Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga’s Tauranga office.

Te Haana brings insights and a close connection to her whenua, Matakana Island, as well as skills in Te Reo and the deep support of her whanau to her role.

"I am part of the Kohanga Reo and Kura Kaupapa generation, raised on the marae and by a village with my kuia and koroua,"says Te Haana.

"This life experience is invaluable and could never be replaced."

A graduate of Victoria University, Te Haana, 32, holds Bachelors Degree in Te Reo Maori and Māori Studies with a background in law.

Her iwi affiliations, responsibilities and obligations are to Tauranga Moana- Tauranga Tangata, Waikato and Te Arawa with Tauranga Moana as home base.

The position of Pouārahi is translated loosely as a Māori Heritage Advisor, though this doesn’t begin to cover the broad scope of Te Haana’s role.

"In a traditional sense, a pou can be a pillar or support. It can also mean an action of anointing, or a teacher or expert," says Te Haana.

"To arahi something is to lead, escort, conduct or drive. So when I put them together I would say a Pouārahi is a pillar of support that uses their expertise and experience to guide people and lead people.

"In a heritage sense it could be in terms of pā management; or facilitating relationships between tangata whenua and applicants, coucillors and archaeologists. Sometimes it’s giving advice to tangata whenua on how to interact with processes, and where exercising their Tino Rangatiratanga and Mana Motuhake is the most important."

Te Haana Jacob celebrates her one-year anniversary at Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga.  Photo: Supplied.

No two days are the same for Te Haana with only about a quarter of her time spent on what she describes as ‘business as usual’ work.

The Lower Northern region - which encompasses, the Waikato, Bay of Plenty and the Tairawhiti area - is dynamic, often bringing its own set of challenges.

"I have a big area to cover, and there is always someone doing something different," she says.

"We have resilience and recovery work in the Tairawhiti area, while Waikato, Te Arawa and Tauranga iwi have a lot of areas that are being developed for horticultural purposes as well as city development."

For Te Haana, bridging the gap of legal understanding among iwi and hapū with the Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga Act is central to her work.

"The law is not a system that has been designed by Māori, but we conform to it. There are massive gaps in iwi and hapū understanding of how the Act works with some having little or no understanding. Bridging that knowledge gap is important," says Te Haani.

"My major goal is to work myself out of a job, which will be achieved when I don’t need to double-check that consultation has been done and tangata whenua recommendations - within reason - aren’t given a second thought to implement.

"Part of that is for tangata whenua to be able to see the potential through understanding Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga and the Act we operate under."

Previous experiece working in education and the health sector has been good preparation for her current role, which Te Haana loves.

"This is mahi I would do whether or not I was paid," she says.

"Mahia te mahi hei painga mo te iwi. I’ll do the mahi for the good of my people regardless. For a lot of our whanau who have been displaced, and connections to their whenua severed, I want them to learn about their tupuna and their feats as a way to whakamana themselves."

Te Haana doesn’t presume to speak for all iwi in terms of how Māori can be looked after or connected to their heritage, though has come up with some thoughts about how that could work.

"I would like to see whānau wananga that reopen some of the old tracks between iwi retracing ngā tapuwae o ngā tūpuna - the footsteps of the ancestors," says Te Haani,

"I would like people to look at Māori heritage as examples of how to find solutions in modernity. Māori were observers, and according to whakapapa, the taiao - or natural world - is the tuakana and we are the teina; to discover these amazing abilities of adaptability."

Although generally there is a growing awareness of the importance of Māori heritage among New Zealanders Te Haana believes it’s not as accepted as it should be.

"There is an old attitude that still lingers that would prefer not to accept it, and continue instead to try to ‘debunk’ or minimise history," she says.

Te Haana acknowledges that some of the history of Aotearoa New Zealand can bring out ill feeling - but instead of erasing it, she advocates for "sitting with it and reflecting on it."

"There is a real difference in perspective among the younger generation. At Kura Māori, for example, you have to know your culture and history through waiata whether you like it or not because we can’t erase parts of ourselves - we have to accept it."

Living in Te Ao Māori as well as the Pakeha world can have it’s own challenges - ("are we being led by tikanga or ture [law] today?" she sometimes asks) - though those same challenges have also helped foster a range of strengths.

"I’m a good problem solver; I’m someone who can talk to people - someone with a lot of self-awareness, and I am a good critical thinker. I like to think that I am also teachable," she says.

She also knows how to read the room - quite literally.

"The way you behave in a boardroom is different to the way you’d behave at the marae, for example, and being able to understand that social shift is important."

At the end of the day, however, it is her whanau - and her upbringing - that have been some of the strongest influences on her life.

"Our grandfather made sure all of his children had a home in town - Matapihi - as well as the island, Matakana. We were raised in a village - both my grandparents are 20m away and my sister, aunties, uncles and cousins are all within 100m on a farm," she says.

"We have paddocks of animals and orchards planted by my grandmother. We still trade food; we all work together to get big jobs done; we harvest gardens together. And it was safe because we could yell across the paddock for our cousins to come, and now the new generation does the same.

"It’s our village. We are privileged to have a lot of whenua, but I don’t think we could have held as much individually as we do now - it’s only as a collective that we have maintained it."

The centrality and importance of whanau has shaped Te Haana’s life and world view, and a lot of her downtime is invested in encouraging emerging rangatahi.

"I’m usually doing something with the next generation to realise their own potential and it’s usually through sport like waka ama, netball, touch and so on - or I’m organising others to do so," says Te Haani.