Best for
Lesson 3 jigsaw, migration and identity inquiry, seminar preparation, and connections to 1970s activism.
Unit 2 inquiry sheet • Years 8-10 • Identity, migration, and activism
Urban Māori Identity Inquiry Sheet
Use this page to move beyond a shallow “Māori moved to the city” explanation. The real inquiry is how identity, institutions, whanaungatanga, and political action changed when people were pushed away from traditional anchors and had to rebuild community in new places.
Free identity inquiry, premium adaptation path
This version is ready to print. Te Wānanga becomes useful when you want a version tied to your local city, a whānau oral history task, or a more scaffolded junior sheet with visual supports.
- Generate a localised version focused on your town, suburb, or urban marae.
- Build support and extension variants for mixed-readiness classes.
- Save a class-adapted identity inquiry into My Kete for future reuse.
Kaiako planning snapshot
- Use length: 25-35 minutes for inquiry and discussion, or longer if paired with source work and oral histories.
- Grouping: Individual annotation, then pairs for compare-and-contrast discussion.
- Prep: Decide whether your emphasis is on migration causes, urban marae, political awakening, or pan-tribal identity.
- Teaching move: Keep the language of adaptation, innovation, and collective care visible alongside challenge and displacement.
- Support / stretch: Support with one concept card and sentence starters; stretch with present-day comparisons and local examples.
Resources already provided
- Concept cards that foreground both challenge and resilience
- Write-on compare-and-contrast spaces and identity mapping
- Prompts that connect migration to activism and institutional change
- Room for drawing and writing, not just single-line answers
- A matching teacher-only curriculum companion
If students are asked to think about identity, they need more than one paragraph of background. They need a structured way to notice complexity.
Ngā Whāinga Akoranga / Learning Intentions
- We are learning how urban migration changed Māori identity and community structures.
- We are learning how new institutions and relationships helped Māori adapt in the city.
- We are learning how those changes fed into political awareness and collective action.
Paearu Angitu / Success Criteria
- I can describe at least two ways urban life changed Māori experience.
- I can explain one example of adaptation, innovation, or institution-building.
- I can connect urban identity formation to later activism or current Aotearoa questions.
Curriculum integration / Te Marautanga alignment
The companion page makes the curriculum fit explicit across relationships over time, systems, identity, and social change in Aotearoa histories.
Mātauranga Māori and identity note
Urban Māori identity did not replace whakapapa or iwi identity. Through a mātauranga Māori lens, it can be understood as a response to new conditions: people carried tikanga, relationships, and memory into the city and created new spaces to sustain them.
Push and pull factors
Urban migration was shaped by land loss, employment pressure, state policy, education, housing, and the promise of opportunity.
New institutions
Urban marae, welfare organisations, kapa haka, sports clubs, and church networks helped create belonging in new places.
Pan-tribal identity
City life often required people from many iwi to work together in new ways while still holding to whakapapa and local belonging.
Political awakening
Shared experience of racism, policing, housing stress, and language loss helped fuel organised action and stronger political voice.
What was hard?
List the pressures or losses that whānau might have faced in the shift to urban life.
What was created?
List the new forms of connection, organisation, or identity that Māori built in response.
Why does it matter?
Explain how this history helps us understand later activism or contemporary urban Māori life.
Identity map
Sketch or label the people, places, institutions, and values that might shape urban Māori identity. Include ideas like whenua, iwi, marae, language, sport, music, protest, housing, and whanaungatanga.
One idea that challenged my assumptions
One institution or practice I want to know more about
One connection to present-day Aotearoa
Hononga Marautanga · Curriculum Alignment
Social Sciences — Tikanga ā-Iwi
Level 3–4: Investigate social, cultural, environmental, and economic questions; gather and evaluate evidence from diverse sources; communicate findings and reasoning clearly for different audiences and purposes.
English — Communication
Level 3–4: Read, interpret, and evaluate information texts; write clearly and purposefully for specific audiences; apply critical thinking skills to evaluate sources and construct well-reasoned responses.
Aronga Mātauranga Māori
This resource sits within a kaupapa that recognises mātauranga Māori as a living knowledge system with its own frameworks, values, and ways of understanding the world. The New Zealand Curriculum calls for learning that reflects the bicultural partnership of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, which means every subject area has an obligation to engage authentically with Māori perspectives — not as cultural decoration but as substantive contributions to how we understand our topics. The concepts of manaakitanga (care for others), kaitiakitanga (guardianship), whanaungatanga (relationship and belonging), and tino rangatiratanga (self-determination) provide a values framework applicable across all learning areas, and all are relevant to the work in this handout.
Tuhia ōu whakaaro · Write Your Thoughts
Reflect on what you have learned today. What was the most important idea? What question do you still have?
Ngā Rauemi Tautoko · Support Materials
This handout is designed to be used alongside the broader unit resources available at Te Kete Ako handouts library. Related resources from the same unit are linked in the unit planner. All resources are provided — no additional preparation is required to use this handout in your classroom.
📋 Teacher Planning Snapshot
Ngā Whāinga Ako — Learning Intentions
Students will engage with this resource to develop a decolonized understanding of Aotearoa's history — reading the past through the eyes of tangata whenua, examining primary sources critically, and understanding how colonisation continues to shape the present. This unit centres mana Māori as the starting point, not a footnote.
Ngā Paearu Angitū — Success Criteria
- ✅ Students can analyse a historical source for perspective, reliability, and significance — including identifying whose voices are centred or absent.
- ✅ Students can explain how a specific historical event — such as the NZ Wars, land confiscations, or the Dawn Raids — connects to present-day inequities and Māori-led responses.
Differentiation & Inclusion
Scaffold support: Provide annotated source analysis frames for entry-level access — guiding students through the OPCVL or SOLO process step by step. Offer extension tasks asking students to compare a colonial-era source with a contemporary Māori account of the same event, analysing how the historical narrative has been contested and reclaimed.
ELL / ESOL: Primary source language (particularly 19th-century English) presents specific challenges — pre-read sources with students and pre-teach archaic or specialist vocabulary. Allow students to express historical analysis in their home language first before translating to English. Bilingual glossaries support engagement without reducing intellectual demand. Some ELL students may bring first-hand experience of colonisation from other contexts — honour these as valid comparative perspectives.
Inclusion: Decolonized history can surface difficult emotions for Māori students encountering colonial violence and injustice in the curriculum for the first time. Create a trauma-informed classroom. Neurodiverse learners benefit from chunked tasks and clear analytical scaffolds. Ensure all students understand that the purpose of this unit is not guilt but understanding — and that understanding is the foundation of partnership and change.
Mātauranga Māori lens: Decolonizing history means more than "adding Māori perspectives" — it means recognising that the dominant historical narrative itself is a colonial artefact. Whakapapa is an alternative historical framework: tracing connections, obligations, and continuity across time. The NZ Wars were not distant events — their consequences live in land ownership patterns, economic disparities, and community structures today. Tino rangatiratanga — the right of self-determination — was not surrendered at Waitangi and has been asserted continuously through protest, legislation, and resurgence. Teaching this history is an obligation of Te Tiriti partnership.
Prior knowledge: Students benefit from foundational knowledge of the Treaty of Waitangi and its context. No specialist prior knowledge required for entry-level source analysis tasks — scaffolds are provided.
Curriculum alignment
- Aotearoa New Zealand Histories — Know: Understand that colonisation was a global process that had a specific and profound impact on tangata whenua in Aotearoa, and that Māori responses to colonisation have been continuous and varied.
- Do — Social Studies: Explore perspectives, use evidence to form conclusions, and share ideas — analyse primary sources, compare historical perspectives, and present findings.