What has brought you the most joy or strength this year? 

Scarlet | Kaikohe

Scarlet shares how moving to Kaikohe has grounded her whānau and her business in whenua and whakapapa. Scarlet is the owner and founder of Kairākau Awhi, the world’s only Māori industry registered virtual assistant agency.

“Something that really really brings me joy is just around how important whakapapa is and hapūtanga is and how easy it is to hold you in all of your mahi.

With Kairākau Awhi I was going through this journey of whakapapa of realising the mātauranga that I did have. Even though I didn’t know it as that. Since being here the intention has been to put a bit of a pou in the ground.

So it’s easy in virtual digital land to still have a little bit of a disconnect and especially when I was trying to ground everything in whakapapa because that was where I was getting my strength and my confidence. This brings it home a little bit, te taha wairua (spiritual aspect) that we were missing in Kairākau Awhi so it’s been a real defining moment for the business as well. Just in being able to embed it and ground it in whenua.

So my Nana Pā – I didn’t have much to do with him until about 2011-2012. But he’s got some very tūturu (original) whakapapa lines here. We engaged with him in the last sort of two to three years of his life. Didn’t get to make it here with him but I’ve been able to develop those relationships since and I’m the first of his whakapapa line to be here since he left in about the, I think the sixties, fifties or sixties, with his oldest two children.

So I definitely came with not much but my hapū, my marae, my whakapapa connections, have held me here. They’ve given me a sense of identity that I’ve never experienced before and it has been an unlocking for me.

We’ve got five tamariki now. All of them that are talking are fluent in their reo. We had a relatively safe life and existence down in Tāmaki. We had a lot of whakapapa down there but I guess coming up here and sacrificing all of that you’ve gotta make it count for your tamariki.

The thing I love most about living in Kaikohe is that everyone knows that we are rangatira. So it’s not a case of ‘if’ it’s just a known, everyone’s assuming their authority over their land, over their whānau.”