Increasing Māori community participation in the RSI sector
This snippet comes from the submission of the Indigenous Genomics Institute. Ko wai mātou? The Indigenous Genomics Institute (IGI) (currently an LLC in the process of transferring to a charitable trust) began coalescing in 2020 in recognition that a gap existed in the RSI ecosystem in “for Māori, by Māori” guidance and leadership around genomics. We aim to be a resource and a voice for Māori communities, hapū, and iwi when it comes to educating whānau about genomics, empowering them to utilise genomics for their own kaupapa, and engaging with genomics researchers.
There are two major roles in the RSI sector: the person/people who ask the questions, and person/people who answer the questions (credit to Willy-John Martin for this concept from one of the MBIE hui). Before Europeans arrived in Aotearoa, Māori carried out both of these roles through wānanga and the development of mātaraunga. However, following colonisation, the asking/answering roles have both been concentrated in TEOs, CRIs and other RSI structures of the crown. This is disempowering, and any reimagining of the RSI system needs to re-balance this, to make sure the questions getting asked in the RSI system reflect questions important to Māori communities.
Addressing this will require dedicated funding to support research originating out of Māori communities, including base-grant funding if that is the model that is adopted for the rest of the RSI ecosystem. Currently, many funding streams are difficult to navigate and take a large amount of time to apply for. While institutional support for developing these grant applications is available in many current RSI institutes, local communities are not likely to be as specialised or resourced for submitting grant applications. The process of applying for funding needs to be simple and streamlined enough that is not overly onerous for communities.
Researcher-driven questions are likely to continue under a revised RSI system. It is important to note that current funding schemes – particularly for early career researchers who have not have time to previously establish relationships with Māori communities – do not align with the time necessary to build adequate relationships with local communities. In addition, communities are not funded for the time they spend engaging with researchers, unless researchers build this into their grants. A re-imagined RSI sector needs a code of ethics/funding/time for these interactions, to ensure communities are not bearing the cost of “consultation”. In addition, mechanisms for communities to ‘enter’ into existing platforms of research (e.g. the NSCs, the CoREs, Genomics Aotearoa etc) need to be made more clear.
Finally, Māori communities should be considered in any discussion of research infrastructure in Aotearoa. Currently, access to research infrastructure being restricted to institutions within the RSI sector bakes in inequities e.g. until Māori are as equally represented in computationally-heavy disciplines as Tangata Te Tiriti, the number of users of infrastructure, such as NeSI, will not be equitable. How can this be addressed so that communities can be empowered to access and utilise these resources themselves, rather than having to be incorporated in an institute? Could attempts to mitigate these inequities take the form of addressing long-acknowledged substandard infrastructure (i.e. internet) in areas where a large proportion of the population is Māori?
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