I met Temeura Hall about a year and a half ago on a trip to New Zealand. He opened a meeting as a Māori elder, welcoming us with his warmth, his words, and an energy that I felt held the weight of wisdom and something bigger beyond himself. In that meeting, he talked about the concept of aroha, which he also shares in this interview. The concept of aroha is one in which you live and act as if you can feel the breath of another – meaning, keeping others close to you as you navigate life, living beyond just yourself.
Over the past year and a half, I have had the pleasure of getting to know more about Tem and his work as founder of the Māori values-led listed equities fund, TAHITO. On reflection, after hearing about Tem’s work, it feels so obvious that we should be drawing upon traditional wisdom to inform investment and financial flows, which is inherently about directing capital to where we attribute value. But having worked for some years in impact investing, I know it is a rare case to see people and organisations doing this meaningfully the way Tem and his team are.
I am delighted that in my role as Chief Impact Officer at Impact Investment Group, a leading Australian impact investing funds manager that seeks to use finance as a force for good, we will be deepening our relationship with Tem, as we work together with colleagues to invest for meaningful positive social and environmental outcomes in New Zealand. I was grateful to be invited to speak with him about rest and time for this issue of Dumbo Feather, and hear how his ancestral wisdom and values inform his work and the unique way he sees the world.
ERIN CASTELLAS: Let’s start with a bit about where you’re from and the work that you do.
TEMUERA HALL: Ko Te Arawa te Waka, mai Maketu ki Tongarori. Tongariro te maunga, Ko Taupo-nui-a-Tia te moana. Ko Ngāti Tuwharetoa te Iwi, Ko Ngāti Rauhoto te hapu, Ko Nukuhau te marae. That’s how we introduce ourselves, whereby we acknowledge our mountains and tribal region first. If you are from a coastal tribe you’ll talk to your ocean, if you’re an inland tribe you’ll talk to your river or your lake, because the environment sustains us through past and future generations. But it’s deeper than that. It’s the acknowledgement that the environment comes first, people come second and you as the individual are the last and least important. It’s acknowledging that we are just a reflection of those that have gone before us. And in pre-European, traditional times, when you did something that was worth remembering, your name was changed to record that event. We have managed to keep some of the traditional practices alive, but a lot of it’s been lost. It’s important to understand, particularly with the work we’re doing in reviving traditional ethics and values, to put things back in context and take people out of the centre. A lot of indigenous people would have a similar format, I think.
So in that introduction you just gave, which was lovely, thank you, you mentioned the mountains. Is that where your family and background is from?
My iwi (tribe) is Ngāti Tūwharetoa, it’s an inland tribe. We settled in the central north island also known as Te Puku o te Ika, or “the stomach of the fish.” The original name for the North Island of New Zealand was Te Ika a Maui – “the fish of Maui” – with Maui being one of our eponymous ancestors. We have a large freshwater lake called Taupō-nui-a-Tia, with Tia being another famous ancestor. You can still drink the water straight from that lake. We are blessed with a lot of mountains and forest. When you grow up in that environment you miss it if you’re away for long periods of time. My town, Taupō, is a relatively small town. I was lucky to be raised in my tribal region because it gave me a deeper connection. After completing a social sciences degree majoring in geography, I spent a number of years overseas. When I came home I ended up going straight to work for one of our large iwi forestry trusts, which had an estate in excess of 30,000 hectares of plantation forestry. My first role was deputy trust manager which involved managing and investing the internal funds of the business, and that led to managing funds for other entities. We made the conscious decision to develop this fund management capacity ourselves. Back then, our cultural values could only be applied at the risk profiling level. It was difficult to bring the values into security selection and the investment decision-making process, it was simply too early for its time. I ended up in governance at a fairly young age, partly because of the token Māori requirement on crown boards, but it was a great experience. What also happened at the same time was a strong sense of purpose emerged among a small group of us around reviving our traditional knowledge and creating a forum in which it could be taught. So we set up a wananga, a traditional school. We got the support of the elders – kaumatua (elder males) and kuia (elder females) – in our tribe to develop this traditions-based school. And we ran it for 10 years, meeting for approximately three days a month. This was running alongside developing business and finance skills. Five years ago, my wife got a role with New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, our government funded trade and export agency, so we moved to Auckland. And that is where an opportunity to build a fund based on cultural values arose within the Investment Service Group, which manages over $5 billion in client funds. They have a strong responsible investment ethic and were brave enough to support our development of an indigenous ethical and sustainable investment fund. The rest is history.
Hm. So also by way of background, tell us a bit about the fund and work that you do. Because it’s so interesting the way that our groups, Impact Investment Group and TAHITO, have come together. What you’re doing is so interesting and novel in the world. And I love that you’re bringing this idea of traditional culture wisdom and values to something that is so fundamental in terms of the institutions and systems that we’re all using.
TAHITO is an ethical and sustainable funds manager, and we’ve developed a unique way of measuring companies by drawing on Māori ancestral knowledge. We may boast about descending from a long line of warrior chiefs, but in reality we descend from a long line of star gazers. Our ancestral knowledge comes from many centuries of in-depth observation of nature and astronomy and is carried through generations in the form of genealogy, or Whakapapa we call it. This knowledge existed prior to our arrival to Aotearoa, from the period we refer to as Te Ao TAHITO. It’s the same knowledge set that enabled our ancestors to traverse and thrive across the vast Pacific Ocean. So in developing the fund, we first had to go through our traditional knowledge to identify and define our values, ethics and behaviours and ask, “How do we make these applicable in the financial markets?” We called it our “collective south intelligence,” which sounds sort of out there, but it’s essentially the Māori worldview, which is the intrinsic understanding of connection – everything’s interrelated, nothing exists of itself. With the event of colonisation, much of the traditional knowledge had been watered down, it was mostly considered “myths and legends.” The detailed creation narrative and the instructions on how to live a life, a life that’s connected and in harmony with your environment, had largely been lost. So we have been going through a process of revitalisation. And we have developed a set of indigenous values and principles that we think is a good way for guiding your investment decision-making process. We started with listed equites in financial markets and now we have expanded into direct investments, private equity, hence how we get branded as impact investors. The impact is the intent but it’s still the placement of capital to do good. So from a Māori cultural perspective we are measuring behaviours. In our language, we are saying if you increase your aroha, or your connectivity, you can then improve your mauri, which is your life force or wellbeing. So we set out on a path of measuring aroha. That can be quite esoteric for most people, and even as we’re working through this, we had to ask, “How do we convert this into a language that’s going to actually make sense?” Because so much of it is around relational behaviours that connect you to your world, and understanding how your world is connected to everyone and everything around you. In business speak it means respecting and measuring your externalities. It’s not only about connecting within your business and your supply chain, it’s also connecting with the environment and the communities you impact upon. So TAHITO is about re-building the connection between people and the environment. Arguably it is the loss of connection that underpins the major issues we face across the world, from climate change to loneliness. We believe that by re-connecting, you can drive positive change in economics, finance and all societal behaviours. It is an indigenous contribution towards a new global story of diversity, equity and sustainability. We build upon the momentum of the global initiatives created by the United Nations and the World Economic Forum which platform indigenous values as a solution to global challenges. And we try not to get pulled into sustainable themes because the indigenous view is holistic not thematic. As soon as you take one theme without considering the wider sustainability and interconnectivity, then you you no longer have an indigenous worldview. So even the term “impact” is premised on trying to solve a problem. With an indigenous approach we’re not trying to solve a problem. We’ll align, if you want us to define it that way. But ultimately we’re not trying to solve, we are measuring how far companies, and their leadership, have moved from the individual, internally-focused, self-interest type behaviours to the collective, relational, interconnected behaviours.
I love that you’re taking these principles that derive from ancestral wisdom and inherently feel really true and applying them in a way that just feels like it’s what we should have been doing all along. If we think about the things that we value and care about, why not incentivise and reinforce those things? So it’s wonderful that you’re bringing that to life in a fund. I was interested that some of those concepts you mentioned like aroha, connectivity, is very closely related to the Hawaiian word aloha, which means the feeling of someone else’s breath on you. It’s that awareness of another person. We’re in this society now where so many of us in our working lives are focused on productivity and output and filling our time with productivity, there isn’t space for being with other and using time in these deeper, meaningful ways. How do you navigate that?
It comes back to the principle around the collective self over the individual self. If we look at time in the individual sense, which most of us in the western world do, we’re talking about it in terms of one person’s lifetime. You get into the economics of that, you go, “Well these are your development years, these are your peak capital or peak earning years, and these are your retirement years.” The whole industry’s been established around a persons lifetime. A community sense of time is much more expansive, it’s about the continuation of your genealogy and making sure that that world is in an equal or better place for them. So it becomes intergenerational by default. It’s not easy because this individualistic thinking around your own personal wealth and your nuclear family has been well ingrained. And the urbanisation of society over the past couple of hundred years has meant that our capacity for being in tune with nature has largely been lost. The closest example for us is to go into the Pacific. Some villages, while struggling immensely with the impacts of climate change, are living in tune with nature. They’re thinking of the whole and thinking about the bigger context of time. So the key difference between the two notions of time is your capacity to look beyond yourself. And say, “Well actually I care more about my children’s and grandchildren’s future. How am I going to better set my children up for the future? How can they have a life equal to or better than mine?” That’s still very individualistic type thinking. But it helps you think next generation. So the challenge then is, well how do you think five generations away? How do you think beyond your own genealogy? In Maori culture and a lot of indigenous cultures, it involves understanding your past. So when we describe how we walk through life in our culture, we talk about te ao ki muri, meaning, the world behind us. In other words, we walk through life facing backwards. This is based on the understanding that the past is known and fixed and the future is unknown and unseen. So by understanding the continuum of time and looking through your generations all the way back, it gives us knowledge to walk forward. It’s the only way we can. When we introduce ourselves we always start with the waka (canoe) we arrived on some 700 years ago, if not longer. And we can then go back to Hawaiki, the place we resided before traversing the Pacific. So if you can look back that far then you can also look forward that far. It doesn’t matter how far you look back, the further you look back, the further you have to look forward. But if you put yourself in the centre and it’s all about yourself, you will only look into your lifetime.
When I hear about some of the Maori or Aboriginal wisdom, it reminds me of the way that my dad, who’s passed away now, spoke about our culture and how it was very philosophical and poetic. He was a mathematician from Taiwan but often explained things in poetry. When he said things, it was never linear. It was always a story and a roundabout. I hear that in the way you use words and you come about things. It’s different to the way we use language in western societies, which is more functional, productive and linear, which I also relate to having grown up American with an American mother with an Anglo-saxon background and of course now living in Australia. I wonder about some of the Maori ways of thinking about the life cycle, and if that is reflected in those forms of communication.
We have this simple little tau or saying that goes: “Ko te pu, ka more, ka weu, ka aka, ka rea, ka wao, ka kune, ka whe, ka tau e!" It describes the circle of life and it’s modelled on the growth cycle of a seed. So kakano is seed, ko te pu actually means to explode or to open up, and of course when a seed does open, the first root is a tap root that goes down into the Earth. It’s not the one coming above the ground. It goes into the ground and then the little rootlets stabilise the plant, and start to draw Earth’s energy. Then it appears above the ground and starts to capture the sun’s energy. It thickens, grows and spirals up into a large tree. We eventually get to hear the whe, or the song of the plant or tree, in the wind, and that is that last stage before the next seed falls and the cycle starts again. Now let’s take that internal. To create a word, to communicate or to give an instruction for someone to follow, you start with your experiences through life – what you’ve learned, all your matauranga (knowledge), all your subliminal learning. You form a word which becomes a string of words, or a sentence, which gets converted into a sound or a sound wave. And this communication which may give an instruction or create an emotional response for someone to then follow or feel, whatever the case may be, it’s the same life cycle, we’ve just internalised it. It can be referred to as the intangible transition from singularity to duality, different from the seed example whose transition is of a tangible nature – we see it in the life form.
Lovely. A lot of what you’re talking about and coming back to is the principle that nature is first. And I wonder in your experience if this is something you embody? Because you straddle traditional Maori culture and interpretations as well as operate in a very modern western context.
It’s really hard to unwind the western worldview which is around production and creating wealth and growth to really come back to the true connection and living with nature’s rhythm, which is the basis of our cultural values. It’s pretty hard unless you actually live out of a city in an environment where you are connected and feel and deeply understand the seasons and cycles. A lot of this natural rhythm understanding has been revived with natural gardening and fishing practices that are aligned with the luna cycles, and there’s a number of our mainstream universities and our kura (schools) where this knowledge and understanding is being captured and taught. Right now, we are caught up in quite a busy world with all its pressures and expectations, it’s hard to really grab a set of values that helps you break away from a primary individual wealth and self-importance framework. One problem we have is how we measure: that is, our employment statistics and everything around how much you contribute to the economy, GDP per capita. In our Māori communities we have many people who have dedicated their life towards practices like raranga (weaving) or whakairo (carving) or mahinga toi (Māori arts). They mightn’t be earning much or contributing to the economy in a GDP sense, hence they are counted as unemployed by mainstream statistics. But culturally they are very much employed, they are keeping our culture and our values alive, they’ve given their life to it and they’re teaching our kids to have a deeper relationship with the world.
I think a classic example too is the uncounted time that underpins us, time which is spent caring for others, or even caring for ourselves. None of that is counted as productivity or time and yet none of us exist without it. It’s essential to the doing. What do you do to rest?
Well you sort of don’t really when you’ve got kids do you? [Laughs]. I certainly like the bush. And there’s something about that energy, the revitalisation. I mean, science tells us now of course the oxygen is better as soon as you move into that bush environment. If you open yourself up you can connect. I also enjoy the ocean. I’m probably torn between the two. ’Cause when you’re out on the water you either fear it or you love the sense of freedom even though you’re confined on a boat. Which to some people is like a prison. For others it’s just a whole sense of freedom, the movement of the ocean, the sound of the waves and everything that’s going on around you. The stars, the clouds, the wind. That is a whole sense of relaxation and freedom if that’s your normal. There’s a reason why people like to go to the seaside. A lot of it is just the rhythm of the waves. Feeling the ocean breeze against your skin. Being in it, the sense of weightlessness and the power of it, being overpowered by a wave and dumped up on the shore. When you look through what it is that’s restoring you on a holiday, it’s not just the time away from work. It’s also allowing time to enjoy nature. When you’re in the forest you’re lost in a forest. It doesn’t take much to get lost unless you’ve got a GPS or you know the place well. That’s because it’s disorientating. Not only are you now uplifted by the energy of what the forest gives: the birdlife and the plant life and everything around you, but it’s also the sense of being lost. There’s freedom in that.
I think I realised last night that when I’m feeling overwhelmed what I’m longing for is a bit of chaos and unstructured time and space. And for me that often does feel like just walking off into nature. Interestingly my Chinese name is Kuo I-Ping, which is my destiny. I’m meant to protect the city with peace and love and the elements that my father gave me, which are water and wood. So those two things you were saying as well about the bush and the ocean, my father always said that you’ll find the peace and love when you find where the water and wood come together. So the roots of the tree meeting, where the water comes, there’s growth, or where the dock meets the shore you have adventure and also returning home. So those poetic ideas are also very much a part of my culture. And I can relate so much to this idea of rest by the sea and rest in the woods. It’s easy to let go of my thinking rhythm in those places. So how do you think about bridging that gap into the constructed world? You’re working in funds management and finance where there’s a particular rhythm to that work culture and the institutions and decisions that need to be made. And then you also are bringing in the cultural context and values that you’re working with. How do you balance those things in your own working life?
Well the immediate challenge, having developed a holistic framework which is deep in ethics and sustainability, is that you then have to live by them and uphold those ethics and values. You are compelled to ensure that everything you do in life is aligned. Moving from petrol cars and fossil fuel energy sources to clean energy for example. You are expected to teach and lead in the workplace to embrace sustainability otherwise you look hypocritical and it become quite hard to bare. A big responsibility is addressing equity in the workplace. We’re going to really struggle to address climate change, biodiversity, food security, clean water supply and the likes if we don’t also address equity. Even though historic research and data tells us that this current period that we’re living in now is the most equitable in history, the gap between the rich and poor, the haves and the have-nots, those with rights and those without rights, is still a long way from where it needs to be. The system is heavily based upon individual wealth, which drives individualistic thinking and behaviours. How then are you expected to address the issues of climate change and the biodiversity challenges with that thinking? We can’t just go to the extreme socialist position and say, “Everyone’s equal, everyone earns exactly the same.” There are enough examples in history that show us pure socialism doesn’t work. We can’t go back to our traditional tribal method of a paramount chief who makes all the decisions as that is effectively a dictatorship, even though some indigenous tribes still have that system. Capitalism has proven to be exploitative and disregards the environment and community. In our work, we are suggesting that the indigenous values and principles could inform the next stage of our societal evolution. One way we are trying to address equity is through pay equity. It’s a model which I think isn’t too unfamiliar, we are using a one to seven pay ratio. What that means when applied is that the top paid person cannot get more than seven times the bottom paid person in the organisation. Also there’s a ceiling for the capital or equity that investors receive. They may have different ratios according to different risks and stages of the entry, but generally if you are receiving a 20 percent return on your investment you’re doing quite well. Why do you need more? We are dealing with greed or “the green-eyed dragon,” as they say. It’s quite alluring to be on the high salaried corporate ladder or to invest purely for profit. It’s hard to say, “No, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to play to a higher value set based on equity, diversity, sustainability and revitalisation.” To enable this business environment you’ve got to set a strong culture working with like -minded people, supported by strong policies and principles within the business. Your partners need to also be on board as well.
You started the conversation talking about the importance of thinking not just one generation but five generations into the future. So I wondered if you had thought about what you would hope for five generations into the future, what that looks like or feels like for them, and for the planet.
In our culture we constantly challenge ourselves with this, with intergenerational thinking. Most Māori organisations I’ve worked with go into strategic planning sessions with an intergenerational view. We try to envisage the ideal world with the knowledge that there’s no such thing. And we will look back in order to understand how to look forward. So we understand the continuum of time and that life is a spiral. If you allow your religion or culture to be your celling instead of your platform, you can again be prevented from looking past yourself; it limits your ability to think with that intergenerational perspective. If you make your culture and your religious beliefs your platform, then it’s a lot easier to look forward and think multigenerational and ask what would we like the world to be for our grandkids, our great grandchildren and so on. You also need to have enduring values and principles. We have this simple concept called “te kauae runga me te kauae raro,” a lot of our traditional teachings were taught within this concept. The kauae runga is your upper jaw. That’s solid and doesn’t move. The kauae raro is your lower jaw. That moves and changes. So the upper jaw is your purpose and your values, which remain solid. The lower jaw is how you go about representing or achieving those values, which can be through your policies, your processes and practices, and they will no doubt change over time. The beauty of this simple little concept is you need both jaws to eat, otherwise you will starve and be unable to communicate. So to look forward five generations, you need some fixed values which are sustainable through time. I mean aroha is a simple one. I said before we call it connectivity, it also means love and care for others. Something that exists now, that will exist in a hundred years’ time and a thousand years’s time. Caring for the environment, caring for each other, feeling safe and nurtured, these are examples of fundamental values which will exist throughout time. It’s only now we’re waking up to realise that for these values to be enduring we actually have to be in balance and harmony with nature and looking after the environment we are in.
