Old School Meets New

Laird Blackwell, Chair of Humanities at Sierra Nevada College (US), his wife Melinda, and a small group from the institution are the first ever non-Waitaha students to be invited to study at the sacred Whare Wananga O Waitaha school in NZ. The Waitaha claim to predate Maori as NZ’s indigenous people. “They want to expand the sacred Whare Wananga to the people of the world,” says Blackwell, who met Waitaha chief elder Makere Ruka Kete Hurako and her husband Peter while on leave in NZ last year. “[Now] they’re trusting us to be part of this process.”