Tukua mai he kapunga oneone
ki ahau hei tangi māku

Kauae Raro Research Collective was founded in 2019 by Lanae Cable (Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Pūkeko, Ngāi Tūhoe, Ngāti Maru ki Hauraki), Jordan Davey-Emms (Ngāti Pākeha), and Sarah Hudson (Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Pūkeko, Ngāi Tūhoe). We started out as a group of friends with interests in research, art, pottery, rongoā Māori and whakapapa. One day we took a road trip to visit ngā ana whakairo (Māori rock art sites) in our rohe and we fell in love with whenua.

A few years later, the three of us are all still based along the Ōhinemataroa river in Whakatāne, but our Kauae Raro Research Collective community has grown to connect with ringatoi throughout Aotearoa and across the moana.

As a collective, we are dedicated to researching and sharing our mahi looking at whenua as an art material, a component of ceremony, for personal adornment and as rongoā. We publish elements of our research journey here at kauaeraro.com and over on Instagram.

Our practice is focused on the retention and promotion of mātauranga Māori around this beautiful resource at our feet - a taonga to which we belong to as tangata whenua.

We share this mātauranga to fill gaps in our collective knowledge and encourage reconnection. As Māori, we already face so much gatekeeping- systematically, academically, culturally and actual physical locked gates that keep us from our ancestral lands. Kauae Raro Resarch Collective do not wish to play a part in the violence of gatekeeping, our focus is to model our reciprocal, responsible practice of relating to the land in the hopes that others find their way own way of enacting kaitiakitanga too.