Helping the ‘Helping hands’: supporting Māori postgraduates to advance community aspirations for environmental research

Postgraduate research is complex enough, but Indigenous students face unique challenges and additional expectations. For instance, they are often strongly motivated for their tertiary education to support their community’s aspirations but distanced from those communities. We are wāhine (women) Māori researchers working to restore various local, natural environments in alignment with our iwi/hapū (tribe/subtribe) interests. We all gained funding to support this work through contestable postgraduate scholarships or research revenue, enjoying a high level of autonomy to design projects, under incentives designed to support Māori capability and potential. Using digital collective autoethnography, we reflected upon and articulated how our iwi/hapū and whānau (family) aspirations shaped our study and research, and how university and external research funding supported these pursuits. Through these narratives, we highlight the driving influence of iwi/community aspirations, consider how universities and the research sector currently align with these, identify barriers, and finally discuss what deep tautoko (support) looks like. We also reflect on how our postgraduate experiences and learnings have influenced and guided our subsequent work. Our collective experiences encompass potentially transformative approaches in community-driven, publicly funded, tertiary research; so, we finish by identifying specific mechanisms that could amplify these approaches.