Introduction

Navigating the borders of a new country and a new area of work can be bewildering for the transnational social worker. This chapter introduces a cultural framework called ‘pōwhiri’, which challenges the reader to consider the experience of its process and metaphorical application to practice. It is our declared position that pōwhiri is a gift to practice from Aotearoa New Zealand for transnational social workers, for New Zealand-trained social workers and for those that we work with. In this chapter, we provide a context for our view and explain the role of host and the rationale for cultural encounter as crucial to our position. Pōwhiri is then introduced.

Relationships between parties are core to good social work practice. The social worker needs to understand their own values, principles and worldview, as well as those of the people they are working alongside. In Aotearoa New Zealand, understanding the Māori world and their history is a critical contribution to good social work practice. Māori, as the indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand, share a similar history of dispossession and injustice with other colonised indigenous peoples, and the history of their struggles over 175 years has been well canvassed elsewhere (Walker, 2004; Kawharu, 1989; Orange, 1989; see also Baines, this volume). As a colonised indigenous population, Māori have also been resilient in surviving their colonial history, with its considerable historical and current impacts. They have also maintained their constitutional status as a partner to the Crown through the Treaty of Waitangi (signed in 1840), and with its reassertion via the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975, some means of justice, redress and greater influence in the political, social and economic life of the country has started to occur (Eketone and Walker, 2013). The relationship between Māori and the Crown, or tangata whenua (hosts – people of the land) and manuhiri (visitors – people who have come from other places), is sometimes referred to as ‘biculturalism’.

Social work is one of those professions (at least peripherally) that has shown a commitment to the Treaty of Waitangi and biculturalism. In particular, this has been the case since 1986 when Puao-te-Ata-tu (Daybreak) (Ministerial Advisory Committee on a Māori Perspective for the Department of Social Welfare, 1986) was published.