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Written by Luke Willis Thompson

I'd like to start with Tēnā koutou! Apologies if you already knew but it's a concept of acknowledgement and a recognition of all the history it took to get you here today. Read aloud like this it sounds simple enough but like most things it gets messy very fast.

If we apply this concept to everyone who reads this, we can see that these lines that got you to me, or me to you, follow us around. Inevitably they will have begun to collide and interweave. So what I want to ask is how do we make sense of this everyday interweaving? What part of what made me messed with what part of what made you? Take our names for example; we could have been called so many things. Now that everybody's history has happened how do we feel ok with what we call ourselves? It often feels our names don't fit quite right.

Anyway, you are here. That's possibly the main thing coz now we can untangle all this spaghetti.