This week, as I sat in the departure lounge returning to Rarotonga, it felt like a family meeting, writes Thomas Tarurongo Wynne.

So many of our people were in transit, be it medical, work agency, family, government or socially, we continue to live out our deeply connected migratory DNA, moving across oceans to get what we need so we can survive and thrive.

I reflected on the flight, not just on the many journeys we as a people have made —from the moana to the coral bed and mountain islands. That we have also travelled from our parataito to the Auckland hospital bed.

At the Auckland International Airport, I met several Cook Islands families, burdened not by suitcases but by the weight of our healthcare system’s gaps. Many travel for critical medical care – dialysis, surgery, oncology – because our hospitals cannot carry the load. The strain these places on the ‘money bed’ of our families in Aotearoa is real and unrelenting. Between airfares, temporary accommodation, loss of work and long stays, families stretch thin, carrying a cost that should not fall solely on their shoulders and their limited resources.

Then there is the third bed we rarely talk about – the bedrock of our knowledge, our research, and our cultural intelligence. Our knowledge bed. A recent symposium in Rarotonga invited academics – game changers in their own right, many Aotearoa Māori and celebrated in Aotearoa.

Yet watching on from afar, I couldn’t help but wonder where were our own- academics like Dr Teremoana Maua-Hodges, Professor Jean Mitaera, Dr Jean Hunter, Dr Emma Powell, Dr Sam Manuela, Inano Taripo, Liam Kokaua – each of them acclaimed weavers of our knowledge, of our worldview who have not only worked in academia but have indigenised it with our worldview, our Pe’u Maori and our stories. 

They have carved spaces for an Avaiki Nui or Cook Islands worldview in health, education, social policy, social work, maths education and psychology. Yet their seats remain empty at some of our most important tables. As academic and Taunga Korero, Mitaera Ngatae Teatuakaro Michael Tavioni, calls us to be more Maori – let us be assured that this is happening, by our people and for our people as we speak.

The Cook Islands must think carefully about which beds, be they seabed, hospital beds, knowledge beds, where we invest – and why we need to further examine our resources and not just the one at the bottom of the ocean.

The seabed is not the only resource under threat. Our hospital beds are stretched, our families exhausted, and our academic beds are often left made but unslept, while others tell our stories and teach us to aka eke or “decolonise” our thinking on our behalf.

Maybe in that respect they are right. When we overlook our own above others, do we need to decolonise our thinking. When we need to further invest in health to assure services are not met in other countries, do we need to decolonise our thinking and if our focus is only on the resources on our seafloor, what are the resources we miss instead.

Let us not feed our children with the food of others, while our own teachers prepare nourishing food that is left to go cold.

“E kai venevene te tuatua a te monomono korero” – Delicious food is the word of the teacher.

Nonetheless, it is so good to be home, to hear the roosters crowing all day, the dogs walking along the road, and motorbikes whizzing by as we now sit on our porch and connect again with those we love, with a land we connect with and a future that each day seems so much more complicated and complex, even here within the reef.