Hei Te Wā Tītoki: Time to Hold Ground, Ground to Hold Time

The authoritarianism of the Modern/colonial (Western) one-world ontology includes an insistence on the nature of time, and this dogmatism persists in the face of other temporalities. The normative status of coloniality is evident in the ways trans and takatāpui communities are compelled to operate on straight, Settler time, from research ethics and sexualities education to medical wait times and parliamentary submissions. To begin, we outline the research on which this claim is based, which employed wānanga as a mode of co-designing decolonising, gender-affirming (sexualities) education, and how deviations from the intended approach allowed the study to centre what was important to the participants. Next, we unpack the predicaments of resistance as we sought to embrace temporal multiplicity and the need for an alternate strategy for holding spacetime. This strategy emerged through Waitī’s whaikōrero and poem, which construe the participants’ contributions as seeds to be cultivated in their own time. Across the three wānanga, three seeds emerged. Whakataukī and pūrākau are employed to unpack these seeds from the wānanga, illustrating the importance of valuing all contributions, both absent and present, and how whanaungatanga offers a strategy for meeting participants on their own terms and in their own time, kanohi ki te kanohi.