From Plastic Windows to Wellness Framework: How Lived Experience Shapes Indigenous Health
I am breaking from my usual weekly post to introduce you to where Te Poutama o te Ora originated. A kaupapa that must be shared.
When you hear about health frameworks and wellness models, they often arrive wrapped in academic language—clean, theoretical, and somehow removed from the messy reality of actual lives. But what if I told you that one of the most comprehensive Māori wellness frameworks emerging today has its roots in something as humble and heartbreaking as plastic windows?
Matapihi Kirihou—Plastic Windows. These two words carry the weight of lived experience, intergenerational trauma, and the kind of poverty that seeps into your bones along with the cold air that no amount of plastic sheeting can keep out.
This is the story behind Te Poutama o te Ora, and it’s a story that needs to be told.
Beyond the Theory: Where Wellness Frameworks Really Come From
In the 1980s, Mason Durie gave us Te Whare Tapa Whā—the four-sided house that revolutionised how we think about Māori health. It was brilliant, and it changed everything. But here’s what often gets lost in academic discussions: theories don’t emerge from thin air. They come from real homes, real bodies, real lives shaped by forces beyond individual control.
Matapihi Kirihou pulls back the curtain on this reality. It shows us the actual homes with plastic windows, the bodies carrying trauma in the Puku (gut), the children denied te Reo Māori, the cycles of poverty and violence that don’t just affect us socially—they literally change our biology through what scientists now call epigenetic inheritance.
This isn’t just a backstory. It’s methodological testimony. It’s saying: “This framework exists because of this pain, and through this pain, and it’s designed to heal this specific kind of harm.”
The Plastic Windows: Literal and Metaphorical
Picture this: A child, eight years old, responsible for siblings, living in a house where the windows aren’t glass but plastic sheeting—makeshift barriers against the world that nevertheless let the cold, the shame, and the violence seep through. Fast forward years later: H. pylori infection, multiple infectious diseases, breast cancer. These aren’t random afflictions. They’re predictable outcomes of what scholars call “structural violence”—the systematic denial of resources, culture, language, and dignity that manifests physically in Māori bodies across generations.
The plastic windows are both real and symbolic. They represent the resourcefulness required to survive when you’re given inadequate tools. They show the shame of visible poverty. But they also reveal something powerful: even makeshift barriers provide some protection. Even imperfect solutions demonstrate our refusal to accept what colonisation determined for us.
From Matapihi Kirihou to Te Ao Mārama
The journey from plastic windows to te Ao Mārama (enlightenment, the world of light) isn’t about transcending your past or pretending trauma didn’t happen. It’s about what Leonie Pihama calls “transformative praxis”—the deliberate, conscious work of breaking cycles while honouring the resilience that enabled survival in the first place.
This is where Te Poutama o te Ora becomes radically different from wellness frameworks that ignore their origins. It doesn’t ask you to forget where you came from. It doesn’t position wellness as something separate from your history of struggle. Instead, it takes that difficult ground—the poverty, the violence, the loss of language and culture—and transforms it into the very foundation for healing.
One of the most powerful elements of Matapihi Kirihou is the inclusion of the author’s daughter’s poem. This transforms shame into whakapapa, recasting poverty and struggle not as failures to overcome, but as the honest ground from which cultural reclamation grows. It says: “This is where we came from and look what we’re building now.”
Grounded in the Body, Rooted in Lived Experience
What makes this approach methodologically sound is its adherence to the principles of Kaupapa Māori research. It centres Māori experience as legitimate knowledge production. The author becomes both researcher and research subject. Individual wellness is explicitly linked to collective liberation.
This refuses the Western academic demand that Indigenous knowledge present itself as universal or objective to be valid. Instead, Matapihi Kirihou offers beautiful, powerful particularity: one Māori woman’s journey from childhood poverty to breaking intergenerational cycles. And paradoxically, this specificity makes it universally applicable. We see ourselves in the details, not despite them.
The Science Meets the Spirit
Here’s where it gets even more interesting. Te Poutama o te Ora, emerging from this foundation, integrates contemporary scientific understanding of trauma, epigenetics, gut health, and metabolic wellness—while remaining firmly grounded in Mātauranga Māori concepts of mauri (life force), wairua (spirit), and whakapapa (genealogy, connections).
This isn’t about abandoning traditional knowledge for Western science or stubbornly rejecting helpful scientific insights out of principle. It’s what Graham Hingangaroa Smith calls “conscientization”—developing the critical consciousness that enables Indigenous peoples to use Western knowledge without being consumed by Western worldviews.
The plastic windows taught lessons that modern science confirms chronic stress from poverty and violence literally changes our bodies. Trauma gets encoded not just in our memories but in our cells. The gut—te Puku—holds our emotional and physical health in ways that connect directly to brain function, immune response, and overall wellbeing.
But Mātauranga Māori already knew this. Our Tūpuna understood the connections between physical, spiritual, emotional, and collective health long before Western science had terminology for it. Te Poutama o te Ora simply creates bridges between these knowledge systems, allowing them to reinforce rather than contradict each other.
Not Aspirational Theory—Practical Necessity
This is crucial to understand: Te Poutama o te Ora isn’t an aspirational theory from a university. It is a practical necessity born from the bodies, homes, and lives of Māori people navigating the ongoing reality of colonisation.
When you’re eight years old and responsible for younger siblings, you develop systems. When you’re living with plastic windows, you learn resourcefulness. When your body carries the weight of intergenerational trauma, you either develop comprehensive wellness practices or you don’t survive.
The nine-element framework that emerges from this foundation isn’t about achieving some perfect state of wellness depicted in glossy magazines. It’s about the daily practice of healing what colonisation broke, while building different futures for the generations coming after us.
The Transparent Markers of Structural Inequality
The plastic windows remain in the narrative as transparent markers of structural inequality. The story doesn’t hide them or gloss over them. Instead, it follows their transformation: removing them, replacing them, eventually moving beyond them into homes with proper glass windows.
This physical journey mirrors what Te Poutama o te Ora offers: not the erasure of difficult history, but its transformation into a foundation for different futures. The plastic windows taught resourcefulness, resilience, and the understanding that what is broken can be mended—even if imperfectly, even if it takes time, even if the scars remain visible.
These lessons become bedrock. They inform every element of the framework because they come from lived necessity rather than theoretical possibility.
Why This Matters Now
In a time when Indigenous wellness is increasingly commercialised and commodified, when everyone wants to sell you a decolonised version of something without doing the hard work of confronting colonial harm, Matapihi Kirihou stands as essential truth-telling.
It says: genuine decolonisation in health must begin with honesty about how colonisation lives in our bodies, our relationships, and our daily practices of eating, moving, and being in the world.
It refuses the separation of theory from lived experience. It stands with Audre Lorde’s insistence that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” and with bell hooks’ assertion that theory emerges from pain and must serve healing.
The plastic windows are not footnotes to the framework—they are its foundation. Visible, acknowledged, and transformed into the very structure that enables others to find shelter, warmth, and ultimately, wellness.
A Different Kind of Framework
What emerges from Matapihi Kirihou is a wellness framework that understands you might be starting from plastic windows. It doesn’t judge that. It doesn’t ask you to have it all figured out before you begin. It meets you where you are, with all your trauma and resilience, all your broken pieces and incredible strength.
Te Poutama o te Ora says: “Your story matters. Your pain is real. The violence done to your Tūpuna lives in your body, and healing requires acknowledging that reality, not pretending it away.”
But it also says: “You are more than your trauma. The same resilience that got you here can carry you forward. The plastic windows taught you lessons that glass never could. And from this foundation—honest, difficult, real—we build something new.”
Moving Forward
The beauty of positioning Matapihi Kirihou as essential reading alongside Te Poutama o te Ora’s theoretical and practical materials is that it keeps the framework honest. It prevents the wellness work from floating off into abstract theory disconnected from the realities of Māori lives.
Every time someone engages with the nine elements of wellness, they’re reminded: this comes from somewhere. This emerged from necessity. This is built on the foundation of real homes, real bodies, real experiences of colonisation and survival.
The plastic windows remain visible in the story—not as shame, but as a testament. They show where we’ve been. They honour what it took to survive. And they point toward where we’re going: homes with solid walls and clear glass, bodies healing from intergenerational trauma, communities reclaiming language and culture, futures where our mokopuna won’t need to be resourceful about plastic windows because they’ll have what they need to thrive.
This is the power of Matapihi Kirihou. This is why it matters. This is the foundation upon which genuine, lasting wellness can be built—not despite our difficult histories, but through them, transforming pain into purpose and plastic windows into pathways toward healing.
Matapihi Kirihou is the origin story of Te Poutama o te Ora, a comprehensive nine-element Māori wellness framework. To learn more about the framework and its practical applications, explore the full Te Poutama o te Ora materials.
TPO, the backstory is available here, and a narrated flipbook version is here; both are free.