There is a quiet assumption baked into a lot of technology: that the future is culturally neutral. It is not. Every app, game, dataset, and AI model carries the values of the people who built it. So the real question is not whether culture belongs in tech — it is whose culture is already there, and whose is missing.
For Māori learners, that question is personal. Too often, engaging with technology has meant leaving identity at the door — learning in someone else’s language, playing in someone else’s worlds, and being counted in someone else’s data. It does not have to work that way.
It is already happening
Some of the most interesting technology work in Aotearoa is Māori-led, and it has been building for years.
- Te Hiku Media, an iwi media organisation in Te Hiku o Te Ika, has built speech recognition technology for te reo Māori — trained on decades of archival recordings of native speakers, and governed by the communities the language belongs to. Their Papa Reo platform is a world-leading example of Indigenous language technology done on Indigenous terms.
- Māori data sovereignty — and more recently Māori algorithmic sovereignty — is a growing field of research and practice arguing that data about Māori should be subject to Māori governance, and that algorithms affecting Māori lives should reflect Māori values. This is not an abstract debate; it shapes who benefits from AI.
- Digital Natives Academy in Rotorua has spent over a decade building digital and creative tech pathways for rangatahi — esports, game development, coding, and content creation — grounded in kaupapa Māori values.
What Te Ao Māori offers technology
This is not just about representation. Te Ao Māori carries concepts that technology urgently needs: whakapapa reminds us that everything is connected and nothing exists without a history. Mana reminds us that dignity is not negotiable, including in data. Ako reminds us that teaching and learning flow both ways. Whānau reminds us that no learner is an island.
Imagine educational technology designed from those starting points — where a game knows that a learner belongs to a community, where progress is shared kōrero rather than a private score, where language is a taonga rather than a localisation afterthought.
Our small part
Iconic Games is one small Māori-owned company in this much bigger movement. We are not the pioneers of this space — organisations like the ones above cleared ground long before us. Our contribution is learning through play: digital adventures like Mīharo rooted in Te Ao Māori, printable resources that carry culture into classrooms and kitchen tables, and a design rule that the mechanic carries the learning.
The future of tech in Aotearoa does not require Māori to assimilate into it. It will be better — for everyone — when it is built with us in it.