Milly Grant-Mackie

Milly Grant-Mackie is a coastal geomorphologist. Her work includes climate change impacts such as sea-level rise and whānau-level research.

He mihi

Ko Milly tōku ingoa
Nō Te Rarawa rāua ko Ngāti Kahu ki Whaingaroa ahau

Growing up as Māori living in the city, but having a strong connection back to my marae, it was kind of like I was living in two worlds. I could walk in two worlds. Knowing always that I was from my marae allowed me to be very confident in my Māoritanga, even though I wasn’t brought up in te ao Māori.

Milly Grant-Mackie

Using science to benefit Māori

Milly grew up with an understanding of both scientific and Māori knowledge systems and sees science as a tool that can benefit Māori. Her research draws upon the physical sciences and is used to guide decisions about environmental changes. Her work has taken her to Hawaii to learn what Pacific peoples are doing in their response to climate change and how to share knowledge to be more resilient.

Milly wants rangatahi to know that, although studying science can seem hard, they can do it. Rangitahi don’t have to wait for a master’s degree to do the type of impactful research she is engaged in. Milly says they just need to have the right people and the right support. Milly’s friends, whānau and university colleagues have all been part of making the work she does possible.

Milly’s advice is to study something that you care about, and she thinks that climate change is a good topic because it impacts all facets of our lives, including health. She believes that it’s important to know what might happen so we’re not blindsided by the changes.

We’ve got to be proactive. We can see that with climate change, it’s already impacting people in the Pacific.

Milly Grant-Mackie

Researching sea-level rise

To get answers for her community regarding future inundation of their whenua, Milly created a digital 3D elevation model. She modelled inundation using different sea-level rise scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which provides up-to-date sea-level rise projections. This enabled her to identify where the community is likely to lose land and which dwellings might be inundated under different scenarios.

My marae has always had issues with environmental changes. When I got to a position where I could do my own research, I chose to look at something that was going to impact my marae, and sea-level rise was the most obvious.

Milly Grant-Mackie

Milly has also worked on mapping past coastal movement. The results from her research showed that, in one area, 54 metres of land had been lost from 1942 to the present day. This supported whānau knowledge and demonstrated how communities can access information for climate change action.

We found that there was a lot of erosion, which had already been known. The importance of my research is I was able to put Pākehā terminology to the observations that my whānau had already experienced.

Milly Grant-Mackie

Methodologies

When Milly is looking for answers to her research questions, she is guided by both Western science and kaupapa Māori methodologies. As an indigenous person, Milly’s research brings together different disciplines and a lot of different people from different spaces. She sees this as a way of resisting the colonial system.

My methodology comes from my values.

Milly Grant-Mackie

Milly has experienced a clash of two worlds and of two cultures, but because of her strong connection to her whānau and values, she feels she can be a protector of her whānau, her research and her whenua. She says she is using Western science institutions to help her people, but at the same time, she acknowledges that these institutions have not always helped Māori.

Activism and climate change

Milly champions the idea that we are active agents in our response to climate change rather than holding a colonial view that we are vulnerable. She says that, when we look at indigenous knowledges and their relationship to the environment and to climate change, we can see that indigenous peoples are active in the way that they respond.

Milly sees her research as a form of protest and is determined that indigenous peoples are not going to just let climate change happen to them. She wants to see rangatahi given space to talk about what they need and what they want to secure for their future – the future for our people and of generations that come after.

For a lot of Māori, they’re going to be impacted by climate change, different types of impacts. If we view ourselves as active agents to be more resilient to climate change, then it actually gives us hope. We have a strong connection with the environment and in turn a strong connection with climate change. We can do what we need to do. We’re the generation that needs to be sorting it out.

Milly Grant-Mackie