Borrin Foundation – Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga Postgraduate Scholarship for Rachael Evans

About Rachael

Ngāti Tama, Ngāti Pamoana, Pākehā

Rachael is a legal scholar with an interest in the rangatiratanga and kāwanatanga spheres, and how they share power. She has whakapapa to Ngāti Tama (Taranaki) and Ngāti Pamoana (Whanganui), and pakeha settler ancestry. Rachael is a māmā of one and is based at UC, where she also teaches into Legal System, Te Tiriti, and Public Law. She is the Ngāi Tahu Centre representative to the Faculty and also the Co-Director of the LLM by thesis degree.

Coming from a practice background, Rachael was a legal advisor at Te Kura Taka Pini, the Ngāi Tahu Freshwater project, and prior to that, a litigator at Rhodes & Co, Christchurch. She has also been a judges’ clerk in the District Court at Christchurch. Her 2014 LLM thesis examined co-governance regimes with a focus on Ngāi Tahu arrangements in Canterbury and the Tūhoe settlement in Te Urewera. Rachael is a fellow of the First Nations’ Futures Program at Stanford University and has also worked with Tulo Centre of Indigenous Economics at Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, B.C. In her spare time, she loves body boarding and vegetable gardening.

What Rachael is studying

Rachael’s PhD will investigate how iwi can fully exercise their rangatiratanga outside of a reliance on Crown funds, through fiscal and regulatory authority. She is interested in legal tools to further iwi rangatiratanga that may include taxation, local government, and interdependence. Rachael thrives in finding ‘grey space’ in the law and policy to help iwi and hapū achieve their goals.

She is supervised by Professor John Hopkins and Associate Professor Elizabeth Macpherson at UC.

Scholarship amount

$80,000