Background: The World Health Organization (WHO) has called for global approaches to palliative care development. Yet it is questionable whether one-size-fits-all solutions can accommodate international disparities in palliative care need. More flexible research methods are called for in order to understand diverse priorities at local levels. This is especially imperative for Indigenous populations and other groups underrepresented in the palliative care evidence-base. Digital storytelling (DST) offers the potential to be one such method. Digital stories are short first-person videos that tell a story of great significance to the creator. The method has already found a place within public health research and has been described as a useful, emergent method for community-based participatory research. Methods: The aim of this study was to explore Māori participants' views on DST's usefulness, from an Indigenous perspective, as a research method within the discipline of palliative care. The digital storytelling method was adapted to include Māori cultural protocols. Data capturing participant experience of the study were collected using participant observation and anonymous questionnaires. Eight participants, seven women and one man, took part. Field notes and questionnaire data were analysed using critical thematic analysis. Results: Two main themes were identified during analyses: 1) issues that facilitated digital storytelling's usefulness as a research method for Māori reporting on end of life caregiving; and 2) issues that hindered this process. All subthemes identified: recruitment, the pōwhiri process, (Māori formal welcome of visitors) and technology, related to both main themes and are presented in this way. Conclusion:Digital storytelling is an emerging method useful for exploring Indigenous palliative care issues. In line with a Health Promoting Palliative Care approach that centres research in communities, it helps meet the need for diverse approaches to involve underrepresented groups.

Indigenous scholars have recently focused on the Hollywood western and the figure of the cinematic cowboy as particularly potent sites of identification in twentieth century Oceania. Curiously, neither the genre nor the icon figures prominently in current film scholarship about the Pacific. One of the reasons is that westerns have been considered particularly paradigmatic of cinema's imperial legacy. The genre's tendency to reaffirm the dominance of white masculinity at the expense of Indigenous people, suggests that westerns ought to have attracted utter contempt in colonial settings such as Samoa and New Zealand. The fact that the opposite seems to have been true, that westerns and cowboys were not only admired in Oceania but even imitated, cannot be simply dismissed as yet another example of 'spectators […] unwittingly sutured into a colonialist perspective ' (Shohat and Stam 1994: 12). Instead, the cowboy constitutes a complex site around which political critique, corporeal desire and modern spectacle coalesce. This article interrogates why the western appears to have been overlooked, how the cowboy can be seen as a significant cultural influence in the Pacific, and how he might shed light on historical spectatorial practices and preferences in the region.

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