Jemaine Clement: ‘They’re tough here’
“New Zealanders are fiercely reticent. They don’t want to stand out, whereas in America they just go: ‘Wow.’” — Jemaine Clement on New Zealand audiences.
Ella Henry: Creating a new Aotearoa
“When you’re around those whānau and individuals who’ve been broken, at the heart of that brokenness is a lack of belief in how extraordinary we are as a people.” — Dr Ella Henry.
Utu for workers
“We’ve made enormous progress on social inequality. But we’ve lost ground on class equity. Working people are consciously and legally discriminated against.” — Matt McCarten.
‘English has broken my heart’
“I lose faith in my discipline quite often. English has broken my own heart several times, and it has been used for generations to make our community feel small.” — Dr Alice Te Punga Somerville.
Trust the science: the Covid-19 vaccine works
“Fear is a powerful thing. It erases whanaungatanga, that relationship and duty that bind us as Māori. In its place, it inserts false logic, slapdash principles, and conspiracies.” — Dr Anthony Jordan.
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WAKA Episode 1: The revival
"The knowledge of wayfinding and waka building was almost lost as a living practice, destined to survive only in historical journals and museums. Luckily for us, a small group took up the battle to keep them alive." — Simone Kaho.
WAKA Episode 2: The future
"Billy Harrison isn’t just carrying the mana of the Aotearoa team in this symposium. He’s the future of waka building in Aotearoa. If tārai waka is to survive here, it will need more like Billy and his teammates." — Simone Kaho.
WAKA Episode 3: Creatures of perfection
The Hawaiians are considered the best technical experts in canoe building: “They make creatures of perfection," says James Eruera.
WAKA Episode 4: The edge of old times
“I can look at the wood and see parts of the canoe. The shape. Like a vision in my head.” — Freddie Tauotaha, Tahitian master waka builder, who came to Aotearoa to finish the va'a his father started 27 years before.
Ngarimu Blair: For Ngāti Whātua, a new fight
“No one was jealous when we had one-quarter of an acre. No one was jealous when we had the city sewer pipe spewing tiko and baby foetuses and amputated arms and legs right in front of our meeting house.” — Ngarimu Blair.
Talking with Tame
“Being a short-arse, I got bullied hard by people. So I had to learn how to move, to look after myself.” — Tame Iti.
Claudia Orange and the Treaty
“We need to acknowledge that this is a partnership that we can move further forward — and that there still needs to be an open-mindedness in government, and in the public at large.” — Claudia Orange.
Tania Sharkey: The treasure in the struggle
“We were poor, man. Mum had multiple cleaning jobs, and she always told us kids to do the best jobs we could, no matter what it was. That message has stuck with me throughout my working career.” — Tania Sharkey.
Ethnicity changes the odds for babies with heart defects
“Māori and Pacific babies are more likely than Pākehā babies to receive palliative care rather than active treatment.” — Dr Simone Watkins.
The myth of tikanga in the Pākehā law
“Don’t expect the Crown to become a revolutionary and hand over, or even share, real power.” — Annette Sykes, delivering the Nin Tomas Memorial Lecture in December 2020.
Jacinda’s choice: Transformative or timid?
“The problem with social democratic parties around the world is that they’re timid. They focus on feel-good social justice issues and not nearly enough on economic justice.” — Matt McCarten.
‘Pick your own damn fruit’
“New Zealand’s colonial legacy in the Pacific is one that was inherently exploitative. We took — not just land and resources but brown bodies, too.”
Tripping over Te Tiriti
“Much of our practice is repeatedly addressing the resistance to well-documented facts. Some people just can’t believe that they have been spun a toxic yarn about our history.” — Catherine Delahunty
‘I follow the trail of blood’
“In these fields, the tūpuna lie where they fell in the swamps or in unmarked graves hastily dug by survivors, with the dead piled up around them. I swear I can sometimes hear their voices.” — Joanna Kidman.
‘Clowns wear suits, too’: the look, feel and taste of systemic racism
“Whiteness is a dance whose rhythm we all know. And our missteps invite derision and censure, as Anantha and I found in stepping out of line at this particular dinner.”
Dawn Raid — born in South Auckland
“The legacy of Dawn Raid Entertainment serves as a timely reminder that our ambition mustn't get lost in the allure of money and fame.” — Litia Tuiburelevu.
No longer scared to speak my language
“It’s only in recent years that I’ve even plucked up the courage to claim my identity, to proudly say: Yes, I am Māori.” — Siena Yates.
Cole Meyers: Bringing truth to trans stories
"We don’t just want to see our life experiences. We want change so we can fully experience our lives." — Cole Meyers, writer and producer of 'Rūrangi'.
The struggle to embrace my identity
“It’s funny to think that it took moving across the moana and immersing myself in another Pacific culture to gain an appreciation of my own.” — Terina Kaire.
Language, identity — and ‘real’ Sāmoans
“Some of the things you may have learned from those anthropology textbooks shouldn’t be seen as a bible for what a ‘real’ Sāmoan is.” — Patrick Thomsen.
Keeping Māori storytelling alive
“Ours is an oral tradition and that's important because it's not only how we share stories but how we transfer and transmit knowledge.” — Lee Timutimu.
A whānau affair
“We have almost four generations of te reo Māori speakers in our family. My goal in life before I leave this earth is that those teachings will funnel down to the next three generations after my children.” — Eli Smith.
Reflecting the reo world
“Their decision to be a reo Māori-speaking household instantly cut off friends and whānau who either didn't agree with their decision or found it too challenging to communicate solely in te reo.”
Fish and chips and a serving of te reo
“It really didn't sit well with me that, outside our home, my kids would feel like they’d have to leave that part of themselves at the door and be somebody else. To put on a mask.” — Anton Matthews.
Balancing tikanga and journalism
“Māori journalists see themselves as Māori first and journalists second.” — Atakohu Middleton on her PhD research into the influence of tikanga on reo-Māori journalism.
Indira Stewart: When one of us wins, all of us win
“When I think about the shortage of Pasifika journalists, I'm a bit surprised there aren't more of us, because we're powerful storytellers and we always have been.”—Indira Stewart, host of RNZ's new morning news show First Up.
This is not the time for white voices
“Everyone has their say in a democracy. But mostly the people who have their say in public life in New Zealand are white.”—Steve Braunias
Conversations: Lifting our voices
Our stories create the lens through which we see ourselves and our neighbours and the world around us.
Tim Worrall: Tūhoe storyteller
“We grew up proud of being Māori, proud of Ngāi Tuhoe and of our tīpuna.” — Tim Worrall.
James Eruera and his waka kaupapa
"There are very few who’ll understand how it feels to know that you’ve built this vessel that’s gone across the ocean and that’s delivered your people safely to their destination." — James Eruera, master waka carver.
Kerry Warkia: A chorus of Pacific voices
“In filmmaking, the essence is collaboration. For something to be really good, there needs to be different perspectives, techniques and skills from lots of different people.”
Lani Wendt Young: A hunger worldwide for our stories told by us
“There are lots of silly excuses that people offer for why there aren’t more of us published. They say, for instance, that we don’t like to write. We aren’t storytellers. We’re not readers. But that’s ridiculous.”
Claudia Orange: Questions of sovereignty
"The early plans for a British colony envisaged a Māori New Zealand in which settlers would somehow be accommodated," writes Claudia Orange. But, by 1840, there'd been a shift in thinking, reflecting "reluctant official acknowledgement that the tide of British colonisation could not be held back forever".
(Not quite) 250 ways to start an essay about Captain Cook
“We have been hoarding stories about Cook for 250 years now. Some of those stories are valuable, important, useful. Most of them are junk.” — Alice Te Punga Somerville.
Te Rauparaha’s migration
“In the morning when the sun was high, near midday, they migrated, they left their pā. They did not allow themselves to weep, they left Kāwhia behind, following the paths along the coast."
Who should tell our history?
"We are still here, the descendants and beneficiaries, the marginalised and reviled — so how are we going to face the truth, and how can it be taught?" — Catherine Delahunty on the teaching of New Zealand history.
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