“I like taking the kids back to Waitara and Urenui. Going back home and realising that wi-fi is not the norm … that Sky television is not normal either. Most of the whānau don’t have doors on their bedrooms, let alone wallpaper on the walls. There’s a stark contrast that they can see.”
“The #MeToo movement hasn’t flowed through our Pacific communities as publicly as it has elsewhere. I think a big part of that is that the ones who’ve hurt us are our family. So outing our assaulter hurts us in new ways, and brings back the old pain.”
“It’s not enough for Pākehā readers and publishers to ‘love’ Pasifika or Māori or ‘other’ writers, while barely giving them space in print.”
"If you understand the technology and how to use it, then you can deliver important messages." Gaming developer and winner of Māori Entrepreneurial Leader award, Maru Nihoniho.
“We grew up on our marae at Waipatu and we didn’t know there were Pākehā. We only saw and breathed Māori until Sunday school, or until we had to go to the dentist or the doctor. They were the only Pākehā we saw.”
"I've been through tough times … and it’s made me much better equipped to do the health work that I do now, because I understand, through my own experience, just how tough disabilities and mental health problems can be on families.” - Counties Manukau DHB chair Mark Gosche.
“All you can do is hold on, hold on, and then they break your hold, and they take you away, and you're screaming.”
"I think for those of us who identify as Pākehā, or who grew up in Pākehā dominant spaces, there's a special responsibility to strive to be aware of our own advantages in Aotearoa New Zealand."
“All that has come out of the moko kauae debate is that, as Māori, we’re still having to justify ourselves in order to appease those who think that what is ours should also be theirs.”
For a decade or more, there have been no marked gains in economic progress for Māori. Instead, there’s been stagnation and even some setbacks.
"The bliss of freedom enjoyed by those who have power should never mean the right to cause pain to those who are comparatively powerless."
“I lived to make my mum happy . . . And hiding my truth was one way I tried to do that. I wanted to protect the both of us.”
My daughter’s “coming out” momentarily knocked the life out of her mother and me.
The concept of wearing allegiances on the face, of using the skin as a canvas to tell a personal story . . . was a distinctly Māori expression.
Remembering the mother of the nation, Whina Cooper — a tough, uncompromising mother who understood the power of protest and the political fray.
"Being an outsider because of my personality quirks was an identity I could embrace. Better than being defined purely by my lack of culture and language. Give me Crazy Pālangi over plain Pālangi any day."
When I hear a child saying she hates Pākehā, it doesn’t sit right with me. It’s the same when I hear people referring to the “bloody Pākehās”.
The good news is that the country seems to be in a process of recovery — and for Pākehā, discovery — of the Māori conceptual world.
I grew up in a predominantly Pākehā town in the South Island. My mother is Pākehā. My father, who...
"Our ancestral languages and concepts, in their purest forms, are largely untouched by colonisation and Christianity."
Parents who want their children to learn in te reo Māori are always compromising — whether it’s discovering your local school isn’t that supportive of te reo or whether you need to be able to afford an hour-long commute to get to your pēpi’s puna reo.
In the opening sequence of the cult classic, The Great Silence, the cowboy — a lone figure on a...
We’ve done a fair few te reo stories on e-Tangata. But it seems you can never have too many,...
Bob Jones’s column on Māori was “mean, malicious and infantile”, but it gets a Press Council pass under the humour defence.
Keith Ikin, the new man at the helm of the Māori Television Service, is bringing a fresh...
I love a good debate. When I was at St Joseph’s Māori Girls’ College, I was in the school debating...
There’s not much that Wena Harawira can’t do or hasn’t done in radio or...
Being original and unique is an enormous reason that Black Grace is still here. We don't copy what happens in Europe or anywhere else.
“We were constantly finding ourselves among the firsts. It was scary because there wasn't enough work for us — and we had such a little voice in the industry.”
“When I was at school, I already knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to dance. But people would laugh under their breath when I told them because, in their opinion, it wasn’t a ‘realistic career’.”
James Nokise comes from a family with more than a few church ministers — his dad and grandfather...
The Great South Road was built in 1862 to carry a British army into the Waikato kingdom. When the British invaded the Waikato in 1863, soldiers shared the road with Māori refugees from Auckland. Scott Hamilton revisits that history in this excerpt from his book 'Ghost South Road'.
“As the arrests began, I was overwhelmed with emotion. Tears streamed down my face, not because I was scared or angry, but because, at that moment, there was nowhere in the world I’d rather have been than right there with those people.”
“The truth is that the Treaty settlements aren't that big. Initially, when the $1 billion fiscal cap for the settlements was announced, I calculated that what was needed was in fact around $100 billion. So Māori are getting a very small contribution.”
“For many Māori girls who grew up in Rotorua during the 1960s, the guides were our heroes. Our superwomen. Our warrior princesses.”
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