Reikura Kahi: Fuelling a love for te reo
“It’s up to us to keep fighting for our language and ensure its survival. Our language is essential to our identity as Māori.” — Reikura Kahi.
The Dawn Raids of 1974
“No one was safe. The police just went to addresses where they knew Tongans lived, maybe tipped off by a disgruntled neighbour. And the checks were indiscriminate.” — Joris de Bres.
Rejecting the System
“We don’t need to try to shape ourselves to fit Pālagi measures of success. Because we will never win, if we just play by those rules.” — Dahlia Malaeulu.
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.
Deidre Brown: ‘Hey, Dad. What’s an architect?’
“You’ve got hundreds of years of research and development behind the wharenui that we see today. That doesn’t even take into account the building knowledge that our ancestors brought with them from Polynesia.” — Professor Deidre Brown.
Veranoa Hetet: For me, weaving is home
“Weaving is my way of connecting my past and present with my future — that is, with my children and my mokopuna.” — Veranoa Hetet.
Ema Tavola: What our artists are telling us
“I think what contemporary Pacific art tells us is what the truth of our reality is.” —artist-curator Ema Tavola.
Traci Houpapa: What keeps me up at night
“Even though our Māori asset base is now worth $70 billion, that doesn’t mean anything if our families, who are still the working poor, can’t look after one another.” —Traci Houpapa.
The housing hand-wringing is bunk
“There is a housing crisis — but only for the working class. It’s a bonanza for the owning class.” — Matt McCarten.
A vein in our bodies
“Takutai Moana is the law which, in name, repealed and replaced the inflammatory Foreshore and Seabed Act, but which, in substance, places the same heavy burden of proof on Māori.” — Connie Buchanan.
Injustice in Justice
“To the uninitiated, it can be jarring to learn that, in Aotearoa, the state outsources the prosecution of moderate and serious crime to 17 commercial law firms throughout the country.” — Tim McKinnel.
White supremacy is still the standard
“I often get asked: ‘Do you hate white South Africans?’ The answer is simple, but you must understand my story.” — Gregory Fortuin.
Underground History
“We learned of the arrests from frightened kids who came into our classrooms, wide-eyed and anxious. They talked about special police squads raiding homes and workplaces.” — Professor Welby Ings, on being a teacher during the Dawn Raids era.
Our Pacific communities do have love for us
“I know that Pacific communities do have space and love for us, even if the extremist religious groups seem to have the loudest microphones.” — Seuta’afili Dr Patrick Thomsen.
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.
Reclaiming what was lost
“That bridge tragedy in 1947 severed my links to my taha Māori. And only now, in my early 40s, am I reclaiming what was lost.” — Cornell Tukiri.
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.
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.
Breaking the circuit
“There are unhealthy consequences for our society if the mainstream media doesn’t become much more accomplished at looking beyond Pākehā interests.” — Gary Wilson.
The Māori voice comes in English as well as te reo
“English is the language that reaches all the politicians and the voters, including the journalists and teachers and lawyers and doctors and nurses and academics and business leaders and all the others who play a part in shaping our society.”
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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.
Toi Tū Toi Ora: a mind-opening experience
Visiting Toi Tū Toi Ora, Auckland Art Gallery’s exhibition of contemporary Māori art, is like being invited to a wānanga in cosmology and culture, writes Kennedy Warne.
The Māoriland story
“We define ourselves by the stories we choose to tell about ourselves. When we make films for our own people, it’s not just about the art of it, nor the business of it. We are testing the empowering potential of film.” — Tainui Stephens.
‘Cousins’ — an extract from the book
"She’d been late home and had been sent into the bathroom to bare her bottom for the cane. After the caning she’d peed, so the stick had come hitting down again For, Being, A, Dirty, Girl, Now, Clean, Up, This, Mess." — From 'Cousins', by Patricia Grace.
An interview with Patricia Grace
“My parents delivered some very intriguing one-liners which fired the imagination, such as: 'You know, you had an uncle who rode on a whale.'" — Patricia Grace.
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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