Maru Nihoniho: How years of playing spacies finally paid off
“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.
Kōrero
Reflections
‘You’re still my baby and I love you’
“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.”
History
Great South Road: The Road of Refugees
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’.
Ngahiwi Tomoana: Get out of the way. We’re coming through.
“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.”
Vui Mark Gosche: From groundsman to chairman of the board
"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.
‘Keep your bags packed, my baby. I’ll come back and get you.’
“All you can do is hold on, hold on, and then they break your hold, and they take you away, and you're screaming.”
Brian Easton: Māori have been trapped in a poverty cycle
“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.”
Comment & Analysis
Racism and White Defensiveness in Aotearoa: A Pākehā Perspective
"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."
Respecting what we’re prepared to share and not share
“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.”
Heke Tangata: The ebbing tide
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.
Moana Jackson: No one’s exercise of free speech should make another feel less free
"The bliss of freedom enjoyed by those who have power should never mean the right to cause pain to those who are comparatively powerless."
Reflections
The day our daughter told us she wasn’t straight
My daughter’s “coming out” momentarily knocked the life out of her mother and me.
Of your moko you cannot be deprived
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.
One tough mother
Remembering the mother of the nation, Whina Cooper — a tough, uncompromising mother who understood the power of protest and the political fray.
Princesses — and the sanitising of British history
“For many Māori girls who grew up in Rotorua during the 1960s, the guides were our heroes. Our superwomen. Our warrior princesses.”
Identity
I’ve tried to learn Tongan, and I’ve tried to be Tongan
"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."
My mother is Pākehā — and I love her
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”.
Old certainties, old prejudices, old fears are losing their grip
The good news is that the country seems to be in a process of recovery — and for Pākehā, discovery — of the Māori conceptual world.
Why I didn’t sit with the other Māori girls at school
I grew up in a predominantly Pākehā town in the South Island. My mother is Pākehā. My father, who...
Reo
Holding on to all our ancestral languages
"Our ancestral languages and concepts, in their purest forms, are largely untouched by colonisation and Christianity."
Stacey Morrison: What I’d do if I was the boss of education
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.
The Great Silence — the heartbreak of losing te reo
In the opening sequence of the cult classic, The Great Silence, the cowboy — a lone figure on a...
It all started with Ten Guitars
We’ve done a fair few te reo stories on e-Tangata. But it seems you can never have too many,...
Media
‘I was joking’: the all-purpose humour defence
Bob Jones’s column on Māori was “mean, malicious and infantile”, but it gets a Press Council pass under the humour defence.
Keith Ikin: Steering Māori Television along new paths
Keith Ikin, the new man at the helm of the Māori Television Service, is bringing a fresh...
Moana Maniapoto: Every day is Waitangi Day
I love a good debate. When I was at St Joseph’s Māori Girls’ College, I was in the school debating...
Wena Harawira — a lifetime of achievement in Māori media
There’s not much that Wena Harawira can’t do or hasn’t done in radio or...
Arts
Neil Ieremia: Telling our stories through dance
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.
Goretti Chadwick: Smiles, star power, and soap
“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.”
Parris Goebel: This is what I was born to do
“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: Challenging perceptions, one laugh at a time
James Nokise comes from a family with more than a few church ministers — his dad and grandfather...
History
Bastion Point: A desperate struggle and a dream fulfilled
“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.”
‘He’s the one who came home’
“The same courage that saw us move back to Tauranga Moana after an absence of many generations is needed again to take this next step. To finally be invested completely in the whenua of our ancestors. Our branch of the Bidois whānau will have a foothold again.”
‘Gather up the bloodstained soil’
Kennedy Warne finds a connection between Parihaka and a memorial to the thousands of African-Americans who suffered the horror of death by lynching.
Remembering the women of the Mau movement in Samoa
Why do we always seem to be looking overseas for our heroines and heroes when we have so many right here at home — in our own family histories and in our hearts?
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