Eru Kapa-Kingi: It’s the system that’s radical, not me

Last month’s hīkoi has made Eru Kapa-Kingi (28) one of the most visible faces of a new generation of young Māori — dubbed “the kōhanga generation” because of their strength in their reo, whakapapa and identity — who’ve been stepping up and out this past year, leading the charge against the coalition government’s attacks on Te Tiriti and te ao Māori.

Eru, who graduated with first-class honours in law from Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University, is now a professional teaching fellow at Auckland University. Here he is having a kōrero with Dale about his life and whānau — his mother, Mariameno Kapa-Kingi, was the general manager of Ngāti Hine Health before being elected MP for Te Tai Tokerau in the 2023 election, and his father, Korotangi Kapa-Kingi, is a master carver who taught Māori arts at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. And about why, after leading the largest-ever protest march to parliament, he’s excited and confident about the future.

 

Mauri ora ki a koe, Eru. It’s wonderful to have a kōrero with you. I know that you helped to steward that amazing hīkoi — I was so, so proud of our people. And what an amazing whānau you come from, too.

But I like to start with names. Can you share with us how you came to carry the names you’re known by?

My name Kapa comes from my grandfather on my mother’s side. He was from Te Kao, of Te Aupōuri. But we’re also the Heke whānau from Whangaroa — Tahaawai and Ngāpuhi. And the Kingi name comes from my father, who’s Ngāitai, Te Whānau-ā-Apanui, and also Waikato. So those are all my iwi connections.

And then my middle names are Ruanui and Tia, which are Aupōuri names. And my first name, Eru, is from Eru Nehua, who passed away while my mum was hapū with me and my brothers. I’m a triplet, one of three boys.

Eru was the son of our Uncle Arthur Harawira and Whaea Wiki. Uncle Arthur was very supportive of Mum and us as a whānau when Mum was hapū with us. That’s why Mum chose Eru’s name for me. And why I have close connections to them.

I grew up in Whangārei, mostly in Onerahi, in the home that my mum was raised in with her 10 siblings, that my grandparents migrated to from Te Kao as part of the urban drift. So I had a pretty urbanised upbringing. I’ve lived all over different parts of the motu — I studied in Poneke, and now I’m living in Tāmaki. I’ve been here almost five years now.

Do you and your brothers talk about who was first and who was third?

I was third. I was maybe two minutes behind the first of us, Heemi, and a minute behind Tipene. I’ve always been the teina, and they’ve always reminded me of that. We also have a little sister who was born about five years after us.

It’s not often I get to talk to a triplet. Were you all healthy at birth, Eru?

For multiples, we were pretty big, but small compared to a single baby. I was only about 3.5 pounds, not even that. So, there was a lot of making-up needed, and feeding was obviously a challenge for Mum with three at once. But we had aunties around who were always keen to feed us on the bottle.

You probably couldn’t tell now that we were little at the start. We’ve kind of made up for it over the years. Had a few boil-ups. I’m probably the biggest out of us now.

I grew up with an older and younger brother, just the three of us. We were inseparable. I’m sure you love your bros, but there must’ve been competitive moments at times growing up?

Yeah, it’s like I’ve had best mates since I was born. But even with best mates, there are heated moments.

But no matter what, I know my brothers always have my back, and I always have theirs. It’s our superpower, I guess, having that relationship to lean on. I feel lucky to have had that kind of upbringing.

There must be a lot of expectation on you guys now, because you’ve achieved a prominence that most blokes your age wouldn’t have. A lot of our attitudes towards life, politics and the like develop around the kitchen table. Your dad has a commitment to taha Māori as an artistic teacher, and then there’s your mum’s contribution to Māori health. So I imagine a pro-Māori pride would’ve been part of the Kapa-Kingi whare. Was this the way your house rolled?

Definitely. That’s probably something I took for granted. When I was growing up, I thought that it was quite normal to speak about our rights as tangata whenua, Te Tiriti, and political matters at the dinner table. Anything other than small talk was our tikanga at home, and Māmā and Pāpā were deliberate in encouraging us to engage in those conversations, as opposed to just being listeners.

I’m grateful that we were conscientised in that way. It was only when I moved out of home that I realised that wasn’t normal, though it should be.

You’re right in terms of the role that my pāpā plays. He’s a carver, and anyone who knows how carvers work knows they don’t talk a whole lot using words. He speaks through actions and through his art form, but also through exemplifying what it means to be a tāne Māori and a pāpā Māori — lessons that my brothers and I are trying to replicate now in our journeys of fatherhood. We’re relatively new to that game, all of us.

So, yeah, those examples were a part of our lives. We also saw Mum committing her life to iwi health services and social services, working over a decade at Ngāti Hine Health Trust. We got dragged along to all of the associated kaupapa with the trust, Waitangi being a big one, doing certain youth initiatives such as the Raid Movement, a youth suicide awareness kaupapa that we were a part of.

We learned from watching our grandparents as well. My grandparents on Dad’s side were pivotal figures in the establishment of Kirikiriroa marae, an urban marae in Hamilton that was created at the direction of Te Ataairangikahu as a place for all peoples in Kirikiriroa. We were part of that environment.

And my grandparents on my mum’s side were influential as well. Seeing my grandfather doing the best that he could for his whānau opened my eyes to what survival looked like for that generation — which, a lot of the time, meant moving away from home and turning away from te ao Māori.

That reality wasn’t lost on us either — the effect that colonial education and assimilation had on our grandparents, and the raw realities of that.

These are a lot of the different views and perspectives that we were exposed to growing up, which has shaped how we think today and how we view the world.

I’d like to stay with your dad for a moment, because there’s something magic that happens in whakairo. There’s a depth to the spirituality, and a respect for whakapapa and tradition that’s inherent in that art form. And so, without having met your dad, I’m picturing a deep thinker who loves and honours our artistic traditions. What would you say of that?

My dad learned carving through his dad, Wikuki Kingi, who was one of the very first students of Piri Poutapu, one of the most, if not the most, renowned carvers of his generation. And then also through my dad’s mother, my grandmother Kirikowhai Te Wiata. Her whānau are all carvers, too. One of her mokopuna, Renata Te Wiata, is now the head carver for the Kīngitanga.

So there’s that pedigree on both sides for my pāpā. When I think about my grandfather, Koro Wi, he was much like my dad. Didn’t say much. Let the mahi do the talking. I remember distinctly Koro Wi taking me and my brothers into a carving shed, and we had a crack at this pou. We were very young and had very little experience with carving. This was a test to see whether we had the magic touch or not. We definitely didn’t (and still don’t) have an artistic bone in our bodies in terms of physical art and carving.

But what really drew my attention, and still does, is the depth behind every design aspect, and the mātauranga, the knowledge, that’s encapsulated in that entire world. In every single physical manifestation, there’s a spiritual story behind it.

And even though my dad doesn’t say much and he’s frustratingly humble a lot of the time, it’s clear that carving is a literal doorway into the world of our tūpuna and what they viewed as important, their philosophies, their tikanga.

Even though I couldn’t carve a pou to save myself, I’ve committed a lot of my life to reviving and reclaiming that mātauranga and the spirituality of te ao Māori that is inseparable from those art forms.

I’ve said to my pāpā that even though I can’t carve wood, probably my art form is carving words. And I’ve definitely taken inspiration from my pāpā in that, creating bodies of kõrero and kupu and applying those same sorts of principles of Māori philosophy in doing so. That mahi takes inspiration from our tūpuna and, hopefully, carves out a world where our mokopuna can live their best lives.

So, yeah, that’s how I’ve taken on a lot of the knowledge and experience from my pāpā.

Reo is a window into our Māori world, and I assume your mum and dad were committed to kōhanga and kura kaupapa. How important was this part of your life, so that you were strong in your identity, in your reo? What was the schooling situation for you guys?

This is where the story gets interesting, and maybe goes against the grain of what many would assume. Mum and Pāpā sent us to kōhanga for a few years when they were studying at Waikato uni, and we had one year at kura kaupapa. But then we moved north to live with my grandparents on my mother’s side in Whangārei.

Moving to Whangārei really changed a lot of our options regarding the Māori medium education that was available — and for a lot of reasons, financial included, we went to a mainstream school close to where we were living in Onerahi. We were around six or seven years old at this point, and we had yet to learn how to speak English. Our sole language was te reo Māori.

Mum and Dad were on their own reclamation journeys, because they’re second-language learners of te reo. It was the game that a lot of parents still play today — learning their reo while sending their children to kõhanga so they start out speaking only te reo Māori.

That was how we did things up until we changed into the mainstream model. And from about seven years old to about 18, the primary language, if not the only language in our lives was English.

That emphasis was strengthened when we got scholarships to go to a private school on the other side of town which focused on the Cambridge curriculum. This was a great opportunity to gain education in a Pākehā sense. But the gap between us and our Māori world kept growing wider, not least because we were the only Māori in our year that went to that school — and that was a huge change.

Onerahi, at the time that we were growing up there, had a lot of state housing and quite a prominent gang presence. It was deemed one of the hoods of Whangārei. And the school we went to for our primary and intermediate years was a decile one school.

We went from going to a school with kids who didn’t have lunch, didn’t have shoes, who came from broken homes, to a school with kids who didn’t look like us, who came from worlds of wealth that we didn’t even know existed.

It completely flipped our heads in terms of how the world works. I’m grateful for the experience in a lot of ways, but the cost of it was the connection to our ao Māori, and it wasn’t until we were considering tertiary study that we looked into te reo Māori as a possible option.

We stupidly thought it would be an easy way to get points at university, because we were pursuing other degrees. I was at law school, and I thought te reo Māori would be an easy paper for me to do, to balance out my grades. And, boy, was I wrong. The first class that I went to, I didn’t understand a single thing that was going on.

And that was confusing for me and my brothers because we thought: “We’re first-language learners of te reo Māori, and we’re at a point now where we’ve completely forgotten how to speak it.” That was an awakening moment.

At high school, it wasn’t cool to be Māori, so we weren’t motivated to speak Māori. That was why we turned our back on te reo for quite a long time. But going to university, we met other young Māori who were proving otherwise, and they were promoting being Māori, speaking Māori, kapa haka, and all of these things, which was new to us but enticing at the same time.

So we just put our heads down for a good five years at uni — and now I’m at a point where I’m confident to speak, and I’ve taught te reo Māori for a number of years since leaving uni.

There are lessons in that story for us and hopefully for others as well.

You were 16 and already interested in suicide prevention work with Raid, trying to help those who were falling prey to the “black dog” of depression. What was the motivation for you to get involved?

At that time in Whangārei — and I’m not sure that things have changed much since then — it seemed like every week there was a young Māori person taking their own life. It was quite jarring for us and our peers at school at the time. Even if we didn’t know who that person was, we probably knew someone who knew that person because Whangārei is a pretty small town.

Just knowing that those people were around our age was confronting — and there was a sense that the youth group that we were a part of with the Ngāti Hine Trust could try and do something about it.

There’s also a deeper whakapapa there with the name that I carry of Eru Nehua, who took his life before we were born. That’s why my brothers and I, and a few others, such as Phoenix Ruka, who’s currently a councillor for Whangārei and who created the name and the kaupapa itself, fronted the idea at different kaupapa, particularly up at Waitangi.

It was really just to spread awareness around suicide and to normalise talking about it, because at that time it was a fairly tapu topic.

As you emerge as a political voice, a prominent voice, your political opponents might say you’ve been radicalised. What would you say to that?

I have an interesting relationship with the word “radical”.

The way I see it, advocating for Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the truth behind it, and acting in a way that aligns with the fact that our tūpuna never ceded sovereignty in 1840 — to me there’s nothing radical about that. It’s logical, and it probably makes me the most sane person in the room.

The radical thing is the system that currently exists — a system that completely cuts across that truth, that our tūpuna never ceded sovereignty. To me, that’s the radical thing.

When we stand in our truth as tangata whenua, we’re deemed radical. And when we’re deemed radical, we’re pushed into this dark, faraway corner where we can’t do anything, and it’s disempowering.

So, I try and push back on that language and normalise our truth. To me, the only difference between a radical thought and a normal thought is time and familiarity. The more we talk about these things, and the longer we do that, the less radical, at least in our minds, they become, and the more accessible and reachable they will be.

Films, books, mentors, inspirational thinkers and readings about the mana of First Nations peoples — does anything stand out that you’ve encountered in your studies, Eru?

I was lucky that when I was at university, I got to spend time with the late Moana Jackson, and he had a profound effect on my thinking. It’s not as if I spent loads of time with him, but if you knew Moana, you would know that you didn’t need to spend that much time with him to experience his greatness and to be touched by the way he spoke and thought. Also, the likes of Joe Williams, Te Ripowai Higgins and others of Te Kawa a Māui (the School of Māori Studies at Te Herenga Waka–Victoria University) who are steeped in te ao Māori.

In terms of those I’ve read, I’ve been influenced by the likes of James Baldwin. I really love his writings, probably because he’s a poet as well, and I’m kind of obsessed with writing and words, and the way he crafts his kōrero and the messages behind them. He’s played a big part in how I think and articulate, as well as the philosophies of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. I also have a lot of time for Angela Davis and the way she frames her kōrero. I could go on for days about this stuff, but those are the ones that come to mind right now.

Obviously, there’s a lot to be furious about in the way our people have been treated and the injustices that have been foisted on us. At the same time, there’s some encouraging signs, and I’m thinking now of the non-Māori who supported and participated in the hīkoi. You could see how this cultural dimension of life in Aotearoa could be enhanced and celebrated. What do you say of the mood for change that exists not just for our people, but for those who recognise that culture is an important part of what makes this land wonderful?

I think we’re coming up to an inevitable moment in our lives where there will be a transformational change. It takes time, but I think we’re getting a lot closer to that transformational shift.

Going back to James Baldwin, one of his quotes that’s stuck with me — I can’t say it all word for word — is that the biggest enemy of any empire is time. “Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them.”

Empires with an illegitimate source of power — such as that in our country, an empire that’s founded on the untruth that our tūpuna ceded sovereignty — are operating on borrowed time, and the cracks are starting to show. Time has passed, and we are growing consciously as a people — not just Māori, but all people in Aotearoa — and starting to question the source of power and the way the system operates.

It’s a system that favours a very small minority of people, and it allows that minority to hold the vast majority of the wealth, and that’s a system that is completely foreign to tikanga Maori.

Tikanga Māori is a system of balance, a system where everyone can thrive and be healthy and well. And it’s not just Māori who’ve been struggling. Other corners of our society have been struggling as well. And I think there’s a sense of commonality there. That’s why a lot of non-Māori have joined the cause of liberation, because they know that the liberation of tangata whenua goes hand in hand with the liberation of all people in Aotearoa.

And it’s exciting to see those realisations manifesting in physical action such as the hĩkoi, when hundreds of thousands of people stood in solidarity with the kaupapa.

And yeah, you’re right, there are moments of being furious and frustrated. But for me, and maybe this is because I’ve still got a few years ahead of me, for the most part, I’m excited and I’m ready for this change, this inevitable change, which is coming.

And I’m excited because I’m confident that the world that my mokopuna will live in will be different to the one that you and I know now, but in the best way.

This brings us to the hīkoi, and I must congratulate you for the way it was conducted, the mana that those who put feet on the street carried, the way that even mainstream media saw how well it was conducted. It really reflected beautifully on our people. Can you talk about the pride on the hīkoi and perhaps some personal examples?

Pride is the perfect word for it. At the start, there was cause to be nervous as the new generation took responsibility, guided by Uncle Hone [Harawira] and his crew. But because of the weight of the whole thing, it was reassuring that they weren’t just giving us the reins and then deserting us. They stayed and provided advice and tautoko throughout, and I’m grateful for that. And I’m proud of the result of that form of kotahitanga.

Kotahitanga can come in many different forms, and that’s one: generations working together for the greater cause. And we walked the talk on that quite literally in the hīkoi.

The most touching moments for me weren’t actually the thousands of people turning up for different activation and rally points. For me, it was driving on the road between one town and another and seeing a little whānau standing on the corner of a road with their flags. Maybe there’s only five of them, but they’re waving their flags with all their heart, owning the moment in those less flashy but still very powerful, poignant ways.

Those are the moments where I shed a tear, because the beauty of the kaupapa was that it knew no bounds, and I couldn’t have guessed that it was going to have such a profound effect and comprehensively touch all our people in different ways.

Some observers of the hīkoi, who I might have bumped into in a store or something, would say: “I hope you get something out of it.”

I paused in those moments and thought: “We’ve already got something out of it.”

Just showing up was the goal and an achievement in and of itself. The difference between sitting at home on the couch and putting on your walking shoes, creating a sign and turning up on the street might not seem big, but it’s huge, particularly for a people who’ve been oppressed for almost 200 years.

Because the difference between those two moments is courage and belief in ourselves, love for ourselves, and belief in our power and our ability to recreate the world that we live in. And that’s where the magic is. This was never about some silly bill. This is about us and our mana and our magic as the Māori nation.

Have you paused to think about the impact that the hīkoi has had as a shot in the arm for Indigenous pride globally? While we may think we’re only standing proud in Aotearoa, many other peoples who were also challenged by colonialism and colonisation drew strength from it. Is that something that you’re pleased to be part of?

Most definitely. And it was a learning for me. I suppose I get a bit stuck in my Aotearoa reality, and I didn’t realise the effect that it would have globally. But I know now, through all those examples on social media, that our kaupapa is worldwide. Toitū Te Tiriti is worldwide. It has relations that live in other parts of the world that it has shared whakapapa with, and they might be called different things, but they all have the same intention and the same goal. That’s got to be scary for the coloniser as well.

The day that the movement truly globalises and connections are galvanised between all these Indigenous rights movements around the world, is the day of reckoning. The day when the world will be liberated.

Sometimes when you’re involved in the good fight, you need time to reflect and refresh. I wonder what you do to keep inspired about life and ready for the next challenge?

That’s something I’m still figuring out at the wise old age of 28. I’m still trying to balance my life, figuring out what it means to be a pāpā. I’m learning more and more the importance of prioritising time with whānau. My whānau are my strength and nourish my wairua at the best and the worst of times.

So, yeah, I’m figuring out how to balance all of that, and to find things that fill my cup that don’t require much thinking, because I tend to think deeply and critically about almost everything, and that can be exhausting at times.

I’ve been getting into baseball recently, but now that the World Series has wrapped up, I might start watching some basketball. Diving and fishing are the other ones, but I need to get back home more often to do that.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

E-Tangata, 2024