Mariameno Kapa-Kingi: Being our strongest Māori selves

You may have noticed Mariameno Kapa-Kingi sitting next to her Te Pāti Māori colleague Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke when she led that famous haka in parliament last November — and very clearly enjoying the moment. Even in parliament, the Tai Tokerau MP manages to project a warm and comforting presence, which perhaps helps to explain why she’s been called “the nanny of the universe”. (She makes you feel safe, Eden Fusitu’a wrote.) But it’s not all hugs — in true nanny style, as she tells Dale in this kōrero, she’s ever ready to fight for whānau Māori and the right to be “our strongest Māori selves”.

 

Tēnā koe, Mariameno. I always start with names and connections, so would you be kind enough to tell us your full name and how you came to carry those taonga in life.

Okay, here we go. Mariameno Kapa-Kingi is my name, and I love my name.

Mariameno is a very Aupōuri name from Te Tai Tokerau. It was bestowed on me by my darling mum, but it comes from my dad’s side, my Aupōuri side. My dad’s baby sister’s name was Mariameno, and the name was then gifted to a whānau living in Te Kao.

The Kapa bit is another old Aupōuri name, given to my dad and to many of our tūpuna. Let me just share that my tupuna, Eparaima Mutu Kapa, served in the 11th parliament. I’m in the 54th parliament. There’s a sense of obligation and commitment in our lives. The wonderful Kingi addition is the person I married, Korotangi, from Te Whānau-ā-Apanui and Tainui, Waikato, in Ngāruawāhia.

I’m one of 10 children, born to two loving parents who have now passed on. We have more than 200 mokopuna across my siblings and me. Korotangi and I have triplet boys and then a girl who was born four years later. That makes up our small Kapa-Kingi unit that lives in Onerahi, Whangārei, but I come all the way down to Wellington to do my work sometimes.

Do you have some second names as well?

No, I don’t. Mariameno was more than enough. I think it says it all.

Did teachers struggle with it? Many with Māori names were given Pākehā handles at school, but did you ensure that your teachers knew it, being a rangatira name, and how to go about pronouncing it properly?

This exact conversation came up the other day when I was at Whangārei Girls’ High School. Even to this day, some children still struggle with people murdering their names. Mine was murdered many a time, and when you’re younger, you’re not necessarily going to push back in the same way you do when you’re older. Back then, being Māori was prideful and amazing and wonderful, but the minute you stepped off your property, you had to hide it. And your name, of course.

So my name, dare I even say this, became “Maria-meno.” It was just horrendous. But you don’t realise the harm of all of it until you grow up and think: “Gee, what on earth? Why did I tolerate such things?”

It’s the same way my parents had to tolerate mistreatment, and had to adjust their thinking and their ways of living so that we were protected as Māori kids. They did not push the reo on us because that would have made us targets. Isn’t it crazy? But now, of course, we have the renaissance of the reo, and that’s a wonderful and marvellous thing.

I’m picturing you living on a farm or something. Whereabouts?

Very true. Yes, in Te Kao. I was born in Te Kao, but the hard case thing is that my mum, Te Auraki, used to do the milking every day. By the time she got to number seven, which is me, she had timed it so that she would get to the hospital just in time. It was still a horse and cart back then. She left it as long as she could, then hopped on the cart with Daddy. But they got only as far as Pukenui, which is where her doctor was. The doctor delivered me, and they wrapped me up and took me back to the farm.

Our dad had a small farm, and he wanted to make it a big farm. But things changed and he was forced to leave his homeland and come into an urban setting in Whangārei.

What happened that forced you off the land?

My dad’s name was Paratene Tipene, but banks don’t like to lend to people with a name like that, so my dad had to take the name Christopher. He applied for a loan to do more on the land, and they just said: “No, sorry, Māori boy, can’t have that.” And so, like many whānau at that time, Daddy moved us to Onerahi.

Daddy and Mummy were both fishing people — ika nui and all that — and that was how he tried to provide for us. As well as going out to cousins who had farms nearby. He’d get a beast, bring it home, kill it, hang it up in the shed and butcher it. We had our own chookies. That’s the life I lived when I was a child.

A happy life, I’m hoping. You have to be quite resilient and innovative to feed a big brood and keep them all in shoes and socks and all those things that you need to send them off to school with. Tough times or lovely times, Mariameno?

Tough. But when you’re living that life, and you’ve got your siblings around you and your whānau, it’s your lot, and you don’t really think about it.

Mummy had two jobs. She was a cleaner at the school, and she had some part-time work in an early childhood setting. She sewed our clothes. She would go into town and get some fabric, and she’d make as much as she could out of it. Everything got handed down. Those things were just a normal part of how we lived. We got on and made the most of it.

What about the reo?

I grew up really resenting the fact that we weren’t raised with the reo. I wasn’t very nice about this. I used to be really mad at my dad, and I’d go: “Gee, what a cop-out.”

Then, of course, I grew up and realised what it meant to be a Māori parent living away from your setting, your origins, and wanting to protect your children. They were preparing us for what Daddy would call the “Pākehā world.” He often told us: “Pākehā equals progress.” This is how it was for us.

So, unfortunately, my reo Māori has suffered. But I’ve tasted it, and I’m chasing it. I’m chasing it as much as I can. I don’t have the competency that my older siblings have, but I’m getting there.

You’ve worked a lot of your life on pro-Māori initiatives, in health and iwi politics and suicide prevention. How did you get into those things? Did that begin after high school?

Here’s a funny story. I’m with this vocation counsellor, and she’s got these little adverts pinned up on her wall. One for George Courts, and one for a shoe factory. And I look at the George Courts one, and say: “I think I’m gonna go to that.” And she goes: “Oh no, no, no, no. You need to go to the shoe factory.”

That’s what they now call casual racist behaviour. Anyway, I go down in my school uniform to the interview to be an office junior at George Courts, and I get the job on the spot. I stayed at George Courts for several years and left as an office senior.

Then I did a bit of time at Marsden Point for my sins. Three thousand people on a construction site. Met some really interesting people. Did that for some years and then moved on down the island to Tūwharetoa land.

Over that time, I did a bit of travel, spent some time in Japan, and fell in love with Aikido, which I’m still in love with. It’s a wonderful martial art, which I enjoy very much, hence my living in Japan.

At some point, I thought about going to university, but it didn’t draw me, not until my later life. I did some papers over the years and then ended up graduating as an adult with a reo Māori full-immersion qualification from the University of Waikato, but worked the whole time.

It seems to be a constant for you, working for our people. Was that always a driver for you?

Yes. I think I’m naturally wired for that, whether it’s with the Ngāti Hine Health Trust, where I spent many a year working, or in the Whānau Ora space, or in Oranga Tamariki which was called the Department of Social Welfare back in those days.

But always in those places, I was drawn to fight for our voice, our thinking, our aspiration, and our issues. I don’t mean that I always want to live in that fighting space, but, unfortunately, that is too often where we are needed.

Of course, I’d love to just go fishing all the time, but we don’t have the privilege of that kind of comfort because too many of our families are still not getting what they deserve.

This might sound like a strange question, but I’m curious about what you’re most proud of in regards to your iwi and its priorities?

I reflect back to the negotiation times, which I wasn’t close to, but my uncle Arthur Kapa was. He led the negotiation team to bring us to the point of what is commonly known as settling. It’s a horrible word, but we understand what it meant for us — to get to that point, knowing in our hearts, in our minds, that we deserved way, way more than that.

But you bite the bullet, get what you can, make something of it, gain back our sites of cultural significance, buy back our farm — ironically, work the land and have our own people managing it. We now have an Aupōuri manager managing our farm. Before settlement, we had cool people, but they weren’t Aupōuri people. Now it’s cooler.

What does the Treaty mean to you? And how do you accommodate people who are dismissive of the Treaty in the modern context?

When I lived in Taupō, my brother and I used to run workshops on what we called the Treaty of Waitangi — now, of course, it’s Te Tiriti o Waitangi. We said that, at the heart of the Treaty, was Māori saying: “Come. We’ll look after you. We’re good and generous people. These things here, keep your hands off them. But these other things we can share with you.” That’s still what it means to me today.

What our tūpuna worked and signed up for and accepted, we understand it innately. Despite the nonsense carrying on in the House at the moment, it still fundamentally means the same to me. I’m still very much committed to it, as are my children and my mokopuna.

But you’re in a big house with people who are deliberately dismissive of how the Treaty is interpreted, how it should be reframed in a modern context. Some say the coalition is trying to erase Māori. Talk to those matters for a moment, please, because you sit opposite these people on a day-to-day basis, realising that they don’t value the Treaty, they don’t recognise the mana of our people, and you’re forced to accommodate their ignorance.

It’s a deeply frustrating situation we find ourselves in. You’ve got a party sitting to the left of us in the House who are shockingly ignorant, and they don’t mind. They’re happy to sit in that ignorance because they have the power to do so. Our job in that context, in my view, is that we must persist: talking, describing, fighting, yelling if we have to, singing, messaging the fact that we are not going anywhere. We are here. Māori are forever.

It’s tough, but we’re tougher. A hundred thousand marchers said: “What you are planning for, and what you’re trying to do, David Seymour, is madness, and we will stop you. And if this march doesn’t stop you, another will.”

So there’s that. But the Treaty principles bill has caused such a lot of nonsense, and it’s distracted us from other bills that are coming through, which will be just as damaging.

I guess the simple truth is, we’ve got to keep going. We’ve got to keep moving. We’ve got to keep stepping up. We’ve got to be out there talking, showing, being our strongest Māori selves politically and personally.

And showing that when we all get together and organise ourselves, vote in a particular way, project in a particular way, we will get there. It’s persistence. I’m part of that and I’m grateful to be here. Because I know what my argument is, my line is. I know the essence of me, and there’s not too many here, frankly, that I’m bothered with.

We’ve seen Hana’s discontent, very visible and beamed worldwide. It’s racked up a billion views, which is amazing for a young politician from this part of the world. What are you making of this wave of rangatahi who are helping to push our people forward politically?

You have the likes of Hana, you have the likes of Eru, you have many young ones who are ready and waiting. Whether it’s in the House or outside of the House, they are ready. They are showing what it means to be conscientised, politicised and Māori. That’s a powerful mix. And we must stay close to them until they’re ready to roll.

What do you think is different politically about the Māori Party and, how would you describe its long-term future?

Primarily, we are unapologetically Māori, and that disturbs this house to its core.

When I listen to politicians here, it’s all a bit dull and boring, and the kōrero is not interesting, it’s not dynamic, and it’s repetitive. And I go: “Man, could somebody please make this worth listening to?” They regurgitate their own thinking. They can’t help themselves. They are doing what they’ve always done, and I find that boring and irritating, but they have the numbers and they hold the power and make laws which either make life better or worse for us. It is most definitely worse for us at the moment. So, what do I think about us continuing to do that?

I think that the more of us bringing the way we are Māori as politicians, the way we take to our feet and we speak our reality, the way we are being unapologetically Māori in this house. It matters now, and it will matter even more.

Long-term, what do I think? Just keep growing our competency, growing our capability, showing up wherever we can, and bringing our people into this space.

Well, Mariameno, the people of Tai Tokerau have chosen you to be their rep. How does that sit on your shoulders?

It’s a pleasure and a duty for me, Dale. I’m at a certain stage and age in my life where I have a level of experience that I’m like: “Yeah, I’m good to go. I feel ready for it. I’m wired for it, and I feel strong and resilient.”

I’d like to acknowledge Korotangi. When I spoke with Eru, I didn’t realise that pāpā was a carver and therefore an artistic thinker. I know that you two have a long-standing relationship. How does he contribute to the confidence that you exude in your mid-60s?

He’s probably my voice of reason, and that’s because he was raised in a particularly loving setting with his reo. Those lessons that come in a carving shed, which I’ve never been into, because they are tapu to those people and their place. He has all of that quite naturally it seems, and so he is quite naturally an insightful person who offers me that, all the time, even when I’m not listening. He’s steady, he’s comforting, he’s quiet. And, he’s a great dad.

You make a beautiful team. It’s been a real pleasure having a kōrero with you today, Mariameno. At the end of these kōrero, I like to ask people how they stay fresh because, as you say, you’re in Whangārei and bouncing down to Wellington to be asked to make decisions on this and that. But sometimes we need other things to do. Obviously, your Japanese martial art keeps you a bit fresh. What else do you do to take out the cobwebs and keep yourself energised for the mahi ahead?

I don’t mind having a good singalong with friends, and there are certain books that I like to read — and I read them repetitively. One is A Return to Love, by Marianne Williamson. Another is The Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker. Those sorts of writings remind me of who I am, and the role that I have.

And being with my four gorgeous amazing mokopuna. Hanging out at our whānau home in Whangārei and getting back up to Te Kao and to Whangaroa, where my mummy is from. Going to those places, remembering those people, and then remembering who I am, and where I come from. Those are pretty ordinary things really, Dale.

Very strengthening things, though. It’s been beautiful to have kōrero with you.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

E-Tangata, 2025