It’s been our privilege, over the 10 years that we’ve been publishing as E-Tangata, to have met many talented Māori and Pasifika writers. Some of them, like Nadine Hura, were first published on our site, which makes us especially proud when we see how they’ve flourished since they first started sharing their stories on E-T.

Nadine’s first book, Slowing the Sun, a collection of essays about climate change, was released last month — and here she is with Dale, looking back on the last decade, and explaining how the climate change kōrero can be a hopeful one.

 

I always start with names, Nadine, so can you tell us your names and how you came to carry them, and some whakapapa information?

I knew that we would start with this question, and I was thinking about the name “Nadine” and the fact that it means hope in French — and it’s funny because a lot of my writing is described as hopeful.

But it’s a bit more nuanced than that. The quote on the back of my book talks about hope being a shovel that will give you blisters. It’s a reference to the way hope doesn’t feel activated enough in the climate movement. And yet my name does mean hope, and whether or not I set out to do it, I think I am deeply engaged in and oriented towards the light.

My surname is Hura. That comes from my dad’s people, from Ngāti Hine and Ngāpuhi. So, that’s Ngāti Kahu o Torongare and Ngāti Tautahi. My Dad, Pii Hura, grew up in the Waiōmio Valley in Northland and came to Papakura in the 1960s, where he met my mum, Pamela Yates. Mum came from the north of England, next to the River Mersey in Wallasey. She was born there. My grandfather served in the war and spent four years in a prisoner of war camp in Hong Kong. When the war ended, he got a job with the New Zealand Army. I believe he was one of those known as “Ten Pound Poms”.

Mum met my dad when she was a teenager, and they spent 12 years together. I was born in Papakura, and I’ve got two older brothers, Dion and Darren, and five more siblings from my dad’s second marriage.

Was your dad in the army? Was that why he was in Papakura?

No, my dad was working on the roads. When I was growing up, I knew that he was a loader driver, but I didn’t know what that meant. Often, nowadays, when I’m driving with him around Tāmaki, I’ll say: “Did you build this road?” And without doubt, he’ll say, “Yep.” He’s really proud. It feels like he’s worked on all the roads across Tāmaki Makaurau.

My mum was studying at a hairdressing college and later became a sewing machinist, eventually becoming a factory outworker. I think they met at a dance.

Where did you do your schooling?

I went to Papakura Central School, and from there I went to Rosehill College. In the sixth form, I did a year at Westlake Girls High. That’s when my mum separated from my stepfather.

Actually, let me go back a bit because my surname, Hura, is not the name that I grew up with. The name I grew up with was Douglas, and this is why I sometimes think that names have a way of choosing for us. Hura means to uncover, and I think the process of decolonisation is one of uncovering and peeling back layers.

The surname “Douglas” belonged to my stepfather. Douglas is a Gaelic word, referring to a brook or a stream, quite often dark.

When I was married, I had my husband’s name, but when I separated, I had to choose which name to go back to, Hura or Douglas. It didn’t make sense to go back to Douglas, because my mother and my stepfather had long been separated by then. So really, the only name for me to take was Hura, and ever since then, I’ve been on this process of uncovering the layers of my whakapapa.

So, to go back to where I was in the story, I did a year at Westlake Girls, barely managed to scrape through, then did an AFS exchange in Chile for a year. I learned Spanish and loved it so much that I pretty much made it my mission to do everything that I could to get back to South America.

I came back in 1995 and studied journalism, then got a job working at the Embassy of Argentina in Wellington. It was on the back of that job and my Spanish language skills that I managed to get a job at the New Zealand embassy in Buenos Aires. I worked in Argentina for about three years. That’s where my love of languages came from.

You look quite Spanish. Did many people assume you were Chilean or Argentinian?

Definitely. Also, the pronunciation of Spanish is very similar to Māori, and often people say to me that I don’t have any accent in Spanish. Sometimes people didn’t believe me when I told them that I was from New Zealand.

I felt very at home in South America. I thought I would stay there forever. I only decided to come home when I knew I wanted to do further study.

I enrolled in a degree in social policy and sociology. I was going to do social work, but I ended up enjoying the writing and the academic and research pathway more, and so I went down a policy pathway that took me into the public sector. I worked for a while on the Good Morning show as well.

So you can speak Spanish, but like many of us, I guess, not as comfortable in te reo Māori. Tell us a little about that journey for you, Nadine.

I spent a lot of time living overseas because of my ex-husband’s work. He was working for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I spent four years in Apia with him and with our babies. We have three children. After Sāmoa, we came back to New Zealand for a few years and then went overseas again to live in Abu Dhabi. That was between 2011 and 2015.

And, at the end of that stint, there was a choice. We could have continued to travel and do another posting, but we decided that our kids needed to put down roots at home. So we came back to Tāmaki in 2015, and that was the year that I enrolled in Te Wānanga Takiura.

I was carrying more self-doubt and shame than I wanted to acknowledge at that time. I wanted to do it, but I was also afraid. What carried me through that year was my mates, those in my class encouraging me, and my kaiako.

One of them was Julian Williams. At the time, he was the librarian, and I used to hide in the whare pukapuka, and he would help me write every assignment. He was so encouraging and never judged me for how slow I was compared to others. I feel so grateful to people like that who see our potential and believe in us, even when we don’t. I have only known the most amazing and supportive kaiako. The harshest judgment comes from ourselves, I think.

For a long time, I doubted that I could ever achieve fluency, and still some part of me thinks that fluency in te reo Māori might be something that is beyond me. But what I’ve come to learn now, after 10 years, is that te reo Māori isn’t dependent on fluency. It is dependent on love and commitment, though, and that is something that I do have, and many of us have, in spades.

My partner’s father went to Te Ataarangi all his adult life, but he was never able to speak Māori. My dad can kōrero, but he gets self-conscious easily too. It’s a familiar pattern. You can understand te reo and practise the tikanga and the mātauranga, but your tongue can remain sluggish, or the words can just leave you mid-sentence.

I feel way more settled now that I understand that fluency is just one thing — and not necessarily the most important thing. Te whakarauoratanga o te reo, the revitalisation of te reo, depends on love and commitment more than anything else.

Let’s talk about writing and who you’ve been influenced by. When did you start writing? Tell us a little about the journey. It’s a very intimate and personal journey, now a little bit more public, because you’ve published a book of your writings and musings and poetry, but what about the intimacy of writing? Why is it a friend to so many?

I’ve been writing all my life. As long as I can remember, writing has been my thing. I was making zines at the age of five. I didn’t know that that’s what they were called, but I was trying to sell my zines to people in our street, and they didn’t buy them, and I remember being so disappointed. Shocked, actually.

The mongrels, āe?

How dare they? I was like, can you not see the brilliance? [Laughs] And, as a mother, I was always writing stories for my kids. But the idea of being published was something that I’d given up on by the time that I came back to Aotearoa in 2015. Which is why it’s amazing to me to reflect on the journey of the past 10 years, and how te reo Māori sits at the centre of so many aspirations coming true for me.

In 2015, there weren’t any places online that were publishing Māori writers, especially people who were not special in any kind of way but just wanted to tell a yarn. I was writing these long-winded Facebook posts about the experience of total immersion, and Stacey Morrison, who I knew from her days on Mai Time, sent me a message and said: “Hey, have you thought about sending one of your pieces to E-Tangata?”

E-Tangata had just started, and she introduced me to Tapu Misa and Gary Wilson, and, my gosh, the opportunity that I had there to be mentored, and to learn alongside people who really could see that there was a story worth telling.

Back then, another writer who was publishing regularly with E-Tangata was Moana Maniopoto. I loved her conversational tone, the way she wrote about familiar people and situations, always with a thread of political advocacy woven in. Same with Māmari and Tainui Stephens. When I think about it now, I took my lead from people like that who showed me how storytelling itself is a political artform.

Of course, as Māori writers, we’re all influenced by our pou, but E-Tangata was a pathway into a world I would never have had access to otherwise. I thought I had left it too late to do a writing course, and all the mainstream doors were closed.

It was almost like a golden time in online publishing for Māori writers a decade ago. Mana magazine had closed, but here was E-Tangata opening up a new space. The impact on me as a writer is probably unquantifiable.

I was just writing stories about my life. The comments section back then was lovely, and I just kept going and going! I didn’t even know that the genre I was writing in had a name. I didn’t learn until a couple of years later at a Te Hā Hui that what I was writing was called creative nonfiction.

I’m pleased that they built some confidence in you there with E-Tangata. That’s exactly what the platform was aiming to do from the get-go. I’m also pleased that other publishing vehicles such as Pantograph Punch and The Spinoff picked up on your efforts. Talk about the writing process for you, whether you wait for an idea to surface or you’ve got a notebook in your pocket as you go about your day, or do you force yourself into your corner to actually write. Because it’s one thing to think about writing, but it’s another thing altogether to do it.

For me, the creative process is like breathing, like inhaling and exhaling. Writing is not a choice — it’s essential. No doubt it’s like what making art is for some, or singing for others. At times in the past when I haven’t written, I’ve become sick or unwell.

But publishing has a whole different set of tikanga around it, and I think the best thing for me has been to understand that writing and publishing are performing different tasks, and to remember that the joy and ease around writing aren’t present when I’m publishing. Publishing can be quite anxiety-inducing and has really important tikanga and ethics that preferably you don’t want to learn the hard way.

When it comes to the creative process, people often say to me: “I don’t have time.” No one’s gonna give us time — the time that we think we need and want — to do the writing, so we just have to steal it. Often, we have to steal it from somewhere else in our lives. I’m often stealing it from sleep, but if this thing is something that you have to do, whichever art form it is, it’s almost like it’s not a choice.

Something that I’ve learned and been really appreciative of is the writing that I do in my journal. I write every morning. I almost never read it back immediately, otherwise I’d be like: “Oh my god! Burn it straight away!” But so often, there is a kernel in there that you can work with later, and that to me is evidence of the creative process.

That’s why I write in the mornings, because the veil feels thin and I’m able to capture something that I’m reaching for, or heading towards, but maybe don’t quite understand yet. Creatively, I feel that wairua goes ahead of me, and I’m following it with interest. It’s sometimes not until years later that I’ll come back to a piece of writing, and I will have gathered the thinking or the words to be able to recognise: “Oh, that’s what that was about.” That’s why I really embrace the wait. I’m not in a panic to publish because I know that work can improve when you give ideas lots of space to come into fullness.

Let’s talk about your book. It’s described as finding a language that connects more deeply with the environmental crisis. That’s what Bridget Williams Books, which published Slowing the Sun, said. Is a deep feeling of aroha for Papatūānuku and all that we hold dear as Māori, and our kaitiakitanga, what you wanted Slowing the Sun to be?

What motivated me initially was wanting to understand climate change. It was a private challenge that I set myself, to try and find a way to engage more deeply with this subject.

Once I get curious about something, some of my embarrassment goes away, and I just want to know. And I’ll end up asking questions that are actually good questions, but often people won’t ask them because they think: “Oh, this is a stupid question.”

But the more I asked questions, the more I realised that experts themselves struggle to explain these concepts because it’s a complex area, and it’s dominated as much by language as by science. But the really fascinating thing for me has been to realise that, within a Māori worldview, we already know what’s wrong with the current way our lives are organised, and we understand the harm that has happened to our whenua with the stripping of our native forests and with the pollution of our waterways through intensive agriculture.

We know what the causes of climate change are, because it’s part of our whakapapa. From the perspective of western science, climate change centres the atmosphere in a way that’s not grounded in Papatūānuku. Often it starts with graphs and models and things that are quite abstract for us. And so, we’re like: “I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what that’s about.”

But I know, especially from the work that I’ve been lucky enough to do with the Deep South Challenge, working alongside Māori researchers and ahi kā undertaking revitalisation mahi at home, that our people already have the language they need to lead our response. They’re experts.

And, if I can offer anything through this pukapuka, it’s just an affirmation that, yes, it’s important to understand the western scientific climate models, but within our own language, we already know the correct way to be in relationship with our whenua. It’s deeply embedded within te reo Māori, which is why the epigraph of the book is “Kia kore koe e ngaro taku reo rangatira.” May you never be lost, my chiefly language. I chose that because te reo Māori really is the solution to the climate crisis. And I don’t just mean it in a fake hopeful sense. I mean it very practically speaking.

Slowing the Sun looks at the impact of climate change through a relational lens. Relational meaning whakapapa, meaning “how did we get here?” Not just the symptoms — floods and wildfires and slips and all of that kind of environmental harm. But looking at the causes and impacts in terms of people and whānau and communities.

I wanted people to be able to see themselves in the climate stories I wrote, because climate change is often presented as an environmental issue, and it doesn’t let us see ourselves as people who are caught up in the myriad ways that we are.

I think of colonialism as being a set of systems and values and structures that profits from the disconnection between people and land. And that system was brought here 250 years ago, and it has had impacts not just environmentally, but on people. That’s why our social and health indicators are also climate impacts. Climate change is not just an environmental issue.

What’s been the whānau reaction to this new book?

It’s been a beautiful process for me and for our whānau. Mum said some awesome stuff. She said: “I didn’t realise I worked so hard. But I see myself now.” And my dad — he’s stoked. He rings me all the time. I’ve never heard him talk about climate change so much. He talks to everyone about climate change now. Hank Dunn, whose story opens the book, is also really chuffed, I think. I delivered the book to him in Pawarenga, and I got him to sign my book. That feels totally appropriate because, without these voices from the community, there would be no book.

Everybody who featured in the book had an opportunity to read and to see how I’d conveyed their story. It was really important to me that there’d be no surprises. I couldn’t have lived with that level of anxiety. There was a lot of work and time in this, and I was glad that Bridget Williams Books, the publisher, also really valued that relational care.

There is definitely something about being in the book that has ignited something else in my family. A book has legitimacy that makes them feel proud, makes them feel seen. Once, after an event, there was a book signing, but I couldn’t find the table, so Mum signed my books on my behalf. That’s taking proud to a whole new level!

But I’m glad for her. The interesting thing about climate change for me, personally, has been recognising the labour of the people who had to do the things that ultimately have resulted in the harm we are now having to rectify. So many people have had no choice, because of the design of the system that we’re caught up in, to perform the harm — and that’s the part that just feels so wrong. I wanted at least to give visibility to that “stuckness” and injustice.

Both my parents have worked really hard in their lives, and I wanted to capture that. I wanted to capture the lives of so-called ordinary people. Like my brother, whose death, although central to the book, I never wanted to overshadow his life. His story, and my mum’s and my dad’s stories, will be so familiar to lots of people, because they’re all our stories. I’m talking about working-class people who so often don’t even get the privilege of living to old age. I wanted to mihi to both of my parents for their labour, for the labour that has been invisibilised by the capitalist systems that we live under and that have devalued their work and their contribution.

In one of the essays near the end of the book, I say that we’re lucky in this life if we get to say some things and also to leave some things unsaid. What I mean by that — coming back to the hopeful narrative — is that I want to focus on the light rather than the trauma.

My book deals with grief and loss, because wherever there is colonialism, there is grief and loss. But there is also strength, endurance, intelligence, wit, and just really hardworking, hard-case people doing their best in terrible and unjust circumstances.

As a writer, that’s your privilege. You get to choose what to give light to: the systems or the people. I chose the people.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You can read an extract from Slowing the Sun here.

E-Tangata, 2025