She and her partner have been heckled at men’s games for being queer, and she won’t go back because it’s unsafe. The “horrible toxic misogyny” surrounding men’s rugby is “not nice. It’s not a fun experience. […] People don’t want to be a part of it.”

But guess what? That’s not all sport -that’s men’s sport (men’s rugby specifically, in this case). “If you’re not a fan, you’re just not a fan – yet,” said Alice at our online sports kōrero at the end of March. All of you [can] find a sport that you will love. It might be curling. You never know! There’s so many.”

The kōrero was an informal and lively discussion about why women’s sport is so much cooler than men’s sport – and where there may be room for improvement.

Pride in leadership (and grunge)

Chair Stacey Morrison – who was a winger in her own rugby-playing days – asked all the panellists what they were most proud of about their respective sporting codes…. All apart from AUT social sciences researcher Prof Camille Nakhid who joked “I have a very sporting relationship with my sofa, and I’m very proud of that.”

“I love that our Māori can show up first as Māori. And by doing that, we bring all of those natural leadership qualities that my mum had, my grandmother’s got, and all of our ancestors”

Panellist Mere Rangihuna (Ngāti Hine, Ngā Puhi, Ngāti Manu, Te Uri-o-Hau) is Aktive Māori Participation Manager and Event Producer of Iwi of Origin, with a history of managing performance teams such as the Māori Football Aotearoa Senior Mauri team, the Bay of Plenty Volcanix women’s rugby team, AVIS Magic Netball team (Waikato/BOP) and the Kiwi Ferns women’s league team… the list goes on. Her sporting pride is that when spaces are whānau friendly, safe and inclusive then “our wāhine Māori show up. Not as only athletes, but as cultural holders in our spaces, as strategists, kaitiaki of our team environment, like [at] the marae. […] So I love that our Māori can show up first as Māori. And by doing that, we bring all of those natural leadership qualities that my mum had, my grandmother’s got, and all of our ancestors.”

Former mountain biking champion  Kate Weatherly said she was proud that her code has a history of reasonably high gender equity, as a small and individual sport that started as “a bunch of grungy people in the bush riding their bikes down crazy things”: “From basically the start, the World Cup was really built around men and women competing together on the same tracks, on the same day. [..] So we’ve always been together in those environments. And as a result of that, things like prize money being equal, filming rights, all of those things have really been equal basically from the start.” Stacey was amazed: “what is this pay equity thing you speak of? I don’t know her.”  Kate clarified “the pay is terrible” so it’s more equally bad than equally good, but still!

Alice said she was proud of the DIY 1991 Rugby World Cup, “organised by four women who mortgaged their houses, sent out faxes, [and] pulled a world tournament together.” She showed off the event logo tattooed on her arm.

But what could be improved?

When passion is labelled aggression

Camille and her colleagues have found that where media sometimes discuss racism in men’s sport, there’s very little public acknowledgement of racism in women’s sport.

Pākehā women often “see gender as their determining factor in their identity, but that is not so for indigenous, Māori, people of colour”.

That doesn’t mean the racism isn’t there – it just means we’re letting the powers that be off the hook. “If we ignore the racism against our female athletes, it suggests that the concerns of women play a far less important role in society,” said Camille, noting that racism can be “a barrier to Māori, Pacific and Black female athletes from participating in sports”, and urging an intersectional approach that takes racism, classism and other discrimination into account, as well as gender inequities. Pākehā women often “see gender as their determining factor in their identity, but that is not so for indigenous, Māori, people of colour”. She’d like to see research into different groups’ coping strategies and also into specific potential barriers to sport such as “expense, availability, proximity to fields, safety, getting home at night, absence of role models.”

Stacey – host of TVNZ’s I’m Not Racist But – asked Mere to share some of the racism she’d seen in sport: “it can show up every day,” answered Mere. “Not always in a big, dramatic moment, but in those subtle patterns that you start to recognise over time.” Māori players are judged “more harshly for things non-Māori athletes get away with. A Māori kōhine [girl] shows up, passionate, and suddenly she’s labelled aggressive, while someone else doing the same thing is called ‘competitive’, or ‘a natural leader’. I’ve seen our wāhine Māori overlooked for leadership, captaincy roles, not because they lack talent, but because there’s an assumption about what leadership looks like. And it really affects us – them.

“Off the field, it’s more systemic. It’s in the decisions made without Māori in the room. or when tikanga, reo – simple things like correct pronouncing – are treated like optional extras. […] For our sportswomen, it means constantly having to navigate environments where they feel they need to fit in rather than be who we are.”

To play without shrinking: A Te Tiriti -based mana wāhine sporting authority

What would a non-racist sporting system look like? “When we talk about what a Te Tiriti -based mana wāhine sporting authority could create, honestly the picture is powerful,” said Mere. “Imagine spaces where our Māori sportswomen don’t have to negotiate their identity just to play. Where we’re told Māori isn’t something they bring in from the side, but the foundation the system is built on. A place where wāhine and kōhine Māori leadership is normalised, not the exception.”

“Stop calling it a lack of cultural competency, it’s racism”

Decision-making and power would be genuinely shared. There would be “pathways designed to uplift Māori kōhine from the start, not retrofit them later. Our sportswomen would have access to culturally-grounded support from hauora approaches to coaching that actually understands the realities of being Māori and being wāhine. And most importantly, they’d be able to play, lead, and excel without having to shrink any part of themselves. They could be strong, loud, strategic, emotional, analytical, fiercely competitive, you know, all of it. without being misread or racialised.”

Mere went on: “That’s what mana looks like when it’s backed by systems that honour Te Tiriti. So for me, you know, it’s our wāhine Māori walk into any sporting environment and feel: ‘this place was built for me’.”

How do we get there? Pressure has to be maintained, says Alice, who pointed out “backsliding” has already happened on recommendations to combat racism made to Black Ferns administration just four years ago. For example, a recommended cultural lead position has already been abolished. “Stop calling it a lack of cultural competency, it’s racism,” said Alice. “Racism isn’t always just yelling a slur at someone, it is just a lack of understanding or a lack of curiosity, often, in order to make these spaces fit-for-purpose.”

One of the reasons Alice (Pākehā) has always been outspoken – even when she was playing in the domestic league – was that she was more allowed to be. “I knew that my whiteness always would provide me with more security than it would some of my teammates,” she said. With privilege comes responsibility.”

“They were my community first”

As a trans athlete, Kate has faced a different kind of discrimination, being ineligible to continue her professional mountain-biking career since 2023, when international trans-exclusionary rules came in.

“That was really powerful for me because as a young person […] I was able to have these people to lean on who loved me and cared for me.”

But it was heart-warming to hear how supportive the mountain-biking community was in general, when she was a teenager, “and going through the process of figuring out my gender identity,” she said. “I never really had that hard a time. They were my friends, they were my community first. And so when I came out to people, it was this thing that I was really anxious about and no one really cared. They kind of were like, ‘oh, okay, that’s a bit weird. Sure. Whatever.’ [..] And that was really powerful for me because as a young person […] I was able to have these people to lean on who loved me and cared for me. And that has built up so much confidence that I’ve been able to take through the rest of my life.”

By the time she swapped to the women’s races, she had been transitioning for several years. Later, when she started getting some better results in races, she got “nudged” by the national governing body letting her know she was eligible to compete at an international level. “And it wasn’t until that point that I really started dealing with some of that backlash and the lack of understanding around [the trans eligibility rules].”

“Our Black Ferns are about to be outpaid by the NRLW next year, at base level”

She wishes the scrutiny on trans sportswomen had led to more positive outcomes for women’s sport (leaving unspoken the idea that of course it hasn’t, because the scrutiny is not in good faith, but driven by cloaked patriarchy). The energy “that has been focused on trying to stop men competing in women’s sports” could instead be going towards equal funding, equal coaching programs: “I wish we could apply that [energy] in a way that is uplifting everyone, not trying to remove a specific group.”

More women in coaching would be a start. “I am forever and a day an advocate of quotas,” said Alice. “People hate them because they f**king work.”  And better pay and conditions: “Our Black Ferns are about to be outpaid by the NRLW next year, at base level”.

We have power to flex

To get financial and cultural respect – to achieve any vision – politics are required, and working together is required.

“see who’s missing and bring them in and feed them”

Alice again: “Sports and politics absolutely mix for me […] I’ve seen them mix the whole time I’ve been involved in this space.” She sees the need for both the radicals and the diplomats, using the UK suffragists as an example: “You had a woman that was willing to throw herself in front of a horse to make a point, and then you had a woman who was willing to go around and have a bunch of cuppa teas. […] We have so much more power than we like to flex, and I think that’s the first thing we need to do is understand that we actually do have a vote in this conversation.”

Mere agreed. “When I’m in my spaces, I’m quite intentional and deliberate about being the system change, when I’m there, in the roles that I hold […] You mirimiri it and massage it and all of a sudden we’re making these changes while we’re in there. […] We all have a responsibility, regardless of the spaces that we hold […] rather than waiting for somebody else.”

That could be talking to politicians, or it could be buying boots for someone you think is a great talent, said Alice. Or if you’re involved in sport, suggested Camille, look around you “see who’s missing and bring them in and feed them.”

Or – for the not-yet fans out there – it could be turning on the television and watching women run after a ball, or a curling stone, or a runaway mountain bike, and enjoying their joy, and celebrating their success.

Watch the discussion on YouTube

Pausing to celebrate a history of activism and achievement

Where were you in 1975, the year the Auckland Women’s Centre hatched? Melani Anae was caring for her newborn baby, after three years of community organising with the Polynesian Panthers. Judy McGregor, as a reporter for The Dominion, was walking with and reporting daily on the Māori Land March led by Kahurangi (Dame) Whina Cooper. Naomi Simmonds hadn’t yet been born, but when chair Stacey Morrison asked about te wiki o te reo Māori – which is also celebrating its 50^th anniversary this year – the mana wahine scholar commented on the importance of milestones in a fast-paced, transactional and extractive world: to pause, reflect, celebrate and be grateful “for all of the people, the energy, the places that have brought us to the point that we’re in.”

For Naomi – whose whakapapa includes Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Huri and Ngāti Wehiwehi, and whose PhD is about Māori maternal well-being – those people who’ve brought us here include wāhine Māori in the 19^th century whom she researched for the Waitangi Tribunal’s Mana Wahine kaupapa inquiry. “Even if you look back at the times where everything has seemed quite hopeless and quite desperate, there are examples of Māori women writing letters to the King, writing letters to the Queen, making petitions, pulling survey pegs out of the ground so that the surveyors couldn’t survey their land… there were too many [examples] to count,” she said. Importantly, the Tribunal inquiry “acknowledge[s] that we have never been silent passive recipients of [oppression. Māori women have] always been vocal or we’ve always pushed back… across all areas of social justice.… You see people who are fighting for gender equity in all of the other spaces as well. Very rarely are we sitting in one space of resistance.”

Multi-space resistance has certainly been Melani’s experience – from being a teenage Polynesian Panther, to “conscientising” students of all ages about racism as an Associate Professor of Pacific Studies, Queen’s Service Order member, and a holder of two Samoan chiefly titles, Lupematasila from her father’s village, Falelatai, and Misatauveve from her mother’s village, Siumu. In the early 1970s, the Panthers ran food co-ops with the People’s Union, children’s homework centres, and the “TAB” – the Tenants Aid Brigade, to combat racist landlords. They created a legal aid booklet “because our parents didn’t know their legal rights, let alone human rights,” Melani told us. In 1972, Melani and other Panthers circulated Nga Tamatoa’s petition for te reo Māori to be taught in schools. “We took it around to Ponsonby and Herne Bay. We were spat on. We were jeered at – it was just a terrible time. But we did get those signatures.”

Among people who got us to where we are today, Naomi also included wāhine creating “really subtle expressions of resistance and reclamation” such as “speaking the reo to their babies at home when it wasn’t something that was heard around them.” She acknowledged Melani’s story of looking after her baby and “missing the activism” after her years with the Panthers. As Naomi put it, raising a child is also “an act of activism isn’t it? And how you’re raising your child as well.” (Later on, she emphasised the importance of holding space for raising children, without expecting too much (other) activism from carers: “We need to be caring for those that care for our babies.”)

Now: Slipping backward on pay equity and other issues

Stacey and Dame Judy – Human Rights Professor at AUT – picked up on Naomi’s theme of loud voices and quiet voices. “I’ve had the privilege of working with the E Tū union and interviewing female aged-care workers about their disgust around their extinguished [pay equity] claim,” said Judy. “What I’ve seen is a collectivity and a unity about their anger, about their drive to overturn the legislation, about their ability to speak out and speak up. So, they’re both quiet voices and they’re angry voices. But they’re essentially women’s voice. They’ve got agency. They’re not prepared to let this government grind them down.”

130,000 women are directly affected by extinguished pay equity claims (equating to $12.8 billion stolen over the next four years), but the aged-care claim is the largest with 65,000 women involved, including Māori, Pacific and migrant workers. Judy recalled aged-care worker Sushila Devi challenging Christopher Luxon to come and work with her for one day as an aged carer. She said, “I want him to come and help me change an aged-care nappy. Then he would understand the essence of what we do and why our work is undervalued.”

Judy herself accepted such a challenge – for three weeks –  in 2011, when she was Aotearoa’s first Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner. “I had an opportunity in a small provincial town to go undercover and work as a carer, because the carers had challenged political figures and public figures to ‘come and do our job before you speak about us’ […] And it for me it was transformational. I lost about a stone and a half [9.5kg, in] 3 weeks. I’d never worked so hard in my life. I couldn’t do the job because I wasn’t physically strong enough. You know, it altered my entire world view. I haven’t been the same since.”

Judy’s resulting report helped lead to pay equity legislation – the very laws the current government attacked by surprise this year. That’s not the only concern regarding women’s rights and human rights currently – other government signals are hostile (such as potentially removing the Ministries for Women and Pacific Peoples) and in the wider community, issues such as online hate and misogyny, which Naomi mentioned. Judy noted New Zealand is “slipping” and “sliding backwards” as measured by formal indexes on political participation for example, (the National Council of Women’s gender attitudes survey was released the day of the forum, and also shows concerning trends). Meanwhile – although Melani is proud New Zealand was the first country to apologise for racism when then-PM Jacinda Ardern apologised for the Dawn Raids – she notes dawn raids are still happening. “Not surprising, right? … It was a dawn raid. They called it a compliance check. … It’s systemic racism and institutional racism which we have to face and fight against.”

Naomi picked up on Melani’s characterisation of colonisation, Christianity and capitalism as the “three Cs” of oppression: “I would say the three Cs are still our biggest challenge. I think they create a [system that’s] very extractive, disconnected and devaluing for women.”

The need to acknowledge grief

Judy reported, among women workers, “there’s grief and anger – and also this hope that we can do something.”

Judy’s identification of grief, anger and hope resonated for Naomi. “A lot of those emotions can coexist in one space,” she said. “I do worry that we are always in action – action, action, action! – and the grief hits us particularly as wahine, the grief hits us in our hauora [wellbeing]… that we feel that grief and our anger, and it manifests in our bodies. […]”

So “we need processes. We need ritual to be able to tuku [have release]. We need to release that grief … Alongside teaching our young wahine how to mobilise, how to create systems of support and action, we also need to … support them to process grief, to process anger, to create networks of support where they can just be mamae [pain] because this stuff is mamae and we can’t always protect our tamariki from that mamae.”

Several tikanga Māori were suggested for comforting, for processing. Naomi mentioned cleansing in water (as actor Miriama McDowell also mentioned in her 2024 kōrero), and Stacey mentioned fire.  Naomi also described Matariki as a public, collective opportunity both to process grief and crystallise hopes. “There are lots of other opportunities within te ao Māori, but that’s a really beautiful public reclamation where actually we see so many of our communities use that time and space to process, to be hopeful, to send their wishes to Hiwa i te rangi. That, to me, is a really beautiful example of how we can do that as a nation and not just as individuals.” (Stacey mentioned Matariki is “the first Indigenous public holiday in the world.”)

As for the anger and action, Judy has hope that one will lead to the other.  “When I look at the struggles that we’re in around women’s undervalued work, I can see … hundreds and hundreds of younger women being just so outraged that the work that they do is not valued and that they feel disrespected. So I am hopeful that there will be a new uprising across the across the motu … Perhaps this government may be a catalyst for the most amazing coalescence of political forces in New Zealand. I think women will be at the centre of that because they’re galvanised by the horrors that are daily inflicted on us…. [Those horrors] will be a catalyst for a new sisterhood [led by] rangitahi.”

Melani emphasised the importance of organisation for action to be effective. She note that in both the Black Panthers and the Polynesian Panthers (and other organisations), “the sisters were the rank and file of that movement” – the “top organisers” of the gains made. “We have all the poster boys that got into the media, but it was the sisters that did all the work, you know, the pamphlets, the work delivering newspapers, going to schools and doing the homework centres. Nothing will happen without that.”

Judy thinks “a week strike [of low-paid women], and the country would be on its knees. That would fix pay equity forever!” She acknowledged the barriers of cost and carer concern for those missing out on care during the week.

Future: what are we building towards?

For Naomi, the response to the attacks is replacing the three Cs, as merely “making tweaks” to their ideological system will make transformation to a better future almost impossible. She sees the solution as creating alternative systems that are connected, relational, generative and restorative “for us as people, but also for our taiao – for our environment.”

A particular need that Naomi talked about was alternative models of leadership to the current system which subjects women to “very violent masculinist” ways which keep pushing the boundaries so that what’s offensive becomes acceptable. “The current model does not keep women safe….how do we create models of leadership that embody relationships and kindness and care even when we disagree? … [What] if we create collectives of leadership so that we’re actually not putting one person out to be subject to attack, we’re making collective decisions? We all hold that decision together.”

Naomi sees creation of alternatives already in “the new generation that’s coming through”: “I have to acknowledge Queen Ngawai hono i te po. She embodied that new generation in her speech at Koroneihana the other week. … She said we aren’t Māori because we have a common enemy. We’re Māori because of our language, because of our whenua, because of our taiao, because of our relationships and our whakapapa. And so actually, I think what we’re seeing is a lot more energy going into that restoration and the recreation of the alternatives, those ancient alternatives, a revival of those whilst at the same time still holding the fight. But that [fight] can’t be the sum total of who we are.

“…we are our ancestors wildest dreams, but we need to walk that every day.”

Good guidance for us all, as we build the future we want to see.

Unpacking “Mana Wahine”, “Womanism” and “Feminism” – and the solidarity between them

Mana wahine: reclaiming “the uniqueness of being a Māori woman in this whenua”

Naomi emphasised that mana wahine is an ancient concept “born from this whenua… shaped by the history of this place”, and embodied within other ideas like ‘whare tangata’ (womb; literally ‘house of humanity’) and ūkaipō (mother, source of sustenance; literally ‘’to be fed from the breast at night’), as well as “our relationship to atua” (gods).

“Our ancestors lived it [mana wahine]”, she explained. “It was a very relational way of being. And if there was a transgression of mana wahine, then it was dealt to” – as many histories and pūrākau show. (Stacey pointed out the classic story of Maui and Hine-nui-te-pō can be framed as the consequences of  non-consent: “the penalty will be swift”.)

And mana wahine now? Naomi: “For me now, mana wahine is a necessary holding of space to celebrate, to uplift, to reclaim the uniqueness of being a Māori woman in this whenua.”

Naomi also emphasised mana wahine as interdependent with mana tane, mana whānau (including our collective responsibility), and mana whenua. So “it’s part of a much bigger ecosystem.”

She has appreciated studying pūrākau about atua wahine – stories about women gods. Up until relatively recently, atua wahine have been presented “either the villains in a story or as the passive observers or assistants to a male kind of demi God superhero” such as Maui. But now whānau of all ages have access to resources that acknowledge atua wahine as their own beings. “I keep learning new atua almost on a daily basis with people sharing the research,” says Naomi. A principle she has learned is that the pūrākau “are accessible to us to visit and converse with, and uncover all of the layers of meaning that they have over time.” They’re not just one-time chronicles; instead “it becomes a relationship that we build and that is beautiful to have.” For example, the story of Taranga, Maui’s mother, having a stillborn baby, is “a story that we can revisit in all different shapes and forms with our tamariki but also as we grow older and and experience the ups and downs of life as well,” said Naomi.

What about feminism? “It’s not a word that I personally would use in the spaces that I exist in; it would be ‘mana wahine’. But I think there’s a solidarity between feminism and mana wahine,” said Naomi, who went on to talk about the two concepts being in a fluid relationship rather than being static, rigid and completely separate – they’re in a “conversation” about people, information and (social) justice.

Womanism: “embraces both men and women in the struggle against oppression”

“Womanism is a relatively new thread in feminism,” Melani told us. “It was first coined by the black poet and activist Alice Walker in 1983. She defined ‘womanists’ as black women who are committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. So it embraces both men and women in the struggle against oppression and men are seen as partners in liberation. And I could relate to that …”

Melani also appreciates womanism’s emphasis on spirituality and relationships, which resonates with the important Samoan concept of the Va, which Melani explained as “the social and sacred spaces of relationships. It’s not just empty space. It’s energy that flows between the people who are experiencing the Va – it could be with your ancestors. It could be with another person. It could be with the rock or mountain.”

“Way back in the 1970s when feminism broke onto the scene… I couldn’t understand it because – coming from a Samoan family – women rule,” said Melani. “There’s matriarchy. My mother was a matriarch. My father gave him her his pay packet every week. That was one level of matriarch. And then my grandmother was another level of matriarch. She really ruled the roost [over] the whole [extended] family. So that’s was my background. So when I was burning my bras back then and thinking ‘this movement!?’, I didn’t really know what it was!”

(Later on, Melani cited colonialism, Christianity, and capitalism – “the three Cs” – for taking “the power away from women in Samoa… You go to Samoa, it’s very androcentric. All the churches there have got male … ministers and the government workers are all [men], all going to United Nations stuff and women are silent.” Giving hope, Melani’s 2014 Marsden Grant research uncovered that younger men matai (chiefs) now include women matai in decision-making, in part due to Samoan diaspora being more critical of the three Cs. And again, access to ancient stories can help lead the way – Nafanua was the goddess of war, and it was Nafanua, a woman, who first carried the four sacred titles of Samoa. “So – very strong women that I grew up with,” said Melani.

Feminism: “economic security is something I would attach to feminism”

For Judy, thinking about feminism means thinking about her mother “who was made a solo mother in her 40s as a post-war bride” with three teenagers to support. She went back into the workforce, using her Pitman shorthand.  The resulting economic security “gave her a place in which she could stand for herself with us as kids that wasn’t reliant on a man. And she got her power … and her agency from that economic security. And I don’t think we should shy away from talking about money and feminism because that’s what this government would like us to do – to say that we don’t need to value women because women will do women’s work regardless of what value we ascribe to it.

“So … economic security is something that I’d attach to feminism even if it might look a very Pākehā concept. It’s just followed through with me in life that women who are economically secure have an equality with men that’s essential.” That thinking has been part of Judy’s drive for pay equity (for example), affecting tens of thousands of low-paid women workers of all ethnicities (see main text). Resources – money – are seen as enablers and empowerers. “Imagine the 130,000 women… received the $12.8 billion that was stolen from them in the last budget,” said Judy. “Imagine what that would do to revitalize community, family, themselves, their own identity, their own respect.”

On mana wahine, womanism and feminism

“For me now, mana wahine is a necessary holding of space to celebrate, to uplift, to reclaim the uniqueness of being a Māori woman in this whenua.” – Naomi

“Way back in the 1970s when feminism broke onto the scene… I couldn’t understand it because – coming from a Samoan family – women rule” – Melani

I think there’s a solidarity between feminism and mana wahine” – Naomi

“Womanism is a relatively new thread in feminism… It was first coined by the black poet and activist Alice Walker in 1983. She defined ‘womanists’ as black women who are committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. So it embraces both men and women in the struggle against oppression and men are seen as partners in liberation. And I could relate to that …” – Melani

“They are accessible to us to visit and converse with, and uncover all of the layers of meaning that they have over time….it becomes a relationship that we build and that is beautiful to have.” – Naomi, on pūrākau (stories) about atua

Watch the discussion on YouTube

On activism

“Even if you look back at the times where everything has seemed quite hopeless and quite desperate… we have never been silent passive recipients… [Māori women have] always pushed back.” – Naomi

“There’s grief and anger – and also this hope that we can do something.” Judy on low-paid women affected by extinguished pay equity claims.

“I do worry that we are always in action – action, action, action! – and the grief hits us particularly as wahine…[so] we need processes. We need ritual to be able to tuku [have release]. We need to release that grief” – Naomi

“When I look at the struggles that we’re in around women’s undervalued work, I can see … hundreds and hundreds of younger women being just so outraged that the work that they do is not valued and that they feel disrespected. So I am hopeful that there will be a new uprising across the across the motu … Perhaps this government may be a catalyst for the most amazing coalescence of political forces in New Zealand. I think women will be at the centre of that because they’re galvanised by the horrors that are daily inflicted on us…. [Those horrors] will be a catalyst for a new sisterhood [led by] rangitahi.” – Judy

“We have all the poster boys that got into the media, but it was the sisters that did all the work, you know, the pamphlets, the work delivering newspapers, going to schools and doing the homework centres. Nothing will happen without that.” – Melani, on lessons from Black Panthers and Polynesian Panthers for today

“You see people who are fighting for gender equity in all of the other spaces as well. Very rarely are we sitting in one space of resistance.” – Naomi

On caring (as work, and as activism)

Raising a child is also “an act of activism isn’t it? And how you’re raising your child as well… We need to be caring for those that care for our babies.” – Naomi

“I want [Christopher Luxon] to come and help me change an aged-care nappy. Then he would understand the essence of what we do and why our work is undervalued.” – Judy paraphrases aged-care worker Sushila Devi.

“It altered my entire world view. I haven’t been the same since” – Judy, on her undercover experience as an aged care worker

On future visions

“How do we create models of leadership that embody relationships and kindness and care even when we disagree? … [What] if we create collectives of leadership so that we’re actually not putting one person out to be subject to attack, we’re making collective decisions?” – Naomi

“Imagine the 130,000 women… received the $12.8 billion that was stolen from them in the last budget. Imagine what that would do to revitalize community, family, themselves, their own identity, their own respect.” – Judy

“…we are our ancestors wildest dreams, but we need to walk that every day.” – Naomi

Watch the kōrero and read the full kōrero report here

Healthcare for Māori should not just be needs-based but also rights-based

Whereas “equitable outcomes” can refer to any two or more groups – not just ethnic groups, and not just Māori – it was Māori who signed Te Tiriti o Waitangi with the Crown – and te Tiriti guarantees tino rangatiratanga to iwi. That is “the right to look after ourselves,” as Lady Moxon puts it – and this includes healthcare.

For Elana, “a Treaty-compliant healthcare system really would put Māori at the centre of everything it does.” Right now, it’s not compliant. “Not surprisingly, it gets really good outcomes for Pākehā. Because it’s designed for them. It’s in their language, it matches their social number profile, it matches their health literacy, it has a workforce that looks like them, it’s focused on what are the big issues in terms of their total population level, therefore it reflects Pākehā reality.

“A treaty-compliant health system would acknowledge Māori indigenous rights, which are here because of us being tangata whenua, and that is reaffirmed by Te Tiriti o Waitangi and He Whakaputanga, and it’s reaffirmed by and expressed through international law, you know, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

“Right now, we have a health system which is centred around Pākehātanga … We already know that Māori can’t get access to it. And then if you do get access to it, it’s of a lower quality. … Every step of the way is not truly compliant for Māori. So every step everywhere needs rethinking, reorientation with Māori needs and rights at the centre.” (See the kōrero report for discussion on Te Aka Whai Ora’s and Whānau Ora’s holistic approaches to health.)

Why “needs-based” must include ethnicity in Aotearoa NZ healthcare

“Equity of outcomes” means the same outcomes for everybody – rather than a “one size fits all” treatment. “Equity for me is about saying that that gap [in outcomes] is unfair and unjust and that that’s wrong,” says Elana. And ethnicity “is a marker of need because of racism, because of patriarchy, because of colonisation, all those things,” says Elana. In other words, it is not primarily about genetics. Instead ethnicity “is the most precise marker of need because of the way in which society is set up to make our needs so much worse.” It is society that “makes ethnicity matter” as a marker of need: ethnicity is “the best precise marker that we have. It’s better than geography, it’s better than socioeconomic status, it’s better than all these other variables.” So “ethnicity-based vs need-based” is a false dichotomy (the life expectancy gap for Māori and non-Māori is seven years).

Side note: Elana side-eyes the use of the phrase “race-based” as “interesting”, given race is “a biological concept which has been debunked and put in there to think that we can divide everyone up into different species of human beings – and there’s no scientific evidence for that.” It’s not a term officially used anymore, even by Crown agencies, and should be rejected.

Privilege: you don’t know what you’ve got, if you’ve always had it

If you go to the shop and the shopkeeper smiles at you, you think this is normal behaviour if you’ve never experienced anything different. You don’t necessarily know that the shopkeeper follows some people around the store to work out what they’re trying to steal.

That’s privilege. And it’s “really really hard” to see your own privilege helping you through life when you have had it all the time. It’s invisible, says Elana. So “one of the first steps to understand privilege is to stop, sit down, have a look at yourself” – and what society might be discriminating about in your favour. “You really have to think about your own identities and what privilege and disadvantages they confer,” says Elana. Elana’s own multiple identities include being Māori, a woman, a doctor. “All these things, they confer either advantage or disadvantage… and you’ve probably got both….. I didn’t earn either the advantage or the disadvantage. ….  I’ve got disadvantage as a Māori, I’ve got disadvantage as a woman, but I’ve got major advantage being a doctor and having a socioeconomic profile that changes that trajectory for me and my whānau.”

And the privilege/advantage and disadvantage is not something that just happened on its own. Lady Moxon: Society “always favours certain groups within itself” and in the main, those who make the rules and make the laws – they write those rules and laws to favour themselves.

At the same time – as if it were a zero-sum game (which it isn’t) – those in power set up environments which make other people unwell – and then blames them for their own unwellness with a “deficit” explanation. Government, says Elana, “puts people in poverty, it doesn’t pay them a living wage, it makes solo mothers jump through hoops to have enough access to money to feed their children. Those are all decisions made at a societal level and that’s where the interventions need to be. It’s not in educating ourselves to behave better so that we don’t [die early]. The top killers are there because society has created an environment for them to be there and to be distributed along the lines of ethnicity in this country.”

So the next step is not just about looking at our own privilege – it’s about assisting others who share our identities to think about their privilege also. Which leads us to…

Cultural safety and cultural competency: not an either/or

Elana is a world-leading expert on cultural safety. “Cultural safety is not actually about you learning about the culture of everyone else around you; [instead it is] learning about yourself, your own culture and what your own identity might mean to a clinical encounter with somebody of a different culture than you. But also [about] the way in which you set up the health care system for people that are of a different culture than you.

“Cultural safety is not learning a waiata, doing a karakia, having a trip to the marae, going on country. Culture safety is the hard work of [identifying] racism and bias and checking yourself and working out what your gaps are and fixing yourself and not allowing yourself to carry on with discrimination and oppression towards people of different identities.

“Notice I’m using the word ‘culture’; I’m not saying it’s just ethnicity or indigeneity, we have different cultural identities so your sexual orientation, your socioeconomic profile, where you’re from, your country of birth, all your identities should really fall under cultural safety. Unfortunately we tend to just put Māori health or indigenous health with cultural safety, but actually the intersectionality of all of those things is really important.

“ ‘Cultural competency’ is another term that’s often used interchangeably with ‘cultural safety’, and cultural competency is about understanding what [things] might mean for somebody who identifies themselves as belonging to a certain cultural group: what their norms are, what their ways of being are – and you would want to have some knowledge of that. You want both cultural safety and cultural competency but it’s for all identities now.

“In our 2019 article … which was like, ‘don’t do cultural competency, do cultural safety,’ I accidentally encouraged everyone to not do any cultural competency, just to do cultural safety, and it was all about Māori health. We’ve just submitted another article because I don’t think it’s helped us. We need to be doing cultural safety for all, cultural competency for all. And [then] Hauora Māori (Māori health) would take on what you do that’s culturally safe for Māori, what’s culturally competent for Māori, and it must be there on its own pou, in its own sort of commitment alongside cultural safety.”

What the heck are they up to?

The context for the evening was a National-led government which has disestablished Te Aka Whai Ora (the Māori health authority); has now appointed a Health Minister (Simeon Brown) who was president of an anti-abortion club at university; has removed the key funding source for social sciences and cultural research (Marsden); and significantly, has prohibited health services from using the evidence-based and efficient method of identifying need by ethnicity to increase equity.

Yet, as Stacey reminded us, the life expectancy gap between Māori and non-Māori is currently seven years.

Lady Tureiti Moxon – Chair of the National Urban Māori Authority whose long years of Waitangi Tribunal advocacy were instrumental in achieving the establishment of all-too-short-lived Te Aka Whai Ora, and who owns and runs a large health provider in Kirikiriroa – reminded us there is a cyclical rhythm to government attitudes to Māori. Dr Elana Curtis – whose University of Auckland research into healthcare cultures is world-leading, and who now assists health teams with cultural safety via Taikura and Oro Nuku – didn’t disagree… but she does feel “what’s happening right now is another layer, a really evil layer… that I haven’t quite experienced [until now]”. Lady Moxon identified that layer as (emboldened) racism. Elana described it as “weird” and “ugly”: You’re seeing it around the world […] every day I’m like, ‘what the heck are they up to? Shame on your undies, why are you doing that?’ You know, like, you can’t just say ‘we don’t care about equity’. That means you don’t care about humanity.”

Te Aka Whai Ora: the disestablished potential life changer

But as well as equity of outcomes, the government has a responsibility to uphold te Tiriti o Waitangi – to ensure Māori have rights-based healthcare. Yet this government destroyed Te Aka Whai Ora – both kōrero guests had been involved in its establishment. Lady Moxon explained what she loves about the “outcomes driven” holistic approaches shared by both Te Aka Whai Ora and Whānau Ora: it’s not just about counting widgets – or immunisations. It’s about asking “ ‘how is that baby? How is that māmā? How are they progressing? Are they in a warm whare? … Have they been seeing their doctor regularly? … Do they have enough kai in the cupboard?’ You know, all of those things have a huge impact on our health.” Te Aka Whai Ora was important because “we could create plans that actually met the needs of the communities we were working in.” With the new authority, “we finally thought we’d made it”. (Stacey later quoted Sir Mason Durie: “we don’t ask what’s the matter with that whānau, we ask what matters to that whānau.”)

Elana too talked about the “promise and hope” of Te Aka Whai Ora – its opening “was a bit of an emotional day. You knew, ‘wow, this could actually be a huge change!’.” But by gutting the initiative and “dumping” its staff back into Te Whatu Ora (mainstream Health NZ) “you’ve lost something, the wairua behind those staff….morale is dropping off…. The wairua of people that actually saw some hope and then you take it away should never be underestimated. … It’s quite hard for me to watch this gutting out, gutting out, gutting out rather than purposely building up and enhancing our Māori staff. … That’s going to take years of recovery.”

Stacey suggested the current approach is “aroha kore” – devoid of aroha, and Lady Moxon agreed – for all people: “our hospitals have lost the plot.. there’s no caring anymore. So a lot of people are feeling like they can’t trust their loved ones to be there on their own. And they’ve got to be there so they can take care of their ordinary needs on a daily basis…. Our healthcare system… should be a place of caring, of loving, of feeling like you are the most important person who is there in that place at that time.”

Everything they do favours Pākehā domination

An audience member asked a question about the idea that “we have to get it right for Māori before we get it right for others”. It’s about equity and rights – and also about privilege (see Elana and Lady Moxon’s explanations here). “I would say that to get it right for Māori is to have a deep understanding about …  the language of oppression and marginalisation,” said Elana. “And so if we understand that language, we will therefore, should, get it right for Māori and therefore get it right for all people who are marginalised and oppressed. And that’s actually not about anything Māori per se, that’s about those that are doing the oppressing and those that are doing the marginalisation. So if they can get it right, they have to change themselves in that practice, therefore that will have an impact on all of us, not just Maori.”

Lady Moxon also talked about the success of the Whānau Ora commissioning agencies, including during COVID – and about the fact the current commissioning agencies have been told they’ve been unsuccessful in their bid to continue, despite ten years of success and established networks. “It’s about power and control,” she said. “And it’s basically saying to us, ‘get back in your little box and stay there’. And we’ve been here too long… we’re not going to get back into no box and stay there. [But] that’s the destructiveness of this government. … And they still haven’t finished yet because they’re taking away every reference to Te Tiriti o Waitangi everywhere. So I am very very disheartened and disappointed in this government, in the Minister and in the government of today that they think that we are just pawns in a game.” Later she continued: the government’s ethos in healthcare has been “basically get rid of anything Māori” – which aligns to their overall approach. “Everything they’re doing favours Pākehā domination.”

No wonder Elana feels  “a deep sense of the ground moving and it’s been moved and it’s unsafe.” She describes the reneging of the free bowel cancer screening (which was going to drop to age 52 for Māori and Pasifika, but is now going to start at age 58 for everybody), as “abhorrent , probably one of the most shocking things, given the evidence that we have [about current ethnic inequity of bowel cancer outcomes].” The change in policy will kill Māori and improve things for Pākehā – so it will make health outcomes more inequitable – “we have deliberately chosen to do that … against what should be our ethic, moral, responsibility. And so that was institutional racism right there in our face,” says Elana. “Because you’re putting efficiency above equity. [You’re saying:] A good Māori is a dead Māori. A cheap Maori is a dead Māori. So it’s everything that I can’t stand.”

The end game is aroha

So resistance is important: Both Stacey and Lady Moxon expressed the encouragement they felt when they saw non-Māori overtly supporting Māori aspirations – by displaying “Together for Te Tiriti” stickers for example. And – “don’t let anybody colonise your headspace,” says Elana. “That’s my biggest message: stay sovereign. Stay tino rangatiratanga in your head. Understand what’s happening, rise above it…. ‘I know what they’re doing – I can see what it’s up to – but it’s not gonna break me’…. There’s always hope. … Yeah, there is cray crayness right now, but I’m going to stay fighting. I know what the end game is, and it’s aroha.  … We’ve got the future, we can hope and dream, because that’s what our ancestors did, and that’s what we’re gonna do in their memory.”

Need to help some ignorant rellies, or that guy at the gym? Read explanations of Elana and Lady Moxon’s big concepts – cultural safety, equity – here.

On a lovely Spring evening, we witnessed a warm chat among friends at Western Springs Garden Community Hall: it turns out Chelsea Winstanley (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi) and Stacey Morrison (Ngāi Tahu, Te Arawa) have got to know each other through their daughters. And later on, they were joined by another special guest Awatea Mita (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Pikiao) – more on that in the section on Awatea’s Mum Merata Mita below.

But first – Chelsea and Stacey discussed the mid-November hīkoi for tino rangatiratanga and against the ongoing government attacks on te Tiriti o Waitangi. For Chelsea, the government’s motivations for the Treaty Principles Bill, the Fast Track Bill and removal of references to the Treaty in dozens of pieces of legislation include “corporate greed”: “If we take a look at what they’re trying to do, it’s going to affect us all – all of our mokopuna, all of our whānau, everybody in this room tonight.”

Chelsea walked over the Auckland Harbour Bridge with her daughters who broke out into waiata with their kapa haka group. “That was so beautiful… it was so cool, this group of just fierce little kōtiro Māori just going for it over the bridge, that was amazing!” Then she went down to Pōneke for the last day of the hīkoi: “When I saw Hana[-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke] tear up that Treaty Principles Bill in Parliament I was like ‘get online and get a ticket immediately –  we got to fly down to Wellington!’”

Chelsea described the hīkoi as a heartening action of unity, filling her wairua. “The whole thing really felt like we as a nation of Māori, of tangata whenua, of tangata tiriti, were coming together for the common good…. a nation of people who live here together:  we can do this together, we can change things together. I think the power of the people really was the most impactful statement on that day – all colours, all creeds, all people [were there]. [It felt like] hope that we are powerful in numbers and – as much as they want to divide us up – they can’t, coz look at this! we’re just continuing to grow and continuing to want to work together.”

Hollywood, e hoa: “We got Elton John over the line!”

Chelsea is co-producer of not one, not two, but six Disney animations in te reo Māori. The most recent is Moana 2 Reo Maori which – on the very day Chelsea spoke with us – made history by opening simultaneously with the English-language version.

“We reimagine these films so they’ll make sense for our babies,” Chelsea explained. As always, language is about culture – you can’t separate the two. “So they’re not watching a literal word-for-word translation, instead they’re watching a world that’s reimagined for them.” For example, in te reo Māori, a grieving son in The Lion King refers to Matariki. Chelsea: “As a nation, we’ve all experienced the beauty of Matariki and what it means to set our beautiful souls – that have passed on – into the night sky. And so all those little beautiful messages are put into that script for our babies to be able to go, ‘oh! That’s me, that’s my life. I understand that – that’s normal’.”

Another example – which Stacey as Kāi Tahu particularly appreciates – is in Frozen, which uses Kāi Tahu’s mita (dialect). (As Chelsea put it: “why would we use a coastal dialect that doesn’t have snow? No, really, we got to go down south!”) Instead of singing “the cold never bothered me anyway”, Elsa sings a Kāi Tahu affirmation: “Aoraki matatū ake nei!” Stacey remembers the whole cinema erupting into cheers in response.

Who got Disney to see reo speakers as an audience worth wooing? Stacey suggested Chelsea’s superpower was getting past gatekeepers, into rooms to talk to powerful people. Chelsea countered it was also that she was good at spinning stories (not that she put it quite so politely!) When Chelsea went to pitch a reo version (of the first Moana) to Disney executives – pre Jojo Rabbit (the film Chelsea was Oscar-nominated for, as producer) – she describes herself as “super green”. But that was not necessarily a bad thing: “Being a bit naive in those spaces – it’s quite endearing probably.” She told the execs she and translator/co-producer Tweedie Waititi and the team had the money to do the project… and then they arranged the money – afterwards.

Another coup: “We got Elton John over the line.” No other language – not French, German, Spanish or any other – was allowed to remove Elton John’s English version of “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” over The Lion King end credits.  When Disney told them it was impossible, Chelsea says: “We were like ‘what?! We can’t have this incredible movie be in reo Māori all the way through and then have that massive big ballad in English, it’ll be weird!’” but the executives just said sorry, Elton has it locked down. So the team turned that “no” into “an opportunity for a yes!” Chelsea and her co-producers found Elton themselves and in a “beautiful little video” made with various mates “throughout the world”, asked him “really just from our heart”: “‘you don’t know what this means to us and for our children and for our country and for our future – can you please consider? And we just were really honest about what it would mean.”

The yes from Elton John came just in the nick of time. Disney couldn’t believe it. “But I think it’s just part of  – just keep dreaming!” says Chelsea. “Don’t take no as a given, just keep going. If you have it in your guts… the intention has always been pure with these projects, and I just think there’s other forces working out there to make it happen.”

And yes, there are showings of Moana 2 Reo Māori with subtitles in English – Chelsea would like everybody to see it: “What’s good for Māori is good for everybody!”

The tamariki are the film’s sharpest critics. “They now have the audacity to take it for granted – which is actually the win,” commented Stacey. “I didn’t even know I’d see in my lifetime – but yet it’s totally normal for them… They just wonder why we’re so weird about it, so emotional.”

Chelsea agreed. “Our dream was to have our babies walk into the cinema and chose the film and the language. That dream is complete!”

(For more stories about bringing Moana 2 Reo Maori to life, see Chelsea’s Nov 2024 interview with The Spinoff)

Merata, the Godmother of Indigenous Cinema

“I wanted to make documentaries because I saw Bastion Point Day 507, and I was like who was brave enough to make this film?… who would have the audacity and guts to do it?” said Chelsea. The answer as to who covered the Crown’s eviction of Ngati Whatua from their ancestral land in 1978: groundbreaking filmmaker Merata Mita (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāi Te Rangi, 1942-2010). “I was blown away,” recalls Chelsea. “And I thought if a Māori woman could do that then maybe I could do it too.”

Merata also made Patu! (1983) about the Springbok Tour clashes, and Mauri (1988), the first dramatic feature film solely written and directed by a woman in Aotearoa New Zealand, and by an indigenous woman worldwide. Merata’s influence – as an indigenous woman making films for indigenous audiences – was global, and is still felt today. “She was so intrinsic to ensuring that indigenous filmmakers around the world had connections,” said Chelsea, who credits Merata for being an “anchor point” for Māori in Hollywood and enabling indigenous filmmakers to feel they deserved to be at top film festivals such as Sundance.

In 2018, Chelsea produced a documentary about her hero: Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen, made by Merata’s son Heperi Mita. So it was particularly special at our kōrero evening that Awatea Mita – AWC’s Women’s Services Coordinator, Merata’s daughter and Chelsea’s friend – joined Chelsea and Stacey onstage. Awatea noted that her mother is known as “the godmother of indigenous cinema”: “[her] legacy I see in Chelsea’s work. Not only has she upheld that legacy but she’s promoted it even further…. I’m really proud to sit here with Chels today.”

Chelsea returned a mihi to Awatea, saying it was an “honour to be in your presence to know you through your mum and then beyond – and to witness your rise into greatness… I know what you’ve been through and I’m so proud of you and I’m think about your mum often and how much she is just loving on you.” (To catch a glimpse of Awatea’s awesomeness, see her AWC profile).

Awatea is interviewed in How Mum Decolonised the Screen, and travelled with the film to Venice and Germany: “My brother and I had to start to divide up the festivals!” Merata the film was picked up for distribution by “incredible” BAFTA-winning African-American director Ava DuVernay. Chelsea recalled that Ava’s second-in-command watched the film first: “She immediately called me back and she said ‘oh my God, everything that Merata says and talks about is exactly what comes out of Ava’s mouth!” Chelsea is proud of the distribution “coup” that meant Merata’s story was not going to languish in a distributor’s catalogue but “was going to be cared for” – it went on to be shown on Netflix and in aeroplanes across America. At the theatre opening of the film in America, Chelsea recalls Ava getting up and saying “everybody should see this movie!… everybody must know who Merata is!” Merata’s story went on to be shown on Netflix and in aeroplanes across America. (Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen is currently streaming for free on Māori Television).

As for Chelsea herself, she turned to Awatea at our kōrero, and made it clear: “I’m only here because of your mum, I only do what I do because of your mum.”

Life advice from Chelsea Winstanley

• “Don’t be afraid to reach out to people – what are you going to get, a ‘no’? You don’t know unless you ask! Often people are quite open.”
• “Life is a series of soul collisions … and every soul collision is an opportunity learn… every soul collision has a meaning and a purpose in your life.”
• “This too shall pass … the good and the bad – it too will pass, and you’ll get through it.”

Then Chelsea noted “I’m having soul collisions right now!” and garlanded her two friends Stacey and Awatea with necklaces she’d brought along in a kete given to her by Merata’s children, and there was applause – and more than a few tears – to bring the beautiful evening to a close.

]]> https://awc.org.nz/korero-with-miriama-mcdowell/ Wed, 04 Sep 2024 03:53:39 +0000 https://awc.org.nz/?p=4477 Actor, director, playwright

Creativity, campaigning, and channelling Kahurangi (Dame) Whina Cooper– the kōrero was compelling between Miriama McDowell and Stacey Morrison on a cold winter’s night at Samoa House.

Miriama – actor/director/writer and intimacy coordinator – is on the board of Equity, the actors union. “Our work is to make actors’ lives better – I love the simplicity of that kaupapa,” she says. Current project: campaigning to change the law so that international productions shooting in Aotearoa NZ have to hire a certain percentage of local actors. Thanks to such a law across the Tasman, Australian actors “have life-changing opportunities to work that do not exist in this country.” And the NZ industry clearly needs it – only 4% of actors here work at any time.

When it comes to activism, Miriama (Ngāti Hine, Ngāpuhi) is guided by wide cultural principles – as well as lessons from one of her most iconic roles as Whina Cooper. “As Māori, we understand the collective has power; that in working together we make change; it’s not about the individual … a great Rangatira is only great if they are looking after and expressing the values and the hiahia (hopes) of their people.” From Whina, she has learned “fearlessness to not be liked”: “If you truly believe in something, and you truly want to fight for something, you have to let go of that idea that everyone will like you. …There’s something so freeing [in that] – thank you my friend Whina, for teaching me that.”

Miriama (Ngāti Hine, Ngāpuhi) most often uses that new-found fearlessness to advocate for Māori interests in her life. “It’s often in creative spaces and it’s with very well-meaning Pākehā artists who feel like they’re saying the right things and doing the right things [but who are not taking care of mana Māori] … Something happens in my gut and I feel like I have to say something. … I have those conversation more and more and more and they become less scary.”

Even outside the need for such conversations, part of being a Māori actor is “understanding that every decision you make is political” whether you want it to be or not. “I think that’s quite hard for non-Māori to understand … Every role you take, every audition you take – even when you get asked to audition for a role that’s not for a Māori – even that’s a political moment. So I represent my people no matter what I do. That’s a great honour, that’s a great responsibility.”

With experience as a sole parent to two daughters, aged 12 and 6, Miriama (recently married) is also passionate about making her industry more parent-friendly, to create pathways for mothers, such as enabling children to be on set. “If you want experienced actresses …, then you have to make it work for us. … if you want us to be on stage from 5[pm] to 10[pm] you have to give me extra money for childcare.”

Ah yes, childcare. Miriama talked about “the creativity that is required when you are a solo parent” to work out all the logistics of who’s picking up who from school, and who’s looking after who when – especially when she had to be on set at 5am: “Thank God I have a creative brain because that’s about 80% of how I did it.”

And that’s only one of the many tasks of sole parenting. “One of the big things about being a solo parent is that all of the work in unseen, so you’re just working so hard all the time and it’s invisible in a way…. [now] I can really see solo parents, how much work it is, how hard it is to get to school every day, all the things that they achieve on their own.” She’s grateful to friends who gave her Mother’s Day presents during the challenging years. “To be seen in that way was very very significant for me.”

Particularly as she experienced discrimination due to her parenting status. “I literally had a landlord say to me ‘we don’t give houses to solo mums because they have parties.’”

She brought some of her experiences to a web series called Whānau Matters, which she co-wrote and acted in with Pio Terei, and which she describes as like “food in a minute” but with intergenerational whānau: “whānau in a minute”. An example – in which Miriama enjoys acting with her own daughter, Talanoa – is “Hikoi”, about ways to support mental wellbeing.

Mental and spiritual well-being is something Miriama has clearly thought a lot about, and she has a number of wise strategies to keep things well – at home, she might visit the ngahere (the bush), but while living in London where it was harder to access wild places, she visited Catholic churches instead, soothed by the rituals. She draws huge strength from te ao Māori: on a personal level, her tupuna have sometimes visited her when she’s taken on a heavy role, and on a shared level, “as Māori we’re really lucky, because we have practices, cultural practices, to keep us safe so I don’t need to invent those things – those things already exist [such as] karakia: starting a process in the right way and ending a process in the right way.”

She plays a mother who sees her children killed in the “very dark thriller” Coming Home in the Dark. “Very early in the process, I said to the production team ‘it’s such a heavy thing to carry. To come to work and put that korowai on. I need some support for that.’ So, we’d have a minute’s silence at the end of every day. Crew and cast, you could do your own process to whakanoa [come back out of the work], but [it was] a shared and held moment.

“That felt revolutionary – for crew to stop for a moment to look after their mental and spiritual health.”

A kaupapa that Miriama continues to work towards – and inspires the rest of us to do so as well.

Intimacy Coordination – Feminism in Action: “the most amazing work”

Among Miriama’s many pōtae is “intimacy coordinator”: choreographing intimate work for film, TV and theatre so actors can do their job in safety – much like a stunt coordinator. There’s a lot of technical detail – the length and pressure of a kiss, for example, may be given on a 1-5 scale, or described as “feather-like” or “muscular”. “People think we’re the sex police, [that we say] ‘No no, don’t put your hand there!’,” says Miriama. But actually it’s the opposite: “you are giving actors power, and helping directors meet their vision in a way they’re often too scared to ask for… It is the most amazing work; it is so beautiful.”

The rapid uptake of intimacy coordination over the last few years is feminism in action – a direct and positive response to the #MeToo movement: “It was suddenly very clear there was a power imbalance in storytelling,” Miriama explains. So part of the mahi is inviting actors to talk about their past (and sometimes distressing) experiences of intimate work, to ensure the current work isn’t triggering. “There’s healing in that, being able to hold space for people to talk about when things didn’t go right.”

At the same time, “it’s also really weird and really funny!” Because the work is so new, the small group of intimacy coordinators in Aotearoa (which also includes Jennifer Te Atamira Ward-Lealand and Tandi Wright) advise each other. “The things you are talking about – it’s hilarious: ‘I’m in the middle of a cunnilingugus scene – what would you use as a cushion in between?’ ‘oh, I’d get a yoga mat and stick it on with some gaffer tape!’”

…the beautiful, slow, never-ending reo journey…

Miriama spoke fluent French and Spanish decades before she started her full immersion reo Māori course last year – playing Whina inspired her to enrol, as did wanting to support her children’s own reo (a language of instruction for them both at school).

“I thought: ‘I’ve got a language brain so I will be ok’. No no no no no! I’m in my 40s, and the pathways in my brain are not working like they used to. It’s been a very slow journey and still is a beautiful slow journey. And what I do is I give myself aroha around that and say: ‘Ā tōna wā do it in your own time, how you do it.’ I don’t put too much pressure on myself.”

Studying te reo, she now understands that knowing a language is “not binary, ay, it’s a journey… People often say: ‘You’re matatau now? You’re fluent now?’… No, I will always be on this journey – and I never really understood that until I got on that waka.”

At Samoa House, we were privileged to see Miriama perform not only an amusing five-minute excerpt of an autobiographical play she’s written in te reo (including performing her and her twin brother in the womb!) but also a self-penned rap in te reo. “The best way to keep building and learning my reo, is to keep making it creative for myself…. If I can make it fun, I will keep learning the language structures.”

– Ends-

If you missed out on our sold out event, the full video is below!

The upbeat feeling was welcome and perhaps surprising, given the unprecedented attacks on Māori rights by the current government – but Margaret sees many reasons to hope. Firstly: “the next generation and my mokos are coming through in a way that is much more empowering for our people.” In the 1960s, at a Māori girls hostel, Margaret and her roommates were taught they’d only be factory workers or servants (and they cooked and cleaned for themselves – in contrast to the school’s own hostel where the daughters of wealthy Pākehā only had to make their beds). But in the last decade or so, Margaret sees “the young ones coming through confident in both te ao Māori and te ao Pākehā, and being able to succeed, and making it really clear to the country that the inequities for Māori are totally unacceptable and things must change. And that scares people. […] I think they’re scared that Māori having any say in this country is a threat to them whereas in actual fact, Māori have a responsibility to this country that we were given.”

That responsibility includes manaakitanga – caring for everyone. “We invited people in here, we are responsible for them,” says Margaret, referring to te Tiriti o Waitangi (see below). “But when you have dispossessed us […], we can’t do our job properly.”

Margaret’s Scottish immigrant mother “didn’t know how bad the racism was” until she married Margaret’s father, and it horrified her. “She told me and my brother ‘if someone tells you “you can’t do anything because you’re Māori”, don’t listen to them.’ It ended up getting me in a whole lot of a trouble, because I knew to look out for it, to defend myself from it. It still hurt terribly but at least I knew it was wrong.”

The second reason to hope is the “beautiful” feeling of Māori unity at Turangawaewae, at Ratana and at Waitangi – with a hui taumata set for May at Omāhu Marae near Hastings. One day, Margaret says, she will thank David Seymour for galvanising the Māori world. “I have never seen the national iwi chairs forum so united!”

That day is a long way off, however: Margaret points out the politician’s State of the Nation speech was a “masterclass in white supremacy and racism against Māori”, and says there’s a chance his Treaty Principles bill will become law.

She explained one of the differences between te Tiriti and the ethos of the principles bill: “Everything David Seymour wants is about the English cultural notion of the right of the individual. It’s a strong English notion – nothing wrong with it – it’s just different. But rangatiratanga does not meld at all with individual rights. Because the smallest unit over which the rangatira will have a say is the whānau.”

The job of the rangatira is to bring – to weave – the people together. “The rangatira’s job is not to dictate to people what’s go on; a rangatira’s job is to sit and listen to the people, and to make sure you’ve understood everything from every point of view you can possibly get. That’s why our hui are always open.” At the end of the hui, the rangatira guides the people to make a decision. “It’s not the rangatira’s decision, it has to be the people’s decision.” And so rangatiratanga is “about keeping the people together and making sure the people survives, and that they succeed and achieve what it is they want to achieve.”

Along with unity and the younger generation (kura kaupapa are getting fantastic results for tauira Māori), the third reason for hope is the support for Māori rights which Margaret sees from many non-Māori (or “tauiwi”, which Margaret describes as a “lovely” term literally meaning “the people who settle”). For example, Margaret is teaching scores of teachers in the Ngati Kahu rohe about the region’s history, so they can teach it in turn to their students.

“For the Māori side of it, we want to take back control of our own lives, we want to take back control of who we are, of who makes decisions for us – which is ourselves,” says Margaret. And in order to have the space to do that, she asks tauiwi to be the buffer between Māori and government.

An inspiring evening – and one which challenges us all to do our bit.

Tangata tiriti – how can non-Māori support tino rangatiratanga?

Overt and public tauiwi support of Māori rights is vital right now – we all have a part to play; now is the time to be loud. Margaret asks tauiwi to respond to current immediate attacks on Māori, to give Māori the space to work on long-term goals, such as Matike Mai. “We need our tauiwi allies to make the space for us, to get the government off our backs, so that we can just get on with it,” she says.

• Push back against harmful government policy (eg, on social media, emails to politicians, letters to newspapers) – Margaret: “Can you please be a buffer between us and the government. They are really, really hurting our people.”
• Defend Māori in everyday life – Margaret: The government are also “empowering people to attack us, in the streets, in the supermarkets in the schools, we are under attack. We would really appreciate it if people would come out and say ‘stop, stop what you are doing’.”
• Educate yourself to educate others (eg in discussions with colleagues, friends & family)– Margaret: “There is a huge amount of confusion out there. People have to be given the information […] and be able to understand what is misinformation and what is disinformation.” For example, understand He Whakaputanga; read Waitangi Tribunal reports; know why the Māori Health Authority was established – to lessen the effects of institutionalised racism which (to take one example) means Māori don’t get sent to specialists as often as Pākehā. Such patterns horrify a lot of doctors, says Margaret, but they still happen. The seven-year life expectancy gap between Māori and non-Māori shows something needs to change.

Māori never ceded sovereignty – history all New Zealanders need to know

“We do have a written constitution – He Whakaputanga and Te Tiriti – but the government will not recognise it.” – Margaret Mutu

He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tirene (1835 declaration of independence/ sovereignty): stated the power and authority of the land sits with rangatira Māori, and not with non-Māori. Created in response to debaucherous, drunken Pākehā running amok and their lack of respect for tikanga (law), particularly at Kororāreka, the notorious “hellhole of the Pacific”. Signed initially by 34 northern rangatira (and later by others), sent to England and recognised by the Crown there in 1836.

Te Tiriti o Waitangi (1840): “Drawn up as an addendum to He Whakaputanga” as many lawless British subjects still would not abide by that main declaration.  Via te Tiriti, Māori generously allowed the immigration of non-Māori ( “tangata Tiriti”, ie those who are allowed in Aotearoa, thanks to te Tiriti), as long as the British Crown kept the lawless immigrants in line. Only around 2000 Pākehā were in Aotearoa at the time and Māori did not cede sovereignty to them – why would they? As Margaret says: “Our people weren’t stupid.”

Waitangi Tribunal (since 1975): Permanent commission, investigating recent, ongoing and (since 1985) historic breaches of te Tiriti by the Crown; and making recommendations as to how the Crown can stop breaching, make amends and start honouring te Tiriti. Hears district, urgent, and nationwide kaupapa (thematic) claims (including Wai 2575 on health services and outcomes). Established to take Māori rights protests off the streets, which were embarrassing the government internationally.

The evidence of Tiriti breaches is weighty and “irrefutable”. “That is why the Waitangi Tribunal has looked as if it is very supportive of Māori but in actual fact, it has erred on the side of the Crown. […] It  tries desperately to give the Crown advice that it can follow. But still they ignore them,” says Margaret. Therefore social and health outcomes for Māori continue to be poor.

While the Tribunal is criticised as “toothless” and doesn’t necessarily find in favour of claimants, it does understand Māori as Māori and “we do get to put things on the record,” says Margaret. The Tribunal holds enormous amounts of precious information.

Treaty Settlements Process (since 1994): A 1988 Court of Appeal ruling gave the Waitangi Tribunal power to order (not just recommend) the government to return land to Māori; the government response was to circumvent the Tribunal via direct “negotiations” with iwi and hapū.

The “propaganda” is that “the Crown wants to be honourable,” says Margaret. “But once you get into negotiations you find there is no ‘negotiations’. The Office of Treaty Settlements says to you: ‘This is what your settlement will be, you cannot argue, you have no rights effectively, you will do what we say.’” Some iwi have been told if they won’t accept the Crown apology, they won’t get anything. Margaret was negotiator for Ngati Kahu – who ultimately decided collectively not to accept the settlement offered. The Crown had told the negotiators that the process was confidential. Margaret: “Well, Ngati Kahu didn’t listen to that; we just took everybody with us. So they could see what went on.”

Matike Mai (future vision): With the late, great leader Moana Jackson, Margaret led a nationwide kōrero with Māori on future decision-making processes, for both by-Māori-for-Māori decisions and shared Māori/tauiwi decisions. “Moana went to 252 hui. He said ‘Have kete, will travel’ – and away he went. I went to about 50,” says Margaret, who doesn’t usually refer to “constitutional transformation”. Instead, “it’s about tomorrow: if you could make decisions for you and your whānau, what would that look like? For your hapū, for the iwi, for the nation – how do we get to make decisions in this country that benefit everybody?” In response, people “never talked about the models we ended up talking about, they talked about the values to uphold this country: mana, tapu, manaakitanga, whanaungatanga – we talk about them all the time,” says Margaret. “And as much as Moana and I said ‘but how are we going to do it?’, they would say ‘as long as you get those values right, as long as you include everybody, so long as you make sure everybody is safe and looked after, the rest of it will flow.’ […] That’s our responsibility [as Māori] to manaaki everyone so they can be proud of who they are.” The aim is to bring about Matike Mai recommendations by 2040 – “that was Moana’s instruction to us. So haere mai, 2040!”

(Reading recommendation: Mutu, M. (2019). “The Treaty Claims Settlement Process in New Zealand and Its Impact on Māori”. Land 8(10):152.)

Alarmed about the new government? Good. Alarm is an appropriate response to these real-life cartoon villains, so contemptible, craven and dangerous. A friend stresses what the immediate anti-Tiriti, anti-reo, anti-human rights signals are doing: “Māori in public service are deeply concerned. There are no words that can explain the mamae. Allyship needs to be stronger now than ever.”

So let’s follow Ngahuia Te Awekotuku when she advises: “Turn worry into action.” It’s political self-care – or rather, it’s together-care. Māori working for Tiriti justice and others like trade unions are already actively protesting, so keep a look out for their specific requests. Meanwhile, doing something can help replace frozen horror with vital hope, for ourselves and others. He rau ringa e oti ai.

Things to keep in mind with the actions below:

1. You are not alone. Most people in Aotearoa New Zealand are alarmed by the intensified colonisation, racism, transphobia, sexism, ableism, classism and climate justice denial, and attacks on health, facts and the fourth estate.
2. Toitū te Tiriti. Be guided by Māori leaders who are working for Tiriti justice. Pākehā ma, we can call out colonising actions, cut down the gorse of impositions so the ngahere, the native forest of Māori self-determination, has room to grow.
3. The aim is not to go back to a dubious pre-election status quo – let’s build towards more inclusive visions for the future. Margaret Mutu is clear this is an opportunity to advocate for constitutional transformation like Matike Mai. We don’t just want to stop the ship from crashing into the rocks; we want to sail it away towards a beautiful horizon. Free your imagination.
4. Your audience is not just the government. It’s other people and groups in your community. While parliament has the monopoly on law change and big budget control (and those are powerful tools, not gonna lie), we can all influence people’s behaviour and attitudes – and help to contain the government’s corrosive influence, which will already be emboldening white supremacists.
5. Have solidarity with others’ issues.  Let’s not let them divide and conquer.

Things not to do:

1. Avoid mocking people’s physical appearance. By all means, point out the National party is overstocked with mediocre white guys, but if you get personal about specifics, you’re making everyone who looks similar feel stink.
2. Do not comply in advance.

Things to do:

1. Let people you trust know how you’re feeling about the new government. Your friends may be relieved – and find it galvinising. I’m told: “To lift the wairua of Māori within the public service: offer a coffee, a soft place to land, a safe place to rant and tangi.”
2. Honour te ao Māori including te reo Māori in the community and at work. Let’s not be out-done by the Reserve Bank! There are reports of people being told to stop speaking te reo at the supermarket, and at school (these are hate incidents, and can be reported to the police as such). But if we’re all using reo Māori greetings, this can reassure fluent speakers, and dissuade the trolls. In the public service, the advice for non-Māori is: “Now more than ever, that offering of the greeting in Te Reo, the opening of the hui with karakia, the continued advocacy for Māori in allyship from Tangata Tiriti is needed.” For tauiwi, remember our knowledge of te reo is an honour, bestowed by Māori. Show your respect by learning how to pronounce te reo, and practice.
3. And if you do see a hate incident in the community, intervene if it is safe to do so. Check in with the targeted person; they may need support more than they need you to argue with their attacker. In public service: “Say something when there is racism happening, change the subject, divert, as this administration will embolden both overt racism and privilege.” Or push back, politely: “I am not comfortable with that.”
4. Read, sign – and share! – all the petitions.
5. Join your union – do it now – this is absolutely vital for your collective and individual protection, given this government is a declared enemy of the workers. If you’re already a union member – congrats! Ensure your union has a Tiriti policy. And show your union workers some love: email to say how much you appreciate their political advocacy.
6. In fact, praise and encourage all those doing the mahi, even if you don’t know them. It helps balance the hideous complaints they’ll be getting from those few loud regressive trolls. As Laura (now Te Raukura) O’Connell Rapira put it: “Some days you can lose faith or hope, and it can be the nice message – ‘I see you, I love the work that you’re doing, keep it up’ – that can be enough.” Congratulate those who are brave enough to admit they got it wrong – props to Sir Ian Taylor for publicly resigning from government-funded organisations in protest against Winston Peters’ wild corrupt-journalism claims. And thanks to my local library for prominently displaying a large Progress Pride flag.
7. Write to all the MPs in your local area, especially those who are in power, and tell them how you feel and what you want them to do. This can be surprisingly effective. Like all of us, MPs are in their own echo chamber. Hearing from those outside of it recalibrates their reality.
8. Celebrate achievements, big and small, local and country-wide, which go on regardless of the government. (Congratulations to Distinguished Professor Linda Tuhiwai Smith for her well-deserved Rutherford Medal achievement.)
9. Go back to basics, familiarising yourself on why everything the government is attacking is important. Why race-based policies are required to combat racism (MAPAS affirmative action exists to help reduce egregious life expectancy gaps). Why fossil fuel exploration is a really really bad idea. Why it’s important to support all gender identities with the current relationship & sexuality education guidelines (the teachers union want to keep them). Find out more about Te Tiriti o Waitangi itself (more resources here).
10. That way, when Reactionary Cousin goes off at Christmas time, you have a few facts to mention in an aside to your persuadable uncles and aunties.
11. Speaking of Reactionary Cousin/Colleague/Neighbour at various December barbeques, it’s best not to let them rant on. Listeners tend to believe that everybody agrees with the loud guy – apart from their own quiet selves! Again, you could try saying simply – with an eye-roll or a smile! – “oh, that makes me uncomfortable, let’s talk about something else.”
12. “Break the echo chambers” as writer Latifa Daud puts it: follow people from other cultures and communities on social media (but don’t feel the need to insert yourself in all their conversations), and read books and watch screen and news media produced elsewhere. Tell your mates about what you’re seeing. Read e-Tangata, and get some of your news from the Pacific Media Network and Waatea News. Read Waitangi Tribunal reports.
13. For those with spare cash (yes, you know you still exist), what are you doing with your upcoming tax cuts? You could annoy the current government in a neat and elegant way by putting that pūtea into tax reform advocacy. And buy heaps of kohanga reo raffle tickets.
14. Go to the demonstrations. They are energising, and often joyful. You catch up with people you know. And protests work – particularly when they’re big. In 2010, 40,000 people marched in Tāmaki Makaurau against mining in national parks, and the government dropped the proposal. Bring everyone you know.
15. Breathe. Literal, big, deep breaths. And give yourself time off, to prevent burn out. This is a marathon, not a sprint. It won’t be over by Christmas. Tag-team with others, relax, and have energy to advocate another day.

Mā whero, mā pango ka oti ai te mahi.

To finish with the kōrero of Professor Tracey McIntosh (Ngāi Tūhoe) ““[As advocates and activists], we have to have emotional states of hope, we have to have joy, we have to work in our collectives and be well. We have to focus on our wellness within the groups we work with. The imagination can be a powerful space to create the possibility of joy. Sometimes that is hard to process and it feels inappropriate but it must be there.”

Kia ora!

This kōrero video has been lightly edited for clarity.

We live in interesting times. Last year, Ngahuia recounted, she was driving to the reunion of 1970s Māori activist group Ngā Tamatoa, through “the gentle hills of Taranaki” when she saw what she described as “one of the worst things I ever imagined”:  “there were all these MAGA flags and even the American confederate flag and all these weird symbols of Trump waving around in the pastures and the raupatu (confiscated) lands of Te Āti Awa. […] and it was like ‘what the hell is happening to Aotearoa?’” She saw “really disgusting signage” again during the election campaign as well as a “sense of divisiveness and really intense aggression and the very skilled manipulation of the vulnerable. […] It’s in confusion and chaos that people like Trump and the Weasel, it’s from that environment that people like that emerge.”

Words are Ngahuia’s playthings, and she doesn’t mince them. The “Weasel” is David Seymour, while Christopher Luxon is a “diabolical nincompoop” leading an assortment of “very gruesome right wing reactionary people” and “extraordinary fascists” to power. “For the next three years – and God, I hope it’s only three –  we will be encountering and engaging with the challenge of hatred, hostility, the fearmongering, the sowing of discontent and discord” by the elected government. She assesses that many of the dreams which Ngā Tamatoa helped make true are now “at grave risk of demolition and that freaks me out.”

However. She is heartened by the opposition to the government – the doubling of Te Pāti Māori MPs to four – and her very experience with Ngā Tamatoa helps shore up her hope.

“Dynamic, visionary, wonderful” inspiration from wāhine Māori, quoted by Ngahuia

• “Don’t be scared, because the kōhanga reo generation are here, and we have a huge movement and a huge wave of us coming through.” – Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, Pāti Māori MP (Hauraki-Waikato)
• “[…] turn worry into action.” – Nanaia Mahuta, outgoing Foreign Minister
• “Te ohonga ake i tōku moemoeā ko te puāwaitanga o te whakaaro.” Te Puea Herangi (Ngahuia’s on-the-spot interpretation: “By coming out of that time of rest, or crisis, or reflection, we make our dreams come true.”)
• “My beloved aunt Bonnie Amohau, one of the ariki of our tribe, told me at one of my most desperate and asthmatic times on the hockey field: ‘Girl, never give up, never give up, never ever give up’. And I never have and I never will!” – Ngahuia Te Awekotuku

“Even when things are really really bad as they were in the early 1970s, with the energy and the recklessness and the courage of youth, of young people [we made a difference. …] And with the work that we did in the early 70s, late 60s we never lost sight of our faith in each other. [At last year’s reunion], we recognised the love and the energy and the aroha and the strength that inspired and motivated us, and that has never gone away.”

This is happening again. And we can all assist, as “a growing community of allies”: “One of the things we don’t really talk about with Ngā Tamatoa, we did have a whole population of Pākehā allies and [today] it’s in those relationships and the growth of those communities we can make a meaningful way forward.”

Queer Words

Ngahuia also talked about the delight of discovering (at the same time as reo Māori & gay rights advocate Lee Smith) the word “takatāpui”, in the writings of her koroua Te Rangikāheke. “Although in other mōteatea [traditional chants…] there are references to ‘whakawahine’ and ‘whakatane’, which is similar to ‘fa’afafine’ and ‘fa’afatama’. So we’ve always had that energy in our world as people of the Pacific.”

She feels the invisibility of queerness as well as of womanhood. “We don’t hear the word lesbian said nearly enough in this world, and I will never stop saying it because that is who I am, just as I am Māori. […] The ‘L word’ is relegated back into the world of male fantasy and danger, and that upsets me. […] I’ve got a really good label which I sometimes copy and distribute which is ‘drop me in honey and throw me to the lesbians’, and I think that’s a really lovely, cheeky way to say something.”

Ngahuia also discussed her background and her supportive whānau and her name. She used to argue with unnamed “venerables” about whether all the deities born to Papatūānuku and Ranginui were men. As te reo Māori has no pronouns, she says “I refuse to accept that, I refused to accept it as a kid. Tāwhirimātea – winds, storms, weather – is a woman!”

The achievements of the Women’s Liberation Movement which Ngahuia highlighted include women in positions of power in politics (including mayoralties), the justice system and academia – and also the less glamorous establishment of the Women’s Refuge movement and Rape Crisis support.

And she discussed her moko kauae, which she received with 15 other wāhine in 2007, on the first anniversary of the passing of Te Arikinui, Te Atairangikaahu, the Māori Queen, whom Ngahuia reveres as an exceptional rangatira and mentor. “For me in a way, it was a huge decision because [previously] I could literally slide between genders and identities and dress and tone of voice. But out of my sense of being Māori and loving her and mourning for her, this happened.”

Ngahuia then led the creation of a book Mau Moko: The World of Maori Tattoo (2008): “One of our big intentions was to normalise the tattooed face again, and I think we are achieving that.” But still, “I can get into a lift in certain parts of this country and people won’t get in with me. And it’s worse if I’m with one of my male cousins who has a fully tattooed face, people jump out of the lift. So there’s still that sense of fear, of threat.”

Which brings us full circle back to the immediate threat to Māori rights. If it happens, a Treaty-related referendum would be “the most heinous and divisive and crazy policy that could ever be enacted. To introduce an initiative like that would cause immeasurable suffering,” said Ngahuia. But she is also reminded of “something John Key said about another issue: ‘oh no, we’ll have the hikois from hell!’”

At the same time, the vision is not to keep what we currently have. Times are desperate. “I live in a community surrounded by WINZ motels. I have a guy down the road who sleeps on the warm pavement outside the pie shop. You offer him a pie, he doesn’t want a pie, he wants cash. Stopping at McDonalds […] you end up with a very pregnant woman standing in front of your car, refusing to move, and you offer her some of your groceries, and nah, she wants money.

“These things happen to me in Rotorua where I live. This is the reality of our world. I see so many Māori kids who are not part of the privileged kura kaupapa/wānanga/wharekura system, [they’re] in the state schools – what the hell happens to them? If they’re not clever enough, or not secure enough or they don’t have the same address throughout the year, what happens to them?”

So: political action is needed. “It’s about following your heart. […] Sometimes you have to take risks, sometimes you have to do stuff or be there when you know it could be at the possibility of losing friendships, losing contact, losing meaningful parts of your life. […]

“I believe for us now, in this extremely peculiar time in the history, not just of Aotearoa but of the planet, we are reaching a point where we will have to make decisions, we will have to identify our allies and we will have to make that great enormous terrifying step forward. […] Don’t [just] worry, because worry isn’t going to get us anywhere. Turn worry into action and make it work for us.”