(upbeat music)
Kia ora. Nau mai.
- Come into my house.
This is where I come from Te Urewera.
I stole this map from my mum's before I came to Wellington.
For me, it's just really nice to wake up and get to know
my whenua every single day.
I can't remember the first time
I heard the term urban Māori,
but one term I really remember from growing up
is the term city Māori.
People came home who had been away
in Auckland and Wellington, whatever,
and almost had to prove that they were still Māori enough
to be standing strong on our marae.
I think for me it was a little bit scary to come to the city
and become one of those city Māori
and it was almost a dirty term,
but what I've learned being in the city
is that urban Māori are not disconnected, not always anyway.
(soft music)
Among urban Māori, one of the groups
that I think is really significant is takatāpui.
Pre-colonisation, Māori attitudes to gender
and sexuality were less binary.
Missionaries introduced Christian attitudes,
and those were widely adopted by tangata whenua.
Our people have always been open about sexuality
but it was colonisation, the restrictive word of the Bible,
that squashed out any ideas of sexuality
and gender that weren't wahine ki te tane,
in monogamous marriage forever and ever.
This word takatāpui I think has been around for a long time,
but it was reclaimed in the 1980s
by people who stood at this intersection
of identifying on this broad gender and sexuality spectrum,
but also being Māori.
I suspect many takatāpui came to the city
to escape those more colonised attitudes
of our traditional papakainga.
Today I'm going to spend some time going out
and talking to takatāpui around
what it means to be a Māori in an urban environment.
(singing)
(chill music)
We're here in Owhiro Bay
on the South coast of Wellington City.
This is Nautilus Creative Space
and this is where Ariki Brightwell
does most of her art work.
Ariki is an artist, she's a cosplayer,
she's a roller derby extraordinaire.
She's also the kaihautū
on the waka in Wellington City,
so we're going to talk to Ariki today
about what it means for her to be young,
urban Māori and takatāpui in Wellington.
Kia ora e hoa.
Nice to meet you. - Want to come in,
check my place out? - Yeah, sounds awesome.
Ka pai, ka pai.
Oh my gosh.
This garage was a bus garage.
It's been transformed into what you see before you
and now it's a centre, cultural centre.
Gigs happen here.
Everything happens here, essentially.
Yeah, so it's quite an amazing place
and it really truly reflects the kind of person I am.
(soft music)
I was brought up in Gisborne.
Leaving Gisborne I came straight to Wellington City
and I resided in central area since.
Absolutely I do consider myself urban Māori
and I represent myself as such.
I've always done art growing up.
My father is a master carver, he's a tohunga whakairo.
I went down the more kind of illustrative route,
especially with cartoons and animation
that I grew up with in the 90s, so I was that child.
I identify as wahine.
It wasn't until the internet came,
with dial up that I started to type in
some kupu like gender and things,
'cause I just felt weird.
I just felt like something wasn't quite right about me
in terms of how I felt in my own shoes.
I was terrified to let anyone know.
The people I met in Wellington, the city itself,
everything I encountered and saw
started to open my eyes to who I really was.
Problem with the city though,
is that it can absorb you, you assimilate.
And a consequence of that can be you lose a real connection
with your whenua and your people.
You're too busy living in the world trying to make a living
and so you do not focus anymore on your reo,
your whakapapa or things like that.
What I've known, what I've learned too
from some of our kaumatua, takatāpui identity,
pre-colonisation, our people have always experimented
or dived into our sexuality.
Especially our gender,
that's one of the main parts of our culture.
It's displayed on our carving.
We came from Hawaiki and if you look at our people
from Hawaiki, especially our cultures there,
we have our whakawahine on those islands even still today,
still acknowledges as who they are as part of the culture.
The sad thing about here in Aotearoa as Māori,
we kind of lost that connection,
especially on that spectrum.
Even though the heavy presence on the islands,
in terms of religion, is quite strong
you still have the fa'afafine,
you still have the whakawahine from the Cook Islands.
You have the rae-rae from Tahiti,
they're still there and acknowledged.
(bike sputtering)
- You've made this point that Māori in an urban setting
have historically been disconnected from their culture
by the fact that we're in this urban place
and it's different from where we've always been.
For takatāpui, is the city not a place
that has also empowered,
in terms of allowing us to express an aspect of our identity
that might still be uncomfortable
for our whanau at the marae.
- Absolutely, absolutely.
Our rangatira who fled their whanau
due to prosecution of being disowned.
They go to the city now for refuge
because the city accommodates them.
And that's due to that one side
we try to rely on shunning you away
because if you decide to, you're wahine, you're tane,
you're gay or anything you decide to do,
that side tends to react negatively to it,
which is the Māori side.
And so my thing is that this side's really got to step up
and go back to our teachings.
You know, aroha, manaakitanga.
All that sort of stuff encompasses who we are
and it's the first thing we do when we greet one another.
Our people got to remember that.
They should always accept them for whoever they are
because that happened to me.
My whanau accepted me.
Because they supported me, I had my roots
and then I went to the city and found my whanau in the city,
but I still had my connection at home.
So that made me a much stronger person
compared to someone who goes to the city
and doesn't have that, they have to start all over again.
(soft music)
- Now we're gonna go and meet Kayla Riarn.
Kayla moved to Wellington in the late 70s.
I think she has a really different experience
of being an urban Māori person in Wellington City
compared to what myself or Ariki might have had today.
So hopefully we're gonna share
some good kōrero with her about that.
- Kia ora
- How are you? - I'm good.
- I'm an indigenous Māori whakawahine who was born here.
And there's no if and buts about it.
When I discovered I was different,
there are three stages, one is self-realisation,
then there is self-acceptance.
So I accepted who I was
and then of course there's transition.
And I've been doing that for like 40 odd years (laughs).
The reason I don't smile
is because I had a shit-ass childhood.
My father was kind of a prominent person
and out of respect I knew that I was different
and whatever I did would reflect on the family.
So I made the choice to move away,
late 1970s when I moved into Wellington.
I was about 16 then.
I found my own kind of people in Wellington City.
My friends that I made, they were the same as me
and we shared one thing, we're all Maori.
All of us sex workers were family.
When we went out it was like meeting your sisters.
You stopped, you talked about what you did,
what you gonna do.
We had our own social life
so it's like just going to someone's house for a coffee.
Girls would be lined up or sitting across here.
Sex work was just like a minor part of it.
It's just like a great big hui all the time.
You go to any marae, you see one of us, whakawahine.
We're in the kitchen, we're with the aunties.
We are workers.
We don't argue about things on a marae or what have you.
We get up and we do it and we're respected for it.
And just because I'm trans does not mean
that I do not have feelings about where I come from,
who I am and who I'm a great grandchild of, for instance.
- So we're heading now up to Victoria University.
This is an important place for me
because I've just finished my undergrad studies there
and that was the reason why
I moved to the city in the first place.
And we're going to meet Kevin Haunui.
Kevin is currently doing his PhD,
looking at takatāpui understandings of wellbeing.
Kevin's also one of the trustees
and founding members of Tiwhanawhana,
who we're going to go see after this later tonight.
- I was born in Rotorua in 1960.
My parents were school teachers.
They were both from the country as well,
so lived in Rotoiti for a year or so
while they were teaching there.
And then at Rotokawa and from there
I came down to Wellington in 1979.
I was gay from a young age in terms of self-awareness.
So that was a character trait that I kept hidden.
To me, Māori are diverse,
we're not just ones that live on the pā.
We're everywhere.
What's normal is actually being everything
we could possibly want to be.
And all of the things that our tikanga talk about
in terms of mana, upholding mana,
in terms of tautoko, manaaki,
about thinking about our spiritual side, our wairua.
All those things still count.
And are as important today as they always have been.
So we can't, I believe, as Māori be fixed and rigid.
Our tikanga still has to reflect all of those values
though it might look slightly different from how it was,
one generation ago, two generations ago.
It's got to respond to the context of the day.
- So it's about six o'clock at night
and it's just got dark outside.
And we're going to go now and see Tiwhanawhana.
So Tiwhanawhana is kind of a place
for takatāpui community in Wellington City to meet,
start off with a bit of a karakia.
And then I've heard we do a bit of a session
of whakawhanaungatanga and what we've been up to
in the weekend and then hopefully
get into a bit of waiata, a bit of poi.
And I'm a bit rusty, but I guess we'll see
if I can pull out my skills from primary school.
(singing)
So what have we taken away from this journey?
We've talked to takatāpui young and old,
we went looking for what it means for them to be takatāpui
in the city and how they find identity
and that's part of this wider story
around being urban Māori.
I think what I've learned is that there are advantages
and disadvantages to being takatāpui in the city.
Kayla mentioned earlier that one of the advantages
is that the city provides freedom to be yourself.
One of the disadvantages is that you have to look further
to find your sense of whanaungatanga, though it is there.
Overall what I've taken away
is that for takatāpui in the city,
they've gone on this really significant journey.
Not only are they looking at
if they're Māori enough through whakapapa,
if they're Māori enough through their location,
but also if they're Māori enough
through just being takātapui.
I think there is a really significant journey.
They are peeling back these more colonised attitudes
within Aotearoa.
Returning back to something we have always been.
As a wise man, once said to me,
"To be Māori is to be everything you could possibly be,
"and that I think is pretty much the gist of it."
E kore au e ngaro, he kākano i ruia mai i Rangiātea.
Ka kite ano.
(singing)
- [Announcer] This programme was made possible
by the RNZ/NZ On Air Innovation Fund.