John Campbell reports from Tūrangawaewae where Te Arikinui Kuini Nga wai hono i te po gave her first speech and the energy of a future generation was on display.
Ake, ake, ake.
Sometimes you can see “forever” starting.
In her first speech as Māori Queen, Te Arikinui Kuini Nga wai hono i te po, dressed in a blue of sky, and light, and infinity, talked about forever (“āke, āke”) five times.
“I’m tired of talking about fighting and the ‘forever’ nature of that struggle.
“When will we be successful ‘forever’?
“When will we be healthy ‘forever’?
“And when will we be liberated from the struggles of the world ‘forever’?”
(“Kua hōhā ahau i te kōrero mō te whawhai, me te ‘āke, āke’ i roto i tērā wairua tohe.
“Āhea nei tātou angitu ai mō ‘āke, āke’?
“Āhea rānei tātou hauora ai mō ‘āke, āke’?
“Āhea rawa rānei tātou puta ai i ngā uauatanga o te ao mō ‘āke, āke’?”)
The crowd at Tūrangawaewae for Koroneihana was more full of children than I can remember seeing it here. For young people, forever is a lifetime.
Their Queen, only 28-years-old herself, articulated a vision of the future which contained their energy, their identity, and their strength.
But most of all, it contained a sense of possibility determined to shake off the burdens history imposes.
Forever is forward.
“It’s now 2025, we need to stop allowing external forces to hinder us. We need to walk a new path. We need a new direction. We need new solutions for the problems we’ve inherited.”
The young people I spoke to knew the solutions she was talking about. Them.
Vibrations
None of this was unexpected. Particularly not if you’ve been to Tūrangawaewae in recent years.
In January 2024, I drove down the motorway from Auckland to see Nga wai hono i te po’s father, Kīngi Tuheitia, host the National Hui he had called.
It was such an extraordinary day. Ten thousand people arrived, at short notice, amid the sleepiness and holiday absences of January, more than doubling Ngāruawāhia’s population.
Busloads came. Some, pointedly, from Ngāpuhi in the far north, which is most certainly not a Kīngitanga iwi.
Participation was declaratory. Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou, Tainui, Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāi Tahu, Te Arawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāi Tūhoe, Ngāti Maniapoto – they were all there, showing themselves like tūī poi.
It was a response, in part, to the coalition government’s Treaty Principles Bill. But more than that, it was a declaration of Māori unity, kotahitanga.
It was explicitly intended as a day history would remember – and people had come to make it so.
I wrote about it on the day. The sense of joy.
Reading that 19 months on, it feels like nothing declared as aspiration by Kīngi Tuheitia didn’t have a sequel in actual events. So many things that followed felt like their batteries were charged at Tūrangawaewae: the exultant unity at Waitangi the next month; the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti which made its way through the country, with tens of thousands arriving at Parliament on November 19 in the largest protest march in this country’s history; Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke’s haka in Parliament; the record breaking number of public submissions on the Treaty Principles Bill. They all felt like the seeds Kīngi Tuheitia had planted, blossoming.
Tame Iti, who, for decades now, has dared to insist we can do better, told me he was there for the “vibrations”. And there was a passage in Kīngi Tuheitia’s speech that distilled those vibrations into a kind of manifesto.
“The best protest we can do right now is be Māori. Be who we are, live our values, speak our reo, care for our mokopuna, our awa, our maunga, just be Māori. Māori all day, every day. We are here, we are strong.”
A year and a half later, and a year after Kīngi Tuheitia died, his daughter was the very embodiment of that.
“My father said, ‘Be Māori all day, every day’, because he knew we needed to be strong in good times and bad, with or without protest. And that’s how we can express our vitality as Māori.”
Cometh the hour, cometh the kuini
Watching Te Arikinui Kuini Nga wai hono i te po speak, and talking to people who’ve known her during the 28-year journey that led to her standing in front of the famous, carved Māhinārangi meeting house on Rāmere (Friday) afternoon, it’s almost ridiculous how fit for purpose she seems.
A direct descendant of the first Māori king, Pōtatau Te Wherowhero, she is also, and this may almost be as impactful as her royal lineage, a graduate of the kohanga and kura system. She taught kapa haka. She has a Master’s degree in Tikanga Māori.
The kura generation.
Why does this matter?
In 1900, 95% of Māori were fluent in te reo Māori. By 1960, when her father was starting school, that was down to about 25% and falling.
So wilfully and pervasively was Māori removed from our schools and public life that her father didn’t speak it.
But from childhood, Nga wai hono i te po spoke it as her first language. And with the words came identity and agency. A kind of decolonisation.
This isn’t some flex. It’s a response to our actual past.
As Parliament’s website reminds us, the Native Schools Act of 1867 established a schooling system which, “required English to be the only language written or spoken in”. Yes, just 27 years after the Treaty was signed, the government was exiling the Māori language to history, the shadows, and silence.
“Under the Act, Māori children were actively discouraged from learning their language and punishments were common for children who spoke te reo Māori at these schools.”
Punishments.
Colonisation stole the language out of Māori mouths. So when the new, young kuini is so proudly and expertly fluent, her fluency is an act of overcoming, a form of victory over the past.
A couple of hours before Nga wai hono i te po spoke, I stumbled upon a group of students from Te Wharekura o Rakaumanga, her old school.
Every one of the students in the photo is fluent in both te reo Māori and English. Most have Māori as their first language. They move between languages with such ease they appear to not even register they’re going back and forth, back and forth.
They were shining, buzzing, alive with the largeness of the occasion. And also, wonderfully, totally at home with it all. Yes, a woman who barely a decade ago was at their school, in Huntly, wearing their uniform, is now kuini. Yes, she would later deliver her Koroneihana address completely in te reo Māori. But why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t you?
Why wouldn’t we?
He tāngata
Tūrangawaewae has the Waikato river on one side, River Road on the other. When it’s full, people swirl through each other, like aspirin dissolving, round and round, nowhere to go but back in. People stayed after the kuini spoke. They wanted to store the memory. In years to come, they’ll tell you they were there. And they’ll tell you how it felt.
On one of the seats above the river, prime spots, looking across the marae ātea, I met Beverly Manahi. Sixty-nine years old, but looking younger, it’s almost impossible to overstate her love of the language and her commitment to it.
She first became involved in Kōhanga Reo in 1981, the year the Department of Māori Affairs committed to funding and supporting it. That dream. In 1985, she moved into teaching Māori in Te Kura Kaupapa Māori at Hoani Waititi in West Auckland. One of the first kura. Forty years, and counting.
The first of her kōhanga students are approaching 50 now. Many will have children who speak Māori. There are kura kids everywhere here. The conversations around us are nearly all in Māori.
“This was our dream,” she tells me. “It’s wonderful. All the things we dreamt about are now a reality.”
She stopped for a moment, as a group of young people walked past us.
“I feel so happy and so proud.”
When it was time for the Queen to leave, I stood amongst the people waiting to sing Nga wai hono i te po out.
My neighbour was Jack Cunningham, aged 88. Until Jack was five-years-old, he only spoke Māori. When he was five and started school, he wasn’t allowed to speak Māori at all. He was taught in a language he didn’t understand and couldn’t use. If he tried to speak Māori to participate, to have a voice, he got a “clip behind the ear”.
Jack was wearing a hat but when his Queen approached he took it off and held it to his heart.
“We’ve come so far,” he said. His eyes went somewhere far away. “Who knows what the future holds.”
Sometimes, in fear of things we don’t quite understand, we forget to be open to understanding.
In our clamour to put “NZ Transport Agency” before “Waka Kotahi”, as if the latter diminishes the former rather than enriching it with the unique and vital poetry of this place, we deny ourselves something nourishing. But that nourishment was everywhere at Tūrangawaewae.
When she finished her address, the students from her old kura, the young people I met earlier, assembled to perform a waiata tautoko, Timatangi E Te Puea.
The students started and the kuini stood and joined them.
They sang and sang and sang and sang. As if it could last forever.
And they all did poi. Fast.
The kuini, the students, all of them under 30. Singing. Floating above the weight the world has asked them to carry.
On and on it went. History blurring into something that survived it.
“Being Māori is speaking our language”, the kuini said. Te Arikinui Kuini Nga wai hono i te po.
“It is taking care of the environment. It is reading and learning about our history. It is the choice to be called by our Māori name. There are many ways to manifest being Māori, not just in times of protest. Being Māori is forever.”
