What moments shaped you in 2025?
Hāne | Kaikohe
Hāne shares the journey his whānau has been on to reclaim te reo and tikanga Māori, encouraging others to embrace indigenous perspectives to build a better future together.
“What’s given me strength and joy this year is the kotahitanga (unity) of the people. In recent times we’ve gone through some serious changes in terms of the system that we all live under.
It’s been awesome to see not only Māori people come together but all people from all walks of life come together and form a community that’s based on aroha, that’s based on mutual understanding of different cultures. It’s resonated with my whānau on our kaupapa as well.
Recently our whānau’s been on a journey for about the last four years of trying to revitalise te reo Māori me ōna tikanga (Māori language and its customs) in our āhuru mōwai (safe haven). When I saw that it gave validation to what we’re doing here as a whānau for our tamariki to really broaden our worldviews for our tamariki to grow in a way that we never got to.
We grew up under the thought that Māori was nothing and it wasn’t a great thing to be Māori and to learn your te reo Māori. So we want to take this momentum that we’ve gained over the last year and really drive it home to our tamariki that there is strength in numbers and there are other people out there in the world that think the way we do and to grab inspiration from other people and other places as well, not only our āhuru mōwai but from other places.
You see movements happening over in the Philippines, Nepal, everywhere in the world. If we all come together then we should all see better health outcomes and wellbeing outcomes for everyone.
Te reo Māori is a main focus of our whānau and that’s because we are in Aotearoa and we should make an effort to understand the culture so that we can have diversity I suppose and recently we’ve only got one narrative and so my words of encouragement is for people to get out there, ask the questions, learn the reo and get that indigenous perspective to run alongside the other perspective of the system that’s created at the moment. So that we can come together and build a better future for ourselves.”
