Who has changed your life?

Luke | Pōneke

Community has been an essential part of Luke’s upbringing and access to his Māoritanga. At Māori boarding school, he found a connection that he continues to draw strength from to this day. 

I guess for me it’s not so much about individuals but having a community of people behind me. And I’ve been lucky enough to have that throughout my whole life. As a kid, yep, I had my immediate family that sort of sat behind me. But I also had a really cool group of people in the community of Tītahi Bay that I grew up with, who had really strong connections into te ao Māori.

So that was sort of my first exposure to te ao Māori, my parents didn’t necessarily have the language. So I had to sort of learn, kind of ad hoc and on the go. And then that community sort of expanded to when I went to boarding school. And so did my sort of proficiency in te ao Māori. And that was when I really kind of took off.

And so it’s not necessarily about any one individual per se, but probably that community of people that have been behind me the whole way. I’d like to think that they’re still there. But my, certainly my boarding school community that I’ve come through with. And here in Aotearoa, especially at the boarding school that I went to, a Māori boys boarding school, we were protected from a lot of the issues in society, like colonisation and racism and those sorts of things.

And we were encouraged to learn te reo Māori, and be proud of our culture. And so that’s just something that I’ve kind of taken into the rest of my life and my adulthood.