Auckland Pride Festival working to be more inclusive and diverse for queer Māori

Friday, 26 February 2021

The theme for Auckland Pride 2021 is 'Karanga Atu, Karanga Mai' – responding with calls of activism, celebration, inclusively, representation and more.

OPINION: This year’s Auckland Pride Festival theme draws inspiration from the Māori invocation the karanga (spiritual call), recreating this to symbolise a weaving together of calls outward and inward across the rainbow communities.

A chorus is invited and particularly diverse, including takatāpui (people from the Māori queer community), voices are elevated.

Kara Beckford is Auckland’s Pride’s takatāpui representative. She is working to make the festival more accessible to the Māori queer community.

Similarly, most choruses’ voices do not always naturally manifest in harmony. It takes work, meaningful engagement with the individual, groups of voices and with the music itself.

There is a particular intersectional history that has landed the festival at this time and place mirroring and sometimes emphasising the inequities, cleavages, and richness of the socio-historical context of wider Aotearoa New Zealand.

Ngahuia Te Awekotuku led Our March at the conclusion of the festival in 2020.

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More than 7000 people marched up Queen Street in Auckland CBD celebrating their community in the Auckland Pride - Our March in 2020.

As a takatāpui person, past festivals have not felt like a place that I could fully show up in, engage with and that aligned with all of my identity.

Cisgender gay white men have been the nucleus of importance within LGBTQI+ spaces, including the festival.

More bluntly these spaces have been and still are marred by racism, transphobia and patriarchal objectification and subjectification of femme people and women.

Within Auckland Pride there has been a lot of heartfelt work that has gone into healing this mamae felt so deeply by takatāpui and other marginalised communities, much of which began before I was appointed on to the board led by young takatāpui leaders, such as Shaun Hindt and Auckland Pride Board (APB) co-chair Kaan Hiini, who put in the work to establish a separate Māori advisory board last year.

Separate from the Māori advisory board, more than half of APB is takatāpui.

To finish up the month, on February 27 at Aotea Square, the festival party will be all about celebration. (File image)

This is a humble start which expresses the intention of the board to better engage with takatāpui and mana whenua.

This year’s tuwheratanga (call of opening) took place upon the great Maungawhau/Mt Eden and with support from Tupuna Maunga Authority opened the festival.

Overlooking central Tāmaki Makaurau, the board, Māori advisory and community leaders gathered as karanga opened the festival.

A new rainbow crossing opened on Auckland's Karangahape Rd this year.

Through this call we were invited with the rising sun that spilled its yolk across the morning horizon. There we acknowledged the past as well as the work to do ahead of us and reiterated the intention to be a better more inclusive festival and a stronger more dedicated community.

My draw into Auckland Pride was seeing academic and activist Ngahuia Te Awekotuku lead Our March at the conclusion of the festival in 2020.

Her presence and recognition signalled to me a delineation of gay white centrism in the festival. Her work in takatāpui consciousness is profound and reclaimed a space for Māori like me, who were also queer, to come home to.

We are and always have been, as [Green MP] Elizabeth Kerekere describes, ‘a part of the whānau’ and have a place in te ao Māori.

Even more significantly Ngahuia, as kaikaranga on my marae, called my mother’s body into her whare-tupuna, Tūnohopū, to be embraced by her iwi after her death and this best expresses the weight of the term to me.

A karanga is a spiritual call and upholds the mana of each party. Karanga is a call to sanctify the living by drawing near the dead and opening a space to recognise people as full beings.

No-one should have to leave part of themselves at the door within Auckland Pride or the wider community.

As takatāpui we are too big to leave any part of ourselves behind. Our connections are rooted in the whenua and stretch across time, into the cosmos. We require space to be as big as we are and as big as we want to be.

Auckland Pride Festival has set the intention to meet this wero, offered by multiple people over its history. There is still work to do and today we hikoi to keep momentum.

My karanga to takatāpui is to take up more space. Keep wanting more, keep expecting more from the spaces you create, play and live. You deserve the front row, to be heard and deeper solidarity across the rainbow communities.

Join us in the direction we are heading towards an inclusive and diverse Auckland Pride Festival. Where we support and advance our diverseness, elevate marginalised voices and uphold mana takatāpui!

Kara Beckford, who is of Ngāti Whakaue and Jamaican descent, is Auckland’s Pride’s takatāpui representative. She is working to make the festival more accessible to the Māori queer community.