Last words: Titewhai Harawira on damehoods, Te Tiriti and her 'wicked witch' status

Friday, 27 January 2023

Only days before her death, Titewhai Harawira spoke to Pou Tiaki reporter Joel Maxwell about rejecting damehoods, accepting the will of her tūpuna, and her plans to accompany Jacinda Ardern for Waitangi Day.

Read this story in te reo Māori and English here. / Pānuitia tēnei i te reo Māori me te reo Pākehā ki konei.

An interview is a crazy thing. Strangers let you in their house, in their heart, break off bits of themselves, and share them. Ugliness, beauty, devotion, history – hopefully the truth. So why shouldn’t Titewhai Harawira be allowed to torture me a little? An utu for these taonga?

“You want to know a little bit about my life?” she asked, about 30 seconds into our kōrero. “Well, you must be new on the job if you don’t know anything about my life.”

**READ MORE:

* New PM Chris Hipkins pays respects to Titewhai Harawira as tangi begins

* 'She was a fighter': Māori leaders react to death of Titewhai Harawira

* Moe mai rā, Titewhai Harawira

* Speaking rights and slow progress at Waitangi

**

Harawira spoke from her home, somewhere on the end of the phone line. It’s the sting of vinegar in the eye I’d been expecting from this alternative whaea of the nation. This anti-Judy Bailey. A quick reminder of who’s boss at the beginning of an interview on Te Tiriti, Waitangi Day, and yeah, a little bit about her life.

They say you should never meet your personal heroes. Admittedly Harawira wasn’t, but she still made me feel like I’d somehow let her down. Then again I would have felt let down, myself, if she were any different. There's something bracing about a splash of vinegar.

Anyway, she kindly agreed to kōrero on her landline a few weeks ahead of Waitangi Day. And now as I write this, she has died.

It’s genuinely sad to think her plans to accompany Jacinda Ardern (who she particularly liked) on to the marae must have died too before her own passing.

He mihi tēnei ki a ia, tēnei whaea, tēnei rangatira, tēnei kaiārahi rongonui o ngā pirimia maha ki Te Tii Marae.

He mihi ki tēnei kaiwhakatūtū kaha rawa o tō tātou reo rangatira, tō tātou ahurea Māori – tō tātou mana motuhake i tēnei ao hurihuri.

Kua tae atu ia ki te ao wairua, kia okioki ai.

Resting, I think, was the last thing on her mind.

She was enjoying being 90 – said it was wonderful. Harawira scoffed at the idea of slowing down. “Hell no. After all that hard work, you slow down? I don’t think so.”

That hard work included Māori activism since the age of “15 or 16”. Harawira was a member of Ngā Tamatoa, the group that launched the Māori language petition delivered to the steps of Parliament in 1972. She helped organise the historic 1975 hīkoi led by Dame Whina Cooper.

She went to the Netherlands to ask the Dutch government to take back Aotearoa’s weaker alternate name, New Zealand. Once, she accused the Māori Party of hanging off John Key’s jockstrap. (Old school trolling. She had no time for enlisting social media in her fight. People online were “lazy”, she said to me. “They’re afraid to front up and have a proper discussion.”)

Most people, however, probably remember her leading prime ministers on to Te Tii Marae, for Waitangi Day.

“Leaders, and leaders and leaders,” she said of those pōwhiri partners. “Some are good, some are poor – some are a waste of time. But they all have a time, and a job to do.”

As we spoke, she still planned to accompany Ardern this year. Harawira respected Ardern – the then-PM walked the path of simple honesty and worked well with Māori, she said. “It’s her caucus that doesn’t back up her wishes, in a lot of instances … you ought to know that.”

I seriously didn’t know that, but Harawira said the best leaders she met were the women. This includes Helen Clark.

When I told people I was planning to interview Harawira, many mentioned the time she made Clark cry for trying to speak at Te Tii back in 1998.

Well, Harawira said, people like the ones I spoke to can “go to hell”.

“They can stuff their blimmin attitudes as far as I’m concerned. They don’t understand what went on, they weren’t there. They didn’t follow it up.”

Harawira said she met Clark a fortnight after the incident at Te Tii, and had a sit-down and a “woman-to-woman talk”. “And we were back on the road, and I was taking her back on to the marae.”

People never bothered to find out what really happened, and simply thought of Harawira as the “wicked witch of the west” who made Clark cry.

Let’s face it, relationships are tough things to maintain.

Take the Treaty, and Te Tiriti, which along with the earlier He Whakaputanga, were foundational documents. There have been plenty of tears, metaphorical and real, shed as we settle down together as a nation.

The only way we can have a meaningful relationship, Harawira said, is if both parties “understand that those documents need to be honoured by both parties”.

“Now, my people, my tūpuna, my ancestors, signed those documents believing the Crown and our Government would honour them. But that hasn’t happened.”

She was not a fan of Treaty settlements, saying the Crown and governments used them to “bamboozle the Māoris”.

“You know, ‘Let’s give them $5 for a piece of land that’s worth a few thousands, if not a few millions of dollars. Let’s just give them a few dollars.’”

Enticements, rewards, from the state were cheap and had little appeal to Harawira, who said she’d turned down approaches for damehoods several times. “There is no Pākehā accolade that can ever match the mana of my tūpuna. What would I want to take on something of less value?”

It was exactly because Harawira’s ancestors signed He Whakaputanga and Te Tiriti, with all their expectations of the documents, that she herself became an activist.

“I walk in the footsteps of my ancestors, to the best of my ability. And so do a lot of other Māoris. Both old and young.”

So, you wake up one day and find that somebody has gone. And thus it was with Harawira. A week after we spoke she had joined her tūpuna, and I was back here in our world, wondering what to do with this story.

I do know this. If we use a well-worn metaphor for Waitangi Day, and Te Tiriti, then we’re on a long shared journey with a rocky path behind us. But we’re moving. And if each part of the journey is marked by the remains of a fire, then Harawira still smoulders with particular ferocity when we glance over our shoulder back through the trees. That’s some legacy.

My kōrero with her might well be one of the last times she spoke to the media.

The subject of final words is an interesting one. Her last words to me came after I said I’d let her know when the story would run.

“You do that. And don’t forget either,” she commanded.

OK, her near-last words to me had a better sense of completion for Harawira, looking back at a lifetime of fighting, and ahead to the future. It also allowed the tiniest of admissions she was nearing the end of her mahi.

All of her grandchildren spoke te reo Māori, she said, and one of them led the Māori culture group at her school.

“She is the only Māori student in that group of 30-odd children, she is the only Māori, and all that group speak [te reo] and haka, and waiata – you would think they were all Māoris. They’re Japanese, they’re Chinese, they’re all the races, it's wonderful to see.

“And if our children can do those things, then what have I got to worry about? Absolutely nothing. It’s been all worth it.”