Ko au te Harakeke, Ko te Harakeke ko au

Ko au te Harakeke, ko te Harakeke ko au.

I hold it in my hands, woven into my hair, flowing down my back, and I feel the whakapapa move with me. Every strand is both connection and declaration, a whisper of tīpuna through living fibres.

The act of weaving harakeke into myself is intimate. I am not just photographing it, I am embodying it, carrying its stories forward. Its fibres are soft yet strong, bending with movement but holding their shape, a reflection of our own capacity to endure and adapt.

Harakeke has always sustained: sheltering, binding, creating. Touch it and you touch generations. Weaving it into my hair is a quiet reclamation, a revival of practice, a way of situating myself within a continuum between past and future, self and whakapapa.

Harakeke is more than material. It is identity, ceremony, memory made visible. I am reminded: harakeke, like us, persists. It survives, it grows, it reaches for the world, carrying stories that will not be forgotten.

Ko au te harakeke, ko te harakeke, ko au.

Puuhoro and the return of moko

Moko is not ornament. It is declaration.

To mau moko is to place one’s whakapapa on the surface of the tinana, visible, undeniable, a breathing manuscript that speaks to whakapapa and identity. For too long, Māori skin was policed into silence. The ink that once proclaimed belonging was shamed, forbidden, nearly erased. And yet, it lives.

The pūhoro, stretching across the thighs and down the legs, is one of the most dynamic expressions of tā moko. Historically, it marked the speed and agility of toa, warriors whose bodies moved like rivers, swift and unyielding. Today, its meaning has evolved, but not diminished. To wear a pūhoro is to situate oneself in a continuum, not only of strength, but of survival.

What we see now is revival in motion. Moko is returning to skin, to communities, to the eyes of the world, as an act of reclamation. Each line inked today is both homage and assertion, the stories once silenced are spoken aloud, carried forward into the present with pride and purpose.

When I photographed this tāne, I found myself reflecting on how much meaning skin can hold. We tend to think of the body as temporary, fragile, endlessly vulnerable. But moko insists otherwise. It transforms the body into a text, a site of permanence, an assertion that one’s story will not be rubbed away by time.

In a world obsessed with the temporary, trends, filters, disappearing stories, moko is the opposite. It is not for the algorithm. It does not perform for mass approval. It lives outside of ephemera, inside of whakapapa.

And perhaps that is why moko unsettles. It asks us to look beyond aesthetics, beyond “fashion,” and to sit with something older, heavier, more enduring. When lines become whakapapa, they no longer decorate; they declare.

E Tuu Kotahitanga

The streets pulse beneath our feet. Feet pressing the asphalt, voices rising and falling like wind through trees. I stand among them, camera in hand, watching, listening, breathing in the rhythm of kotahitanga, the force that binds strangers into a single body, a single intent.

Each sign, each chant, each gaze carries weight. It is not just message; it is history, care, and persistence made visible. I am there to witness, but also to feel, to let the movement touch me, to trace its lines, to hold its energy in the lens and in myself.

Being Māori here is both grounding and reflective, I carry their pulse in my chest. The mauri of action, the insistence to care for something larger than self, threads through every moment. My photographs do not capture everything, but they carry fragments: the pause of a hand lifted, the tension of voices, the unity that refuses to fracture.

And in that unity, kotahitanga, there is a quiet insistence. The world presses on, moments pass, yet this gathering, this shared breath and purpose, lingers. The energy persists long after the streets have emptied, tracing invisible lines through those of us who were there, through time, through memory.