Qiane Matata-Sipu: On the front lines

At 36, Matata-Sipu is what might be described as a high achiever. She is not only a committed activist, she is also the author and creator of NUKU, a movement that profiles and celebrates 100 Indigenous wāhine. NUKU the book was released in November and has already sold more than 3000 copies as well as making the shortlist for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. In February, she also took home the culture and arts category at the NZ Women of Influence Awards for her work on the project. “Most of the time we had no money and none of my team were paid what they were worth,” she says. “It was a lot of sacrifice. When I was holding the book in my hand, I was very, very proud.”

While Matata-Sipu has strong whakapapa ties to Ihumātao, she also has whakapapa to Te Waiohua, Waikato-Tainui, Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Pikiao, and the Cook Islands. She grew up in South Auckland, raised by her grandparents in Māngere Bridge, but her childhood memories are mostly of her marae at Ihumātao. Her strong connection to the marae is at the heart of who she is today. She remembers tagging along with her grandfather and helping to set up for hui. She was eight years old when she went to her first marae meeting and 16 when she became the chairperson of the Hauora committee.

“My relationship with my marae was part of my everyday life,” she says. “It’s one privilege I always recognise. I don’t know what it’s like to not have my marae. Our marae is almost more important than our iwi in terms of how we as a whānau connect and how we as a whānau operate.”

Although Matata-Sipu knows the stories of her marae intimately, she says it’s hard not being able to express herself in te reo Māori. “You’re born and raised on a marae and you still sit there and get half the conversation,” she says. “You can’t fully participate in that space. And so it’s not like you’re less than, but you’re not fully there, which is the whole concept around wholeness.”

Matata-Sipu’s birth father is Australian — something she doesn’t talk about much publicly — and she has met him only once. “I haven’t seen him for 18 years. I realised that, because my husband and I just celebrated 18 years together in December.”

So although she says she has always felt proud to be Māori, she hasn’t always felt accepted. “I had a very white name, I’m fair-skinned, and my reo wasn’t amazing, so there were times throughout my life when I felt not Māori enough or like I didn’t quite know where I fit.”

One of those times was at the mainstream high school she attended. “It was probably some of the more obvious times of my life, where I was grappling with my own identity and the context of where I was,” she says. “I remember there was this little half fence that separated the te reo unit from the mainstream unit. There was a very clear distinction between mainstream versus the Māori side. And my cousins would be on the other side of the fence.”

And when Matata-Sipu, who was a top student, expressed her interest in studying journalism at AUT, her careers teacher told her she should “choose something else”. “I was the co-head girl, the dux of my year, and I had the careers teacher believing I couldn’t do it,” she says. “Ronji Tanielu was promoting AUT and I remember him saying to me, ‘You should apply for the vice chancellor’s scholarship’, and now I think, the white lady was, like, you’re not going to get in, but the Sāmoan man was, like, you should apply for the biggest scholarship they have. He believed in me and I got it.”

At university, Matata-Sipu says, she was the “token Māori” on her communications-degree course and struggled to find her place. “I kind of just floated in between. There wasn’t anyone really like me. It was in the city and everyone wore make-up and dressed like a fashion show. They were so different; most of them came from money. People would come and ask me all the Māori questions, and I’m like, ‘I don’t know, google it’.”

Because of her experience at high school and university, when she left university for the communications sector she was wary of falling into a media typecast of being assigned the Māori and Pasifika stories. But, despite that wariness, she found herself working at Mana, once New Zealand’s leading Māori magazine. This is where she learnt everything from production to answering phone calls, from flat planning to advertising, and from photography to writing. This experience and the skills she took from it led her to start her own business, QIANE+co.

But in 2015, life changed dramatically after attending a hui at Makaurau Marae and hearing a rumour that a development was to be built at Ihumātao. “There weren’t a lot of people who came to marae meetings back in those days,” she said. “I remember our whānau saying to me, ‘You guys go and find out more information and bring it back.’ And we found out that it was a Fletchers development. We did the call-out when Pania asked everybody to come down to Ihumātao and people started showing up. We never, ever imagined the amount of people who would show up on the whenua. We had 10,000 in that first week.”

Matata-Sipu’s late Nana Dawn was a huge influence on her, telling her and SOUL to “just do it”. “I had mamae for my grandfather, too, because if he was still alive, he would have said no [to development] and our whole family would have fallen in line straight away,” she says.

But “when they both died, that kind of mana never moved to anyone else. And so there was no real authority of one person to say something. We were in our 20s and 30s, forced into a space where we had to step up.”

Matata-Sipu made the conscious choice to work in the background on communications and strategy while Newton became the public face of the movement. SOUL started social media pages, distributed posters, sent out press releases, spoke at events, attended hui, and eventually constructed a kaitiaki village for the “land protectors”.

“In those really early days, it was just trying to figure out what we were doing and how,” she says. “I was still wanting to have my baby and so my close friend, who’s a rongoā practitioner, said to me, ‘You need to choose which whenua you are going to fight for because you can’t fight for them both at the same time.’ I had to choose — was I going to be in the public or do I take a step back and figure out how to still be involved while trying to have my baby?”

The fight to save Ihumātao took seven years of Matata-Sipu’s life. In that time, she gave birth to Haeata te Kapua, her nana died, and she launched NUKU. The word NUKU is derived from Papatūānuku, meaning Earth mother, and is dedicated to her daughter.

“If I die tomorrow, I know I did everything to protect her whenua, that she’s secure in knowing who she is in her identity and that knows she can be anything she wants to be by giving her all these examples.”

In December 2020, Finance Minister Grant Robertson announced that the Government would release $30 million to purchase the whenua from Fletcher Building. He told media that Ihumātao risked becoming his “generation’s Bastion Point”. It was a victory for Matata-Sipu and SOUL, with the Government opening the door to eventually returning the land to the people maintaining ahi kaa on it. It was also a vindication of their special relationship to the whenua and their years of activism to protect it.