Consider This—The Ship Crashes at Dawn

Ox Matiu

Being takatāpui at Te Herenga Waka feels lonely.

We are spread across different disciplines, different research, different whānau. Perhaps this is the institutional design: to keep us separate so we don’t organize too readily.

I hadn’t realized this loneliness I felt until I attended my first postgrad class: a Māori-majority cohort and, most importantly, four other tauira takatāpui. There’s an old English proverb that you cannot lose something you never had. But in that moment, the puzzle pieces clicked into the missing spaces my heart had left just for them.

I wasn’t a standout for being a gay Māori who loved to read. I was at home.

Our big city is lucky enough to house our national archives for queer and takatāpui records. Once transliterated as Te Pūranga Takatāpui o Aotearoa, it was gifted a new name in 2023: Kawe Mahara Queer Archives Aotearoa. It was a place I had never visited but often heard about. Neither had my classmates.

So I submitted a proposal to the Mana Motuhake fund, supported by Ngāi Tauira, to run the Haerenga ki te Kawa Mahara kaupapa.

I rocked up bright and early on a cold winter Saturday morning. Roger Swanson, my KM liaison, swung around the corner at Home Café to introduce himself. He had already started a tab for kai. As we nibbled at the pre-buttered scones, a few other students trickled in alongside several ‘sorry I can’t make it’ messages, until we numbered four.

Roger welcomed us upstairs to Te Kupenga, an apt name for capturing all us taka in one place. Another KM board member, Dr Elizabeth Kerekere, was already waiting for us on Zoom. Across the four surrounding tables were carefully organised materials spanning the 1970s to today.

There were pamphlets on AIDS, custom-made waiata packets, and self-published zines. There were books from our kaumātua including Clive Aspin, Ngāhuia Te Awekōtuku, Witi Ihimaera, and Leonie Pihama. There were catalogues of hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand, different texts speaking to non-Pākehā ways of being gay. 

There were so many words, so much variety, to being takatāpui.

And it had always been here, waiting for us.

My dream was to bring together tauira takatāpui across these imaginary borders created by colonial systems, to break new waves in old seas.

I am glad to say I succeeded, and I will succeed again.