Radicals

Sometimes you’ve got to jump out the window and create a new limit of what’s acceptable.

– Mike Smith on the value of activism

The saddest part for me was that my people were all drunk at the Golf Club house, and were clapping when I got arrested.

– Eva Rickard, on Māori vs Māori

What does it mean to be a kaitiaki in this part of the planet?

– Annette Sykes

People say ‘oh you’re a Māori radical’. I’ve got a Pākeha mum. I’m pretty sure that if my father’s people, ngāpuhi people, had oppressed Pākehās, that I’d be standing here being called a Pākehā activist who would be fighting for Treaty rights for Pākehās because Māoris had shafted them. It’s not about black or white for me, it’s about right or wrong.

– Mike Smith

If people feel comfortable with desecrating our awa, polluting and shitting in our awa, our lands and our forest. Well, from my point of view, that’s utter nonsense. I think what they should be doing is analysing where we’re coming from and say, ‘This is not just good for Māori, this is good for society as a whole’.

– Ken Mair, on occupying Moutoa Gardens in Whanganui

They couldn’t find it … and the Government had bureaucrats running around like rats in a cage trying to find The Treaty document. In the end they found it, I think, in a building in Auckland, and it had been attacked by rodents. The rats had gnawed at it to such an extent that the original document had almost been destroyed. That underlined for us the status of the Treaty at that time...

– Syd Jackson on the place of The Treaty during Nga Tama Toa's 70s activism