Maori Families

Hamu's heart was pounding, his palms sweaty and tingly. No need to worry about limbering up and practicing the wiri wiri - his hands were trembling enough already! He waited in the wings with the rest of his school's kapa haka party, all of them fired up in anticipation of their turn, waiting for the group from Hamilton to finish. Even though they were competing with them, it was hard not to be stirred by the power and precision of their performance and Hamu only hoped that they could maintain their well practised choreography and outperform them. So much was riding on this performance. Bouncing nervously from foot to foot, he thought about his journey to this point.

He was 15 and in Year 11. Right now, school was going really pretty well, surprisingly, and he felt energised and into it. Kapa haka had an awful lot to do with that and he felt grateful to have turned in this direction. Last year he had been drifting along, turning away from school step by step. He and his mates, Paul and Rawiri, had gone to High School from the Intermediate where they were often on the edges of being in trouble, but not seriously, to gradually getting into deeper difficulties at High School and they had begun truanting. It wasn't like he couldn't do the work or anything, but he just didn't feel engaged and when one of the others suggested a 'day off', he would always be up for it. Of course it couldn't go undetected for long, because their school had all the state of the art, period-by-period attendance tracking technology and it wasn't long before he was first of all called into the Dean's office, and then on to supervision and having to report each day, and then finally he had been stood down for three days by the Board of Trustees, as were Paul and Rawiri. So across about six months he got steadily more and more behind and less and less motivated to catch up.

He wasn't quite sure how he had got to that point, but thought it had probably just been a slowly growing thing, starting at Intermediate, but snowballing as the expectations for his school work increased at the same time that he felt less and less sure what he wanted to do and seemed to have no sense of direction. He knew that he had deeply disappointed his Mum and Dad and it gave him a warm feeling to know that they were out there in the audience and that any minute now their hearts would swell with pride, a sense of wehi, as they watched him drive out powerfully with the rest of the boys in the opening whakaheke.

Mum and Dad worked really hard and things had been especially difficult this last year. Dad's settled job at the freezing works, for which he and Mum had left their roots in the East Cape, had become much less assured as the company restructured, and he had had to return to shiftwork, which he had not had to do since Hamu was in primary school. Mum worked as a caregiver for the IHC and she also worked rostered shifts, though she only had to do sleepovers about once a fortnight. Hamu was often responsible for the three younger ones, and that bugged him sometimes, even though he knew it was important that, as the eldest, he played his part in supporting the whanau.

He wasn't actually the eldest. He had an older sister, Ani, who was 19. Dad came from Tokomaru Bay and had met Mum while he was boarding at school in Gisborne. Mum was Pakeha and she had been only 17 when she became pregnant with Ani. Her parents had been very upset and had wanted her to adopt the baby out, but Dad's parents had been determined to have her and she had lived with Hamu's koro and kuia ever since. Hamu and his younger brother and sisters spent all their holidays there, so they had still sort of grown up with Ani, but he still thought of himself as the eldest, in a way. Though the families had discouraged his Mum and Dad from seeing each other after Ani was born, after they finished school they left together for the city and jobs and it was there that Hamu was born. But for Hamu, like his Dad, Tokomaru Bay was where his heart was and today, as it was every time he performed with the group, he felt all the long lines of his Ngati Porou whakapapa behind him,