Defiant spirit lighting the path to progress
To celebrate International Women’s Day tomorrow, the Herald and online magazine E-Tangata are telling the video stories of six inspirational Ma¯ ori and Pasifika women. Today: Naida Glavish, the ‘kia ora’ lady who’s been leading cultural change since the 1980s.
Maybe it’s unfair to keep harking back to that time in 1984, when Naida Glavish stood her ground against the Post Office, as a telephone toll operator who risked being fired for greeting callers with “kia ora”. It seems outrageous today (and indeed was outrageous to many back then). But that’s the point. It shows we’re capable of progress, even if it doesn’t always seem that way.
Such moments are important to acknowledge and celebrate. They’re a stake in the ground, a turning point in our cultural life.
Of course, Dame Naida (she was made a dame last year for services to Ma¯ ori and the community) has achieved so much else in her life.
She’s a mother of three daughters and two sons, a grandmother of 19 mokopuna, and a great-grandmother of 31. She has taught te reo and tikanga at high school. She’s been the president of the Ma¯ ori Party. She’s headed her Nga¯ ti Wha¯ tua iwi ru¯ nanga.
And she’s been instrumental in pushing for our health services to be more attuned to the needs and rights of Ma¯ ori — in real and meaningful ways. Like those wha¯ nau rooms at Auckland City Hospital for grieving families, and dedicated corridors for the transportation of loved ones who’ve passed away.
These things aren’t just for Ma¯ ori, either. They benefit everyone.
As the chief adviser on tikanga at the Waitemata¯ and Auckland district health boards, Naida’s still working, still bringing a deeply and unapologetically Ma¯ ori perspective to everything she does.
“I actually had an intensivist say to me one time, ‘Naida, can you tell us why the Mowrees are crowding out the waiting rooms and the stairwells outside our operating theatres?’ And I said, ‘Well, for a start, Ma¯ ori are not responsible for the size of your waiting rooms. And second, Ma¯ ori are actually entering into a specialist area of karakia to give support to you and ensure that your knife doesn’t slip in that operation.’”
Naida was born on the front seat of her Croatian father’s Studebaker and raised on the shores of the Kaipara Harbour by her Ma¯ ori grandmother, Ngapeka Teririkore Nahi.
Her Croatian grandmother, Marija Glavish, lived across the road, so she bounced between the two of them. Both grandmothers were widows; neither spoke much English.
She was “an absolutely loved child”, she says, and, although poor, had an upbringing rich in tikanga Ma¯ ori, as she told Dale Husband in an E-Tangata interview in 2015.
“We lived in a nikau whare with an earth floor. It was very clean. I remember once when the public health nurse had to visit (because an aunty was there with her baby) and she was just full of praise about the cleanliness of our whare.
“So I grew up with the values of tapu and noa, and karakia for everything with my grandmother. Not playing with food. We were raised with the understanding of the pull of the tide for fishing purposes. Understanding the moon phases for planting and growing our kai, the ta¯ papa for the ku¯ mara and, at the time of harvest for the ku¯ mara, how to prepare the pit with burnt fern leaves so that the slugs couldn’t get in, but also preparing a pit with the little ku¯ mara for the slugs, rats and the like so that they didn’t go near the pit for our consumption.
“Of course, I had to go to school, but I didn’t learn much
... I hadn’t already learned at home.” Naida was expelled from one school and suspended from two others — compliance has never been her strong point — so school didn’t figure much in her education.
She’s also a survivor of four years of state care, between the ages of 12 and 16. It’s a heartbreaking story, but typical of how little it took for Ma¯ ori children to be sucked up by the system.
Throughout her life, it’s been her upbringing, that solid tikanga Ma¯ ori foundation and the old values drilled into her by her grandmother, that have guided her and given her strength.
It was her grandmother’s voice that she heard back in 1984, as she drove over the Auckland Harbour Bridge. She was thinking of dropping the “kia ora” and letting her Post Office supervisor off the hook, because he’d been good enough to give her time off for a tangi.
And then her grandmother (who’d died in 1972) chided her: “Nui ake tenei take ia koe!” This is far greater than you.
It was her grandmother, too, who’d told her, many times, if you see something wrong, fix it. Because if you don’t, you will become like it.
“And so, because of that, I went through my early adult life hoping nobody does anything wrong in front of me. Because I’d be bound to say something or do something about it. Which I have done. Which doesn’t make me popular at all.”