UPLIFTING INDIGENOUS VOICES

As a female of Indian descent, the more I ‘try to have it all’ in a Eurocentric world, the more I notice myself slipping away from my roots in an attempt to blend in. I speak to Qiane Matata-Sipu, founder of NUKU, a kaupapa or movement that empowers indigenous wāhine to look at the world through a lens made by and for indigenous women.

Matata-Sipu says that today “we live in a world where our cultures have been influenced to become patriarchal”. She explains that traditional Māori culture balances the status of both males and females, as opposed to one over the other, but in a Pakeha world, men are put on a pedestal. When I ask Matata-Sipu, if women can have it all, she challenges this notion. “Success looks like different things,” she says. “Success isn’t having a career or not having a career—success is being content in who you are.” And while all women come up against challenges, indigenous women face even more. For example, “when we look at the way we are portrayed, we are victims of domestic abuse or statistics of negative social health,” Matata-Sipu says. NUKU aims to smash these perceptions through storytelling, redefining who indigenous women are on their own terms. MatataSipu’s upcoming book, NUKU: Stories of

100 Indigenous Women, amplifies the voices of 100 indigenous women doing things differently across Aotearoa—the majority wāhine Māori, and also including

Pasifika, Aboriginal, Himalayan and

Mexican women. Find out about NUKU at nukuwomen.co.nz.