To celebrate the 2025 Auckland Writers Festival, we’ve teamed up with New Zealand publishers to showcase some of the authors who will be on stage over the festival weekend.
This extract is from “All That We Know” by Shilo Kino, the award-winning writer’s debut adult novel.
Kino will appear atfour events at the festival: In conversation with Monty Soutar, on Friday May 16, 1pm; Tangata Tiriti For Te Tiriti, with Max Harris, Kirsty Fong, Avril Bell, on Sunday May 18, 10am; Writing Auckland, with Jeremy Hansen, Dominic Hoey, Alex Scott, on Sunday, 1pm; and Someone Saved My Life Tonight Nā Tētahi Ahau i Whakaora i Tēnei Pō, with Dominic Hoey, Matariki Bennett, Awa Puna, Miriama McDowell, Afra Atiq and Tina Makereti, on Sunday, 5.30pm.
The Gatekeeper
Māreikura recognised her in an instant. The woman guarding the event. She was in her fifties, wearing an orange vest and scanning media passes. She had all the nuances Māreikura was familiar with.
The judgmental flicker of the eye. The eye roll. Looking at anything but Māreikura. Māreikura handed the woman her pass. Please don’t talk to me in te reo. Don’t talk to me in te reo.
“Nō hea koe?” the woman asked, skimming her pass.
“I’m from Gretton College.”
The woman shook her head, clearly exasperated by Māreikura’s incorrect response. “Nō. Hea. Koe?”
The woman handed her pass back. “He aha te take kei konei koe?”
Blank stare.
“He aha te take kei konei koe?”
She repeated the question, though it was obvious Māreikura didn’t know what she was saying. The woman blinked, her arms folded like she was waiting for Māreikura to magically pull te reo Māori out of her ass.
The woman shook her head again and clicked her tongue. She pointed at the pass. “You part of the media.”
“No, just visiting for a school trip.”
She pointed to the bag Māreikura was holding.
“I’m taking photos of the marae,” Māreikura told her. “For school. I have to present about the story of Waitangi.”
The woman’s eyes glazed over her. “How you different from any of them?”
By “them” Māreikura assumed she meant the Pākehā media. There were cameras dotted over the Waitangi Treaty Grounds and white journalists standing near them.
Waitangi Treaty Grounds.
“Because I’m Māori,” Māreikura said. But it was more like a tiny squeak. When she uttered the word Māori, her voice was small, like a child saying their name for the first time.
The woman smirked. There was satisfaction and a hint of superiority in her smirk. No empathy or understanding of a shared colonised past. It told Māreikura, You are less than me. You are not enough.
And then she looked Māreikura square in the eyes. “You can’t tell our stories if you can’t speak our reo. Tē taea e koe, tē taea e koe.”
She ushered Māreikura through the gate. Māreikura slunk through, her shoulders burdened not by the camera equipment but by what felt like daggers coming out of that woman’s mouth.
What gives her the right to speak to me like that? You think I haven’t tried hard enough to learn my language?
Māreikura was standing on Waitangi Treaty Grounds for the first time in her life. This is where her whānau were from. This is where she was supposed to belong. Where her ancestors stood on the very same whenua and signed Te Tiriti. Her ancestors, who envisioned a future far different from the present day. The field was overflowing with brown faces, and Māreikura should have felt safe around her own people, comfortable on grounds tied to her ancestry. This was not how she imagined coming home for the first time.
Māreikura hated the privileged smirks of people like the gatekeeper, who made her feel like there was something inherently wrong with her. Who made her want to recoil in a ball or scrub her brown skin off so she could camouflage. Who made her feel ashamed for being unable to speak a language beaten from her grandparents. She hated the fact she sometimes felt more comfortable around woke Pākehā than her own people. Be careful of Māori who like being the only Māori in the room, she had heard so many times. Well, who can blame me when this happens?
Māreikura had a job to do, so she took her camera out and started taking photos. She didn’t care what kind of photos she took. The camera was on automatic so she just clicked the shutter button randomly. She wanted to leave as soon as she could. She did not care about being here. It did not feel like home. Where did she belong if not on her own land?
Māreikura stood in front of Te Tii Marae and held the camera up to her face. The sad part of all of this, she thought, is that this woman was the reason why Māreikura was scared of learning her ancestral language in the first place. The shame, the embarrassment of being reminded she couldn’t speak, through no fault of her own. But maybe the greatest irony was that gatekeepers like this woman were the most colonised of all.
Extract from All That We Know by Shilo Kino. Published by Moa Press. Out now. Kino will be appearing at the Auckland Writers Festival May 13-18. For more information and tickets, visit writersfestival.co.nz.
