Mihingarangi Forbes: My story as told to Elisabeth Easther

Mihingarangi Forbes is a broadcaster, producer and journalist.

Mihingarangi Forbes - Ngāti Paoa, Ngāti Maniapoto - is a broadcaster and producer whose career began with an internship at Te Karere. Since then Forbes has worked for Campbell Live, Native Affairs and for the past seven years has anchored current affairs programme The Hui. Forbes’ most recent project is an instalment of RNZ’s awarding-winning series, NZ Wars: Stories of Wairau. rnz.co.nz/wairau

When my grandmother passed away suddenly from a brain aneurism, my mum shifted back to Feilding with us kids to the family home. She wanted to look after her father but because his heart was broken, he developed cancer and passed away within the year. So we went from living in rural bush settings, in pretty basic houses, to living in this beautiful old villa in Feilding surrounded by all these other big villas with wraparound verandas on one-acre sections.

Dad was a bushman and Mum was a teacher, and just before we moved to Feilding, Mum had recently become a solo parent, so Feilding offered us stability. Before that, we’d lived in the sticks around Waikato, Matamata, Whakamaru and Ruatāhuna in Te Urewera. We were also in Rotorua for a short time, in quite a rough area, so Feilding was much calmer. We all felt the privilege and stability that came with owning versus renting.

We loved our grandparents’ grand old whāre. They’d been great gardeners too, so half the backyard was in fruit and veggies. Same with the neighbours, and we’d run from backyard to backyard, foraging as we went. We had an awesome childhood on Nelson St, where four generations of our whānau explored and played in all the nooks and crannies of that house.

Feilding was a town of two halves, the traditional settler side, and lots of Māori and other ethnicities working at Wattie’s or the meatworks. But at the rugby clubrooms at the end of our street, it didn’t matter how much your parents earned or what kind of house you lived in, if you liked rugby, or you got in the kitchen and served food or beer, you were welcomed.

At Feilding Agricultural High School, students in the B band, which I was in, were made to feel like dummies. Although I knew I wasn’t dumb, and I did well at the subjects I was engaged with. This was back in the 80s, and even though people were saying ‘girls can do anything’, attitudes at my school were very old-fashioned and girls were still offered jobs like nursing and teaching, while boys were encouraged to be lawyers or doctors or sent to the meatworks. My school certainly didn’t have great expectations for me.

I had a couple of amazing teachers, though. Young Māori fresh out of Teachers’ College. Like Irene Pēhwairangi. She taught me so much about activism and equity, about challenging authority and knowing your rights. Sometimes she’d stand up to the vice principal about things like funding and resources. She didn’t care if she got in trouble. She was a ray of sunshine who wrapped her korowai around the whānau population. She lifted kids up and told us we could do anything we wanted. But first, she said, we had to learn our reo, which could only be done through immersion.

After school, I did a year-long reo immersion at Waikato Polytechnic, which had a huge impact on my life. Years later, when I was working at Māori TV, Irene’s daughter and son came to work there and I told them, “your mum is amazing” and they were like “yeah yeah, everyone tells us that”. But Irene was instrumental in changing my life.

During my te reo immersion journey, I decided to identify with my Māori name, to prefer Mihingarangi over Joanne. It’s not like I changed my identity, it’s more that I accepted that my future required me to learn more about myself and do something with reo. I also learned a bit of mum’s Italian whakapapa and all my genealogy on her side, but I still get trolls calling me a sell-out, or who ask, “what about your Anglo Saxon side?” And I tell them that I’m all up with the Lovell-Smiths.

Journalist and television presenter Mihingarangi Forbes. Photo / Sarah Ivey

I finished that reo immersion in Hamilton aged 21, and was offered an internship at Te Karere in Auckland, because one of the producers was at our graduation. When I rang to tell mum, she said, “your whole life you’ve been that person”. As in that “right place, right time person”. Good things happen to me, like it’s a tohu, or a sign. Which, when you think about te ao Māori, we might say that’s our ancestors marking our journey. I do sometimes feel my path was chosen for me, because I’ve had all these amazing people clear the way for me, so how could I not step up?

One of the first stories I did for Te Karere was in Feilding, when 14 fourth formers were stood down on suspicion of smoking on the school field. They were all Māori and none of those kids went back to school. That was the end of their learning, and it’s something that happens to Māori a lot. When I went to get a comment from the school, I was marched off the grounds by the principal. I said to him, “You do know, this is my school you’re kicking me out of”. That was 1994 and I’ve never been invited to Feilding Ag to visit or speak since.

When Feilding Ag had its centenary in 2021, one of the teachers, Mr Jeffries, wrote a book which included 60 student success stories and I was asked to write something. Mr Jeffries also told me the school had changed a lot since I was there, that they’re now doing amazing things with tangata Tiriti, and for tangata whenua. That meant everything to me, to hear that attitudes can change and people can become more supportive. Not that I hold any grudges towards those teachers who were discriminatory in the past, because we’re all on this learning journey. Me included.

As a woman in broadcasting, the glass ceiling is totally there, until you get to the point where you are powerful enough and you believe enough in yourself to smash through it, or you leave the room and find another, without a glass ceiling. On top of that, female reporters are often pitted against each other. Or as Māori reporters, we’d be sent to knock on the doors of violent Māori offenders to get a grab, but when there’s a success story about something cool, like a flash Māori actor, that’s considered a general story. Until eventually, you get tired of banging on doors and people telling you to F-off. Or of seeing the disappointment in people’s faces, when they know you’ve come to get a comment about how their baby died. For a while, it felt that the pathway to get anywhere in a newsroom was to know the dirtiest tricks. I’m

proud that newsrooms have made huge changes since I started, but the industry still has a long way to go.

I was talking to my son about all the different names for puku, and how everything comes from our puku. Because your puku feels pain and joy - like getting butterflies in your tummy - love and unwellness, so you need to listen to it. To learn to trust your gut. So many times. my puku has told me when a situation wasn’t right. Looking back, I wish I’d listened more to my puku, and been braver, as I’ve not aways followed my intuition.

This morning I jumped in an Uber with an Indian-born New Zealander in the driver’s seat, and he said, “isn’t it great that Jacinda has gone”. “Is it?” I replied. “Yes,” he said, “and that new guy Luxon, when he gets in, he’s going to stop the Māoris [sic] from wanting all that land and money, then big business will invest in New Zealand.” I said: “Can you stop please, because I want you to know, so you don’t embarrass yourself further, I’m Māori.”

Then I gave him an example, of how my iwi Waikato, how after The Treaty was signed, when my iwi wasn’t selling enough land, the Crown went to war with us and they took 1.3 million acres and in 1995 the iwi got just $170 million in compensation. I also told him that what he was saying was not true and that it sucked to hear him say those things. He stopped the car and said he was so sorry, but that he’d thought those things were true. I don’t know if he’ll change, but that narrative is out there and it is so untrue and so unfair - because we can’t have New Zealanders believing that some of our most vulnerable are stealing land and money. Yet all I can do is teach one person at a time.

If you are in a taxi and they’re listening to talkback, I suggest you ask them to turn it off, as that’s probably where that taxi driver heard those untruths. And that’s why it’s so important to have diversity in our newsrooms, so the right people are sent to Rātana, or Waitangi. People with the cultural knowledge to ask deeper questions and tell the story through a Māori lens. You wouldn’t send someone who knew nothing about treasury or the share market to write the business reports, and we should have the same expectations of our political reporters.

I get so much hate online. It’s even worse lately, now our former prime minister has stood down and there’s nowhere for those sorts of people to put all their hatred. The vast majority of hatred towards me is aimed at my being a Māori woman. You just have to look at Twitter, because it’s constant. I’m absolutely always there for robust kōrero, and I always try to be gracious, but once people go personal or stray off the topic, or harass me, I’ll block them, or mute them. One of my greatest superpowers is my ability to ignore that stuff.

The other thing that keeps me in good spirits, I surround myself with the most amazing friend group, mostly Māori women broadcasters, and with them, I feel like the luckiest person in the world.

rnz.co.nz/wairau