Urban iwi instills pride and life

By Peter Calder

Nick Pataka can reel off his whakapapa (genealogy) with the best of them: he's a son of the Hineuru hapu of Tuwharetoa, Te Arawa was his waka and Te Haroto his home marae. Titiokura is his mountain and his tribal waters flow down the bed of the mighty Mohaka.

"But I never knew any of that stuff till I came here," he says, gesturing around the modest office in a Henderson side street where he works as part of a youth drug education programme.

Mr Pataka, aged 35, can talk his clients' language because dealing and using drugs was what he was always best at. His story is an achingly familiar one: he hit Auckland as a provincial teenager "with seven ounces of dope in my pocket and thought I was going to make my fortune."

The FTW tattooed on his big neck ("I used to hate the world," he says, by way of explaining the initials) is visible evidence that it was all downhill from there.

Asked to name the worst thing he's ever done, he glances cautiously at the tape recorder.

"Put it this way," he says at last. "I never killed anyone and I never raped anyone. But my life was using people and hurting people and I've spent 10 years balancing the ledger."

For all his awareness of his roots, he belongs proudly to an urban iwi and the Government's plan to give recognition to the West Auckland Waipareira Trust legitimises what has been his reality for a long time.

It began the day a kaumatua embraced him. The sensation was unfamiliar and magic, and said, "You're going to be all right, boy."

"I felt like I belonged," he says. "That's where the climb back up began."

The freckles across his Maori features betray Mr Pataka's Scottish and Irish blood - "I call myself the consummate Kiwi," he says with a big smile - but his identity transcends his bloodline.

"I'm proud of being an urban Maori. It made me what I am today. To me tribalism is a deterrent to our progress as people because there is so much elitism.

"There is no elitism here. We work for each other because we believe in a common cause and that's to do what we can for each other regardless of where we're from. It's a great model for the future."