Eru Kapa-Kingi interview: on Monday’s Te Pāti Māori court clash and Toitū te Tiriti
Eru Kapa-Kingi says his moko kanohi has been life-changing. Photo / Rawhitiroa Photography
Young Māori leader Eru Kapa-Kingi has found himself embroiled in the civil war between Te Pāti Māori and his MP mother, Mariameno Kapa-Kingi, which is heading back to court on Monday. Audrey Young talked to him about his home and professional lives – including a key question about working for his mother.
It says something about Eru Kapa-Kingi’s experience of leadership that, although he is still in his 20s, he is already talking about passing the baton to a younger generation.
And it’s a reflection of the confidence he has in rangatahi to lead the movement he helped start, known as Toitū te Tiriti, which was behind the largest protest that he led to Parliament.
“I know the talent’s out there, and I know they’re ready to speak and ready to lead,” he tells the Herald.
“I’ve never been a believer in kind of holding on to certain positions for the sake of holding on.”
Kapa-Kingi became a national identity in 2024 as opposition to the Treaty Principles Bill grew, culminating in a hīkoi in November.
It was a big year for him for other reasons. He and partner Barbara Luhia Graham had their first baby.
As well, he had his moko kanohi done a month before the hikoi.
“It’s life-changing,” he says.
“It’s a commitment that you can’t hide from, the whole world can see. And there’s a type of freedom that comes with it, a liberation that comes with it when you walk around with your culture on your face.”
It was part of a decade-long transformation for him.
There was a time, particularly as a school boy, when he was ashamed to be Māori, such as when his father, carver Korotangi Kingi, spoke Māori to him in front of his friends.
“It just wasn’t cool to be Māori or to embrace Māori culture,” he says.
“And growing up in an environment where shows like Bro Town would play on TV and, Jeff Da Māori was the butt of the joke all the time, and being Māori just meant you were like hori, that meant that you never wore shoes ... these are the kind of messages from the outside world around what it meant to be Māori when we were teenagers.
“That eventually works its way into your mind, and you start to believe it ... I am proud of how things have changed since then.”
Kapa-Kingi is not stepping away from Toitū te Tiriti immediately. He has projects on the go, not least planning a rangatahi summit in the next couple of months to encourage younger people to step up in election year.
Next week, he will be at Waitangi, helping to facilitate debate at the Waitangi Forum near the wharewaka (canoe house) on the Treaty Grounds.
And this morning at 11 am, he is helping to organise a march in Auckland, Toitū Te Aroha, from Britomart to Myers Park.
He says it is a response to members of Brian Tamaki’s Destiny congregation confronting Indian religious parades with haka.
“It is in part a response to the hateful rhetoric being pushed out by just new church leaders,” Kapa-Kingi says.
“But it’s very much a kaupapa that moves in its own manner, and the message that we’re putting out there is that everyone has a right to aroha in Aotearoa.
“And also our tikanga, our haka, the beautiful pillars of te reo Māori are not to be used to push hateful and essentially colonial rhetoric.”
He says that, unlike another group protesting today, his group is not planning to block Destiny’s planned march.
“If anything, we’re just trying to move the attention away from it and on to something that’s more positive, more endearing, and more aligned with our tikanga.
“This is a stand of the people and a statement by the people, and it’s positive and not at all geared to create conflict.”
It is a similar inclusive approach that was taken in the hikoi to Parliament against the Treaty Principles Bill in 2024, which was very family-friendly, very welcoming and drew in a lot of non-Māori through mainstream and social media.
Kapa-Kingi says his inclusive approach is deliberate, “and probably a more recent part of my journey in realising the power of inclusion and realising the need for tangata whenua liberation actually to go hand in hand with the liberation of all people who live in Aotearoa.
“And so I always try to be very deliberate in that without watering down the truth of the messages, but also not communicating in a way that ostracises or immediately excludes people, because that would be disadvantageous to the broader movement.”
When he is not organising, Kapa-Kingi is a professional teaching fellow at the Auckland University faculty of law, teaching indigenous rights and Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
He gained a law degree with first-class honours from Victoria University of Wellington, then became a judge’s clerk for Justice Christian Whata (now on the Court of Appeal) and Justice Peter Andrew at the High Court at Auckland before joining the law firm Chapman Tripp for a few years.
But teaching is clearly his happy place.
“I really feel the influence and power, those sorts of positions as an educator, as a shaper of young minds. I feel the power and also the pressure of it, but also, I guess, the potential, ultimately.
“Because I often stop myself in lectures and think about the faces looking back at me and the students, and I have no doubt in my mind that in the next five to 10 years, they’ll be shifting into leadership positions. Some of them might be MPs one day.
“It’s a privilege to be able to do that, and that’s essentially the core of who I am. I’m an educator.
“I play a role of activist and advocate in some spaces, but the mahi that I enjoy doing the most is in the space of critical and liberal education.”
There were early signs that Kapa-Kingi himself might have been headed for Parliament. In his last year of secondary school, he was Hone Harawira’s Youth MP representing Te Tai Tokerau – now the electorate of his mother, Mariameno Kapa-Kingi.
He stood on Te Pāti Māori’s list in 2023 at number nine. And until March last year, he was one of the party’s vice-presidents when he resigned to spend more time with his young family – he now has a second son.
But he became entangled in Te Pāti Māori’s civil war last year.
He was involved in a controversial announcement last October to publicly distance the Toitū Te Tiriti movement from Te Pāti Māori. At the same time, he accused the party’s leadership of being dictatorial.
A month earlier, his mother, Te Tai Tokerau MP Mariameno Kapa-Kingi, had been demoted from her position as party whip.
In November, she (and Te Tai Tonga MP Tākuta Ferris) were expelled from the party by the national council, a decision she successfully challenged in the High Court in December.
The case goes back to the High Court next week, where the substantive hearing on the expulsion will be heard.
It is clear from court documents that before her demotion, the relationship and communications between Mariameno Kapa-Kingi and the party executive had broken down.
Party officials accused her of overspending party funds (it was actually parliamentary funding) and questioned what work her son, Eru Kapa-Kingi, had done for her, which had not been explained.
So what sort of work did he do for his mother?
He said that after managing his mother’s election campaign, he moved into an advisory role to set up her team, her office and her systems.
“Alongside that, I provided different advice on kind of, general policy, to Tai Tokerau-specific policies, positions, and that’ll also fit into drafting quite a number of speeches.
“What a lot of people probably don’t appreciate is that I’m kind of a political geek, and I also have a legal background. On top of that, as well, I’m pretty decent at speaking te reo and English.”
As well as writing bilingual speeches, he played a role in designing her Mokopuna Bill, which seeks to establish a Māori Mokopuna Authority to transfer responsibility for Māori children away from the care of Oranga Tamariki.
“Those are things that are bread and butter for me.”
Commenting on a dossier of claims issued by the party in October against both mother and son in the midst of the rift, he said the allegation that he had been trespassed from Parliament in August 2024 after an abusive row with a security guard was not correct.
The altercation with the security guard was handled in an internal process under Parliamentary Service.
“I made a complaint against the security guard. He made a complaint against me.
“There was a number of different discussions between different people and interviews, and ultimately, no findings were made against either of us,” he said.
He supposed it was because it had been a “first infringement” for both of them.
It is clear that Kapa-Kingi has a deep respect for and loyalty to his mother.
“My Mum is a leader that always leads with aroha and love and is the epitome of a type of leader that is ultimately present and listens,” he says.
She still taught him today the power of those things, presence, listening and aroha, in different contexts, including raising his kids, and she saw people for who they were, spiritually, and at a heart level as well.
So does Kapa-Kingi support his mother’s bid for reinstatement to the party?
“The reinstatement of a position is probably less important than the restoring of the mana of our whānau and credibility of my Mum as a political leader,” he says.
The Kapa-Kingis are a close family. Eru is a triplet, and he has a younger sister as well.
The triplets are turning 30 in July, and while Kapa-Kingi dreams about going to watch a Dodgers baseball game in Los Angeles, he suspects that won’t happen in a hurry.
Kapa-Kingi had what could be described as an extraordinarily varied education.
While his parents attended a Māori immersion course at Waikato, he and his brothers attended Kōhanga Reo, then a Māori language kura in Hamilton, before moving with their parents to Whangārei when they were about 7 years old.
Until that time, he spoke only Māori. They then went to a state decile 1 primary school in Onerahi, which was mainly Māori, but English prevailed. Kapa-Kingi says a lot of the kids’ parents were members of Black Power, or in prison, or both.
“We ourselves weren’t necessarily wealthy in the financial sense, but we had a safe home, a home full of aroha, and a lot of kids that we went to school with didn’t,” Kapa-Kingi says.
But secondary school couldn’t have been more different. The triplets travelled across town to a privileged private school, Huanui College, which offered the Cambridge exam to mainly Pākehā kids.
He says he was grateful for the experience and the education it afforded them.
“And so from a young age, we sort of started to make those critical assessments of why that was, and that only grew when moving to a school on the other side of the city, where there were kids who had a type of wealth that we didn’t even know existed.”
The three boys went on to Victoria University after school, with Eru specialising in law, Hemi in psychology and Tipene in accounting.
They also all took te reo Māori at Victoria, and Eru says that despite his early grounding in the language, it was hard and still requires a daily effort.
He tries to speak only te reo to his kids.
”You don’t really get to a point where you can let your foot off the gas.
“You’ve got to stay on top of it because it’s true, and I’ve lived it; you either use it or lose it.”
Whatever parliamentary ambitions he once had, Kapa-Kingi doesn’t have them any more. He says unelected politicians such as Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jnr were able to raise the critical consciousness of their people.
“That’s the space that I see myself walking and growing in, as an unelected politician who can raise the consciousness of te iwi Māori but also Aotearoa wide in terms of Te Tiriti ō Waitangi tangata whenua rights and also the Aotearoa that was intended when Te Tiriti was first created in 1840.”
Asked for his vision of rangatiratanga (right to exercise authority) in an ideal world, he says: “Rangatiratanga to me belongs in the hearts of communities and lives in the heart of communities.”
He says it involves returning power away from Wellington and to communities.
“To me, the biggest enemy of rangatiratanga is centralisation and centralisation of power.”
By 2040, the 200th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, he wanted there to be “an education around the truth of Te Tiriti ō Waitangi that is comprehensively provided in Aotearoa at all levels and isn’t distilled to align with colonial agendas ... and the history being taught centred around that truth that Māori never ceded sovereignty, and that truth no longer being radicalised”.
“I think between now and 2024, that’s more than possible.”
As for what he is looking forward to this year, he says he is feeling positive about engaging with rangatahi and seeking inspiration for himself.
“That might sound selfish, but I am deeply inspired by these newer generations that are coming through, and they give me life in the context where I very much need reminders that there is light, there is hope out there.”