Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke's protest poem featured in music video
What is New Zealand’s youngest member of Parliament and Te Pāti Māori member up to these days?
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The following post is part of my former Substack publication “One Black Woman’s Vote” that is now in “I Do See Color.” To see more OBWV posts from 2025, click here. To see OBWV posts from 2021-2024, click here. For OBWV posts from 2026, click here. In 2026, new OBWV posts will be published on the second Saturday of each month.
Last year, on November 14, New Zealand politician Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke cemented herself in the “IYKYK” category. When news-savvy viewers see her face, they recognize her as one of those women first lady Eleanor Roosevelt may have classified as “well-behaved women seldom make history.”
Why? She ripped up a copy of a treaty bill and initiated a haka that was seen worldwide. The bill she was holding was intended to reinterpret the 184-year-old clauses in the Treaty of Waitangi, previously signed between the Crown and Indigenous Māori chiefs.
In the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, in Māori and English, tribes were promised broad land rights in return for relinquishing governance to the British. The rewritten version in 2024 had more of an oblivious “all lives matter” approach — without taking into account that not all of the population had historically been treated equally or why the treaty was written in the first place.
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What is Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke up to these days?
Although Maipi-Clarke, who became part of the 54th Parliament on October 14, 2023, faced a one-day suspension for interrupting the treaty vote, that hasn’t stopped her from repeating the poem (pao). In fact, in artist Stan Walker’s new single “Mō Āke Tonu,” she recited the poem again.
“I asked her [to be in the video] because I felt like the story that I wanted to tell, she was very much a part of the story today, in terms of the narrative of our people and where we’ve come from,” Walker told Te Ao Māori News.
Check out the video below.
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