Juanita Hepi is a master connector, of others in the arts community, and of her audience to pūrakau from a puna hōhunu – a deep wellspring – of Māori experience. Matiu Calman (Kāi Tahu, Ngāti Toa) sits down with Hepi to discuss the engines of inspiration for her creative life.
It hasn’t been particularly long since Hepi appeared in a Toi Ōtautahi article aptly headlined “An Artist of Many Talents”. She was variously described as “one of Ōtautahi’s art treasures”, and, a “storyteller” who is “a cornerstone in the local arts and Toi Māori sector”. By the end of this latest interview my head is swimming from the sheer breadth of Hepi’s work. Her brain is like a majestic, floating wheke, with its tentacles probing outwards into fathoms of darkness to explore the world. For weeks I do nothing, not really knowing which strand to pull on and to tease out. I want to explore also, to reach out for the centre, to travel closer to the source.
Recently Hepi has completed a sound project for a Swedish gaming company with Kāi Tahi and Te Āti Awa musician Te Pononga Tamati-Elliffe (Kommi). She was the artistic director for (Ngāti Kahungunu ki Heretaunga, Ngāti Pahauwera) musician Byllie-Jean’s music videos, and was then asked by Ōtautahi’s favourite son Marlon Williams to act in two music videos from his te reo Māori album Te Whare Tīwekaweka [for which Kommi was co-writer). In the video for Aua Atu Rā, she plays an intense, notetaking therapist as her patient – Williams – reclines on a couch with eyes hooded casting his thoughts to stranding atop a raft on his beloved Whakaraupō (Lyttelton Harbour). The waiata won the coveted APRA Silver Scroll Award in late October.
On Saturday [December 13], Hepi performs alongside a cohort of Ōtautahi musicians, poets, and artists for the Ōtautahi4Palestine event at A Rolling Stone in central Christchurch. She is currently completing case studies as part of a three-year-long research project alongside Sacha McMeeking to quantify Māori health determinants within Māori organisations.
As if she’s not busy enough, the kākano of possible future endeavours emerge during our kōrero. There’s talk of a doctorate, and various degree courses she is drawn to. I get the feeling she could do all of it, or none of it, but probably the former.
The first time I crossed Hepi’s path was at a WORD Festival event at the end of August. The automatic doors of a crowded Piano foyer parted and there she was. She arrived and launched into three Māori-themed jokes. The encounter was sans introductions, sans the usual small talk. It was one of the more memorable meetings of a person I can recall. To explain it another way, not many people fill a room with the force of their personality from the doorway. Hepi does. Soon after at the bar, I asked my friend Nic who the remarkable joke-telling wahine toa was. “Oh, that’s Juanita Hepi.”
I arrange to meet Hepi two months later. I arrive early to a café in the Arts Centre. She messages to say she’s running 15 minutes late. It’s raining outside and just seven degrees, but it feels much colder. It’s far too cold for late October. A thick bleak, bank of kāpua separates the sun from the whenua.
Hepi arrives to a still-hot oat-milk latte. For an artist whose days are filled with esoteric, creative kaupapa, she is dealing with a mundane and frustrating mechanical issue. She had to be dropped off in town because her car is still stranded on a tussocky, snow-covered, verge near Wānaka. She’s wearing a black, woollen beanie, with Dunedin monogrammed in white, gothic lettering – a souvenir of her time in the deeper, even colder, south.
We finish our coffee and stroll to Te Whare Tapere, the gallery and studio space for Māori artists she curates and manages. Inside, we are surrounded by sculpture, installations, and paintings. One of the pieces is by Tūhoe activist and artist Tame Iti. It’s an artwork Hepi is particularly fond of.
Hepi is of Kāi Tahu, Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe, Ngāti Mutunga, Moriori, Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Wai, and Ngāpuhi descent. Her whakapapa connects her to places the length and breadth of the motu, from the bottom of the south to the far north. If we talk long enough, we would be able to establish many hononga throughout our shared iwi connections.
She generously offers to introduce me to other artists I could write about. Despite living most of my life in Ōtautahi, moving in parallel to Hepi, I’m still somewhat of an outlier to the scene. She is at its beating heart. Before our interview she added me to an email tree of dozens of local artists and writers – in order to invite me to a Te Reo Māori lunch at Te Whare Tapere. Hepi wants to give the arts community a reason to come together.
“We’re all busy doing our mahi we don’t get to hang out together,” Hepi says. “We need a Kaupapa. If it’s just a dinner or a lunch then it might not happen, but if we say it is so we can practice our reo people are more likely to come. And we have a space here and it needs some mauri [life force] in it.”
Hepi has an impressive list of qualifications, which have flowed into her working life. She has a Bachelor of Arts in acting from Toi Whakaari, The New Zealand Drama School, a Graduate Diploma of Teaching and Learning, and a Master’s Degree in Māori and Indigenous Leadership. She is a lecturer of the Masters programme at Toi Whakaari, and helps teach the performing arts students at Ara. She acts, directs, researches, and writes poetry among a myriad of other creative endeavours.
I have no prepared questions or pre-conceived ideas. I want our interview to follow its own wairua, to leave space for Hepi to emerge. I also try and stop interrupting – a bad habit for an interviewer. Eventually I get out of the way and things flow. I wonder if her writing flows easily like her kōrero in a stream of consciousness, with as many questions emerging as answers.
Hepi tells me about visits to the Ngāti Kahungunu marae of her koro, Te Rēinga, in the tiny northern Hawke’s Bay settlement of Ruakituri. I ask her about her whenua connections, and about wairua.
CALMAN: What role does place, wairua (spirituality) and tohu (signs) play in your work?
HEPI: It’s funny because I’m Māori and everything’s metaphorical. I guess it kind of spooks me out a little bit as well you know the way that we look at the world. Whenever we went back to [Te Rēinga] I always found it a very spooky place, and being Ngāti Kahungunu as well I’ve always found that side of our whānau quite spooky. And so there is something scary in being in touch with that wairua vibe. I like to be practical because my head is always in the rangi. So, I’m not a super tohu person but then things happen and I’m like ‘how can you not believe in tohu?’ especially when everything’s gone wrong and suddenly it just falls into place. Or when the people [around you] are the right people.
CALMAN: What’s an example of the tohu aligning in your creative life?
HEPI: We did Wahine Mātātua about Pātahi this Kāi Tahu ancestress. [The play featured in the Dunedin Arts Festival programme and is coming to Ōtautahi in 2026]. It was the first play written with a Kāi Tahu woman as a lead character. Helen Brown helped with the researching so it was quite Kāi Tahu led. Everyone who worked on it was pretty much Kāi Tahu. Cindy Diver was the writer. We ended up getting this young wahine, Grace Turipa, to play the part of Pātahi and through the process few found out she had a direct whakapapa line to the wahine she was playing. She didn’t know beforehand.
CALMAN: You are pursuing both academic and artistic projects. What has led you to do so many different things?
HEPI: I did acting… because I wanted to do different forms. Acting felt like you could do more things. When I did my Masters, I realised I was always trying to return to indigenous storytelling, which doesn’t really separate forms out in the same way. It doesn’t compartmentalise things, so they sit out on the ocean on their own. Everything is interconnected. That’s kind of how I feel my work has progressed to now where I don’t really care what the form is, I’m only really interested in the stories that we’re telling and how we’re telling them. That things are tika (done correctly). If I’m here in Te Waipounamu we should be telling Kāi Tahu stories. If I go back to Northland, where my dad’s from, we should be telling those Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Wai stories.
CALMAN: How do you navigate the boundaries over who owns or has the right to tell our iwi narratives?
HEPI: That is probably one of the main questions I ask myself. When you’re Māori and you’re telling Māori stories you’re not just at the mercy of the storytelling industry but also your own people. You’re having to be cautious of the people whose stories you’re telling. For me I find that I have to do a lot of work to be able to do a story. I am going to go to every event that I can to talk to those who are telling the story. So the who, why, where, and how are you telling the story is all important. I attend Ngāi Tahu story telling workshops where there are all of these amazing researchers. Not only to hear the stories but to tell people this is what I’m planning to do – to get all the right people in my corner. I don’t know if our [storytellers] get the sort of honouring that they deserve. Because I don’t know if people realise how difficult it is to retain, maintain and sustain the story. You have to have mana and tika over the story, and you have to keep telling the story.
CALMAN: Do you feel tension between our oral storytelling traditions, and modern tools of recording and preserving our pūrakau?
HEPI: These are the conversations we’re having as story tellers about what’s tika and what’s appropriate. And also because oral storytelling is an artform in itself. With pen and paper and computers , I’m good at that and I’m happy to use those tools, but there’s a hierarchy within that already … so it’s problematic. You have to be able to read and write and own pen and paper and computers to be able to do that. I know we can’t return to being [solely] an oral storytelling people. There are so many questions and I don’t know what the answer is.
CALMAN: What do you make of the current political environment where te ao Māori seems to be under constant attack. Is it a return to the Tōhunga Suppression Act era through which our tīpuna suffered?
HEPI: It does feel like that but then I think if you were back in those times it had to be worse. Because our population went … to almost nothing. It was the ‘smooth the pillow of a dying race’ kōrero. We have a little bit of autonomy now, but it’s so hard. I just want to live in this little bubble of aroha, so I don’t watch the news . I’ve seen these narratives before, I’ve been in shows that have talked about these narratives, and I’ve written about them. It doesn’t feel like new stuff. It feels like we just keep going around in circles. The rise of fascism and extremism is having a profound effect not just on us as people but on our planet. That’s the scariest thing I think. And so, the narrative then for me becomes more about the survival of people in general.
When I think about what it is to be Māori I think about te taiao (the environment). That’s a question today as well when you have people like David Seymour and Winston Peters. These people are built up of whakapapa so have come to this place because of everything that came before them. It helps me to not get so irate about it. I can disconnect myself from them, which is also hard because of the impact they have on te ao Māori and tino rangatiratanga, and that it is having profound negative impacts on our people.
CALMAN: What is tino rangatiratanga (sovereignty) to you?
HEPI: Nic Low was asking this question which was: “In 50 years’ time if you had everything that you could have in terms of tino rangatiratanga what would the world look like?” I asked my niece, Kura Turuwhenua, who is a comedian and this amazing rising superstar, and she said: “just not thinking about being Māori.” That you can go out into the world and not be politicised, and not be racialised, and you don’t feel like you have to put your armour on and be hyper aware of yourself or what you’re talking about.
CALMAN: What is your experience of being a wahine Māori in Aotearoa?
HEPI: My Danish partner is starting to see it. You don’t just leave yourself at the door. He’s seeing how I get treated so differently everywhere we go. They’re microaggressions so they don’t seem like they’re bad. They’re like multiple pin pricks. James Baldwin says it best: “This is not the paranoia of my own mind. This is the lived experience.” There are examples of people coming up to me at cafes and asking, ‘can you fill up my dog’s water bowl?’ or ‘thank you for the coffee’ or ‘we’ll be back again’, because you’re obviously the waiter or the cleaner. Or it’s always like, ‘I went to school with some Maoris’. It’s tiring. People will say to me, ‘Why don’t you say something back?’, but even that’s annoying because I would be fighting all day.
CALMAN: Āe, he tika tēnā. More and more I’m aware of how my more obviously Māori-looking friends are treated negatively in public. One friend never gets through airport security without being patted down or questioned. He says he’s just become used to it.
HEPI: I don’t know if you’ve heard my little kōrero about three fights a day. It’s a little kīwaha that’s gone around. I’m a three fights a day person. I’ll only engage in three fights. It’s a little reminder to conserve my energy, especially for wāhine Māori, we feel like we have to fight every fight, because we don’t want our children to have to carry these fights into their futures. So we fight everything and we’re exhausted and you don’t have the capacity to look after yourself. Three fights a day is just a reminder that we’re in that part of the mōteatea (song of lament) where we step back and somebody else takes over so we can take a breath.
CALMAN: It seems like it’s always the person who calls out racism that gets attacked.
HEPI: People are more worried about being called a racist than they are in racist action. I’ve gotten really good at kind of switching off. But even that isn’t good because you don’t want to get used to the pin pricks. Eventually it draws blood. They’re pin pricks to the soul as well, so eventually you become quite hardened I think. I think that’s a big part of the problem with our world. We’re so tough, so hard, that we can’t cope with any difference. Our responsibility as humans is to actually soften not harden.
CALMAN: When you don’t get to respond to the pin pricks in the moment, does your work help you form an articulate response?
HEPI: One hundred per cent! I have had so many times when I’ve had an interaction and for whatever reason haven’t said anything, and so I’ve gone home and written poetry about it. When I write I can say exactly what I want to say. Some of my poetry is quite acerbic, and it’s just honest. In the art world you can kind of get away with it as well. People expect you to be a little bit weird, a little bit political. I could not have had these conversations when I was teaching for example. I remember teaching about the Dawn Raids and having to ask my Pasifika students’ whānau if it was okay to teach it and some of those parents were like ‘I don’t want my kids learning about that’. It was their own history [but] it was because it’s unpleasant and they just want their kids to assimilate because it’s safer. You know, we’ve heard this kōrero that was told to our grandparents [by their parents]. You need to speak English because I don’t want you to get a hiding.
I do like the agitators. And they’re often artists or politicians. I remember listening to Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku speak about how she was either going to become an academic or an artist and she chose academia, even though she is an artist anyway. So many of our people chose one or the other.
CALMAN: And you’re doing both.
HEPI: Yeah, I just want to do everything! I was even telling my kids last night, ‘maybe I should go study law or maybe I should do neurobiology because I really like that’. I don’t know why my brain is like this. Because my siblings, and there’s seven of them, they’re all so different, and I’m definitely the only one like this, and I don’t know where it comes from.
Our kōrero ends and I photograph Hepi. Then we head over to the nearby community arts hub, Toi Auaha. We’re picking Nic up from his office to take him to lunch and Hepi also wants to introduce me to others from the arts scene. Did I mention she’s already added me to the email tree for her te reo Māori lunches?
“I told you I’d introduce you to some people,” she says.
Juanita Hepi, the artist.
Juanita Hepi, the master connector.