Māori culture meets punk rock

Māori punk rock artist and producer of ‘Half/time’, Wairehu Grant shares his experience as an Indigenous creative within the music industry in Aotearoa. 

Wairehu Grant was born in Hamilton and is of Ngāti Maniapoto Iwi. Wairehu began his passion for punk and metal at a young age and explains that your culture doesn’t dictate what you should be passionate about. In 2014 he started playing his music at open mic nights and says “Growing up as a young Māori, half caste kid, you kinda get told that’s not the sorta stuff you should be interested in. As I got older, I realized that’s crap”. 

Late 2019 Wairehu began his PhD studying the subject of ‘Māori people working within Aotearoa’s punk scene’ which he hopes to have finished by the end of 2022. He was inspired by his friend Sarsha-Leigh Douglas, who did a masters project on the same topic Wairehu chose to explore this topic because he felt so strongly about integrating his Māori culture with his passion for music. Sarsha later joined onto his study, Wairehu explains “I think that a big part of kaupapa Māori is working together as a community rather than as an individual”. 

Touching on the obstacles being Māori in the punk scene and in his field of study, Wairehu describes the university system to be very ‘Eurocentric’ and a place that he feels still values western forms of knowledge over indigenous. “There’s that immediate racism, and then there’s systemic racism” he says. He explains by highlighting his experience a little while ago working in a teaching position at the University of Waikato saying that the university tried to set up two different departments, one considered ‘Real science’ and the other ‘Māori science’ which he felt invalidated Māori culture. He said it felt like they were saying “You do your make believe over here and we do our real stuff over here”. 

In the music world he experienced more immediate racism in instances of racial slurs from Neo Nazis or those who don’t support a Māori punk artist. During the first lockdown Wairehu began writing songs in Te Reo, “The idea of putting parts of my own identity into music was really scary” but adds that composing music about being Māori was a “really uplifting experience”. 

Writing about his culture gave Wairehu the opportunity to be more confident about his heritage. This was also when he started creating his latest project ‘Half/time’, a post-punk solo music album, various people he interviewed for his thesis helped him publicize Half/time and even participated in shows with him. “We all wanted to do something together that did the same thing musically.” 

An inspiration to young Māori artists, Wairehu Grant continues to role model embracing Māori culture and Te Reo through his music.