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Kiringāua Cassidy belongs to a generation of Ngāi Tahu rangatahi raised in te reo Māori, his whānau have been at the heart of Kotahi Mano Kāika, Kotahi Mano Wawata, the 25-year movement that’s helped restore te reo to thousands of Ngāi Tahu homes.
As a tangata hauā who uses a wheelchair, he has also navigated Māori spaces that haven’t always been designed with accessibility in mind.
Cassidy joined Stacey Morrison to discuss reo, leadership and belonging, and what it will take to ensure physical barriers never become barriers to language, identity and belonging.
He gets questions all the time about his disability, mostly from tamariki, who he thinks are better than adults at talking about it because they have no filter and are very honest.
That is one of the best ways to educate tamariki without any barriers and in a way that validates their curiosity, he said.
“Nau mai ngā pātai, nau mai ngā kōrero engari me tuku mai runga i te wairua pai, kaua i runga i te wairua kino. Most of the attention that I get, or the questions I get about being disabled come from little five-year-olds saying kei te mamae o waewae? (are your legs sore?)”
Cassidy was born with spina bifida and has no function of his legs from the knees down, but beyond that he said it doesn’t really affect his life at all.
He uses the term tangata hauā as opposed to another term - whaikaha which is also used for the Māori disabled community.
“I don’t think words like hauā have those negative connotations. There are definitely slurs and different words that are not okay but yeah I personally use the term hauā because I think that’s a more unique and representative term of disability.”
Following the example of tīpuna hauā
Cassidy said if there was a situation where Māori found something either troubling or unsettling, they looked to examples in whakapapa, to tīpuna and to stories or pūrākau.
Many of the rangatira of old might in the modern day be considered hauā, he said.
For example, in the Ngāi Tahu retelling of the story of Ranginui and Papatūānuku, Papatūanuku’s first husband was Tangaroa.
After Tangaroa left to bury the placenta of their pōtiki, their youngest child, he was away for a long time, Papatūānuku grieved for him and then she moved on to Ranginui.
When Tangaroa returned a fight broke out with Ranginui where Tangaroa injured Ranginui terribly and didn’t kill him but left him severely injured and hauā.
“All of these tīpuna, these atua have left us awesome examples in order to show us that it’s ok, in order to show us that there is no issue with being disabled or being different in any way, and that they found a way so that means we can too.”
Marae accessibility
When asked if marae were set up for accessibility, Cassidy said yes and no.
At his marae, it wasn’t until renovations were happening that they began thinking about him and about accessibility, he said.
“I remember before we got a new wharekai it wasn’t accessible and I had to get carried pretty much everywhere into the whare, into the wharenui, into the wharekai, all around the marae and it’s still like that around the motu. Most marae are catching on and making things more accessible for their people.”
Much of the ableism that we see today, doesn’t stem from Māoridom, it stems from the effects of colonisation, he said.
“A lot of our ableism in our society today doesn’t come from us but we need to be careful because we are going to continue it if we don’t look to change it.”
Kapa haka controversy
Cassidy is also Manukura Tāne for Te Kapa o Rukutia, who last month earned qualification to Te Matatini at the Waitaha regional competition.
Following the competition an online post sparked debate over whether disabled people needed to somehow compensate for things they couldn’t physically do on the kapa haka stage.
Cassidy said all the messages directed towards him were positive and he thinks the debate blew out of proportion to an extent.
“It revealed the amount of support that disabled people have. As much as we talk about the taniwha of ableism, we also have a lot of people who are already on board, a lot of people who just, yeah, e ngākau nui ana, e aroha ana, ki te hunga hauā. I wasn’t the only disabled person to be on that stage that day and e whakaaro nui ana ki ērā atu.”
However, it also showed that Māori still have a long way to go to decolonise, he said.
“I’m glad I’ve got the opportunity now because of all of that attention to direct the narrative into an area where we can have a productive discussion rather than just going out for blood online.”
The answer was to return to the examples set by tīpuna hauā, he said.
“I’ve had the privilege of having whānau that, if they didn’t see any opportunities around us, they would create opportunities for them. So, I’ve had that privilege growing up. So, all of that sort of stuff, I had to be reminded was extra... it is just second nature to me, but it’s something different that I have to think about on top of everything else.”
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