All That We Know
by Shilo Kino

All That We Know is an earnest, often moving story of a young woman finding her place in te ao Māori. Shilo Kino’s first book, The Pōrangi Boy, won the Young Adult fiction category at the 2021 NZCYA Book Awards and All That We Know delves deeper into struggles with decolonisation, racism and belonging.

The novel follows Māreikura, a Māori woman in her early twenties living with her Nan in Ponsonby. She went viral as a teen – ‘twenty million views’ – for speaking out against racism at her high school, causing her to lean away from Pākehā notions of ‘success’ and towards a life consistent with te ao Māori, something that would fulfil ‘her ancestors wildest dreams’. Taken from her young mother’s household as a baby, or so she’s told, Māreikura was brought up by her Nan. Nan remembers being beaten at school for speaking te reo and hasn’t visited her marae up north in a decade. This has done little to instil in Māreikura the security she needs to navigate Pākehā society. When she meets an older Māori woman at a Waitangi event and is questioned about why she belongs there, she struggles to justify it:

‘Because I’m Māori,’ Māreikura said. But it was more like a tiny squeak. When she uttered the word Māori, her voice was small, like a child saying their name for the first time.

Desperate for family, Māreikura is welcomed by the Mormons across the road. ‘The Johnsons were rich so they went on family vacations and skiing trips and Māreikura tagged along until they just always assumed she was coming.’ This is where she meets her best friend, Eru. According to her Nan, ‘they did everything together. I think that girl finds it hard to make new friends. Too much in her head, you see.’ When the story opens, Eru is leaving on a twp-year church mission to Hawai’i. Māreikura calls this a ‘colonising mission’ and feels the panic of abandonment rising: ‘God took away her mum. God took away her culture. And now God had taken away her best friend. Eru was now dead to her.’

Instead of accepting a scholarship to study law, Māreikura decides to take a year off and learn te reo. This comes with a lot more challenges than she was expecting, and she starts to question more deeply how Māori are expected to thrive in a society that was designed to make them fail: ‘The English language is not mine. The school system is not designed for me. The stories I read are not mine. The dominant culture of this country is not mine.’ The generational trauma of a stolen language confronts her and her classmates:

It was a realisation for many in the classroom that this was more than just a hobby, an extracurricular activity or something to tick off the bucket list for Māori. It was reclamation. It was restoration. Te reo Māori was intergenerational healing.

Many in the class are grappling with te reo being embraced by Pākehā, wondering about the place of Pākehā in the struggle to reclaim te reo Māori. Māreikura is accused of gatekeeping her own culture for her refusal to let the learning of it be defined in any way by Pākehā needs.

And now more than ever before, everyone wants our culture. Our culture is a commodity, that’s why we have to be careful about who we let in – we don’t want just anyone coming in and tokenising our culture, do we?

One of Māreikura’s fellow classmates is Jordana, a young, single woman living alone with a lot of plants and a lot less trauma than Māreikura. Jordana provides much of the novel’s levity, balancing out the more serious elements: ‘The problem is, Māreikura, if someone doesn’t love-bomb me then I think that’s a red flag. I deserve to be love-bombed.’ Jordana suggests that the two of them start a podcast about their experiences learning te reo, and this provides the structure for the second half of the novel, despite Māreikura’s reluctance. ‘It is not my ancestors’ wildest dream for me to be at school learning my own language and then dealing with severe language trauma. And they definitely did not envision we’d make a podcast about it.’

The novel explores faith, protest, decolonisation and activism with humour as well as history. ‘The next day, Māreikura would explain on her podcast how English was once forced on Māori, how the Native Schools Act impacted Māori in the present day and how adding te reo Māori to street signs is really the bare minimum.’ Kino also manages to skewer our voracious appetite for online validation, cancel culture, and cultural appropriation. Māreikura questions whether yoga and therapy are really going to fix her anti-colonial struggles, and at one point worries that Jordana’s beloved houseplants may be ‘a form of colonisation’.

Kino’s language reflects a lot of TikTok trends (‘unalive’, ‘polyamorous’, ‘live rent-free in her head’ ‘bipanic’), and she makes it clear that we cannot escape social media or its influence on our lives. As Māreikura learns more than once, social media serves the cause, but the profile it delivers should not overshadow – or undermine – the actual work. A group of Māori professors, artists and writers post an open letter on Twitter implicitly criticising Māreikura’s online activism and its ‘platform of fear, where there is little room for critical thinking, no space for nuance.’

Their use of the word ‘entitlement’ is especially galling for Māreikura. ‘Activism is not trampling on the mana of your own, all for the sake of attention, likes and validation,’ the letter states. ‘Activism is not riding on the back of mātauranga that is not yours.’ She has to learn the hard way – through public humiliation – that having good intentions and a platform isn’t enough. ‘What you think is a trailblazing take,’ say the letter writers, ‘is in fact plagiarising our work and the work of the many Māori scholars who came before you.’

The novel was already weaving the lessons of Māreikura’s and Jordana’s podcasts into the story: repeating them feels as though Kino is catering to an audience that lacks an attention span. But maybe this is the point. She wants to make absolutely sure that we understand these issues are far from academic for Māreikura. ‘Sometimes I feel like it’s just a history lesson for non-Māori, like you can treat it like biology, and you can go home and never have to think about it again. For me, I have to experience it.’

All That We Know leans hard on casual idiom and sometimes reads more like an online comment section, but perhaps this helps to make it accessible to its key audience, young New Zealanders and particularly young Māori. It’s also in keeping with a novel about the turmoil of living through your 20s, as well as learning to ‘stand in your mana, in your power … at peace with who you are’. The book’s use of te reo supports Māreikura’s quest to interrogate and reclaim her identity. The wings of her ancestors were clipped by colonisation, she says in a public speech towards the end of the novel. ‘When I speak the reo of my tīpuna, I’m putting my feathers back on, one by one.’