Mārata Ketekiri Tamaira
Writer
Growing good words in the world
Ko Pihanga te maunga whaea.
Pihanga is my mother mountain.
Ko Taupo te moana.
Taupo is my lake.
Ko Te Arawa te waka.
Te Arawa is my ancestral canoe.
Ko Tūwharetoa i te Aupouri rāua ko Te Mahau ōku marae.
Tūwharetoa i te Aupouri and Te Mahau are my ceremonial meeting houses.
Photo by Makana Middlesworth.
Ko Ngāti Tūwharetoa te iwi.
Ngāti Tūwharetoa is my tribe.
Ko Ngāti Turumakina rāua ko Ngāti Tūrangitukua ōku hapū.
Ngāti Turumakina and Ngāti Tūrangitukua are my subtribes.
Ko Te Rerehau Kahotea Te Heuheu te rangatira.
Te Rerehau Kahotea Te Heuheu is my esteemed protector.
Ko Mārata taku ingoa.
My name is Mārata.
Poipoia te kākano, kia puawai
Nurture the seed and it will grow
Words emerge from the ground like newly sprouted seeds
reaching tender leaves to the sky seeking sustenance.
They rise beyond their own earthbound humility to be nourished by the sun and rain.
Words want to grow.
Nau mai, haere mai! Welcome!
Mārata Ketekiri Tamaira hails from Aotearoa New Zealand and has ancestral ties with the central North Island tribe of Ngāti Tūwharetoa. She received an MA in Pacific Islands studies at the University of Hawai‘i in 2009 and completed a PhD in gender, media, and cultural studies at the Australian National University in 2015. Mārata’s intellectual interests are wide-ranging, covering indigenous politics and art, visual studies, and museum studies.
Mārata’s interdisciplinary scholarship has featured in numerous academic journals, books, and periodicals, and in 2009 she edited The Space Between: Negotiating Culture, Place, and Identity in the Pacific. Her writing repertoire also encompasses poetry. In 2016 her poem “Night Ceremony” was published in Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. She is a seasoned educator and has taught Pacific studies and indigenous visual studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and University of California, Santa Cruz. In particular, she has worked extensively with underrepresented minority students to support their academic success. Mārata has undertaken numerous speaking engagements, including in 2016 when she was invited to be a guest speaker at Harvard University as part of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development.
In 2022, Mārata left full-time employment as Project Manager for the National Science Foundation STEM grant "Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation: Islands of Opportunity" to pursue creative writing. In 2023, she completed her first children’s picture book, Mother Tree, Daughter Seed: Lessons in Slow Growth, which is under contract with University of Hawai‘i Press and will be released in October 2025. She is currently working on her first Young Adult fiction novel.
Much of Mārata's creative work focuses on her Māori heritage and traces the links between ancestral connections, the power of place and memory, and the transformative quest for identity and belonging. For Mārata, telling stories that are rooted in an indigenous worldview is crucial and life-affirming. She states, “As indigenous people, we need to be the light bearers of our own stories.”
Mārata lives with her husband and daughter on Hawai‘i Island, Hawai‘i.
Forthcoming release