‘Being Māori is hard, being Māori is sad, being Māori is to laugh, being Māori is to cry, being Māori is forever,” wrote Dr Ranginui Walker in these pages 45 years ago, in one of the columns that represented, for much of the New Zealand mainstream, an introduction to the radical idea of a distinct Māori worldview.
It’s a line he wrote more than once, meditated over, amended to suit the context. It lives again in the title of Being Māori: The Dr Ranginui Walker Story, a feature-length documentary for Whakaata Māori. The film is as much a family history as it is a biography, and interviews with his children and grandchildren suggest Walker cast a long shadow. They are subject to his expectations even now.
“There’s so many doctors in the family,” laughs producerdirector Bradley Walker. “You say ‘Dr Walker’ and they all look up.”
Walker (Te Whānau-ā-Apanui, Te Whakatōhea) himself did not meet Ranginui Walker until he went to
