This piece was pitched as ‘100 years of Critic’s Māori coverage’. That would’ve been disingenuous. It’s not a centenary for all of us, because for most of that time, we weren’t here.
One hundred years of Critic, and only twenty-nine of Te Ārohi. That’s how long it took for Māori to even be acknowledged in the name of Otago’s student mag – after 71 years of printing, publishing, and running its mouth without us. And while the name change in 1996 was a long-overdue nod to te ao Māori, it didn’t erase the decades of silence, stereotyping, and straight-up racist rubbish that had already been slapped onto its pages.
For most of Critic’s century-long run, Māori in the media have either been a headline, the punchline, or nowhere to be seen. When we weren’t being ignored, we were being debated, dissected, or dismissed – our language up for discussion, our tikanga misunderstood, and our political movements painted as radical disruptions rather than necessary resistance. The magazine, supposedly forward-thinking, sat silent through it all. Let's also not forget the golden era of Māori caricatures, clueless opinion pieces, and the ever-popular “should te reo Māori be compulsory?” debate (spoiler: yes, and you’re already decades late).
Yes, Critic has changed. But has it changed enough? And more importantly, does a century of student journalism really deserve celebration when Māori voices were rarely considered for most of it?
The Early Days: Silence Speaks Volumes
In Critic’s first few decades, the absence of Māori voices was deafening. It was as if anything remotely Māori didn’t exist within the walls of Otago Uni, despite Māori scholars, activists, and students moving through those same spaces. When we did show up, it was through a Pākehā lens – anthropological, academic, or observational. Take ‘The Niue Island Case’ (March 18, 1954) as an example. While not inherently about Māori, its framing reflected the same colonial gaze that shaped Māori representation in the media of its time. Niueans were spoken of as subjects of white tutelage, with New Zealand positioned as their moral and intellectual custodian, declaring itself responsible for “educating these people to accept white standards of behaviour.” Niueans were described as “somewhat primitive and superstitious,” with patronising observations about their attitudes toward work and food – deemed “touchy” and irrationally important to their worldview.
For all its talk of being progressive, Critic spent the majority of the 20th century proving absolutely otherwise. Even in the 1950s, it threw around the N-word like casual punctuation (June 11, 1953), scoffed at the idea that women deserved both pay increases and basic respect (March 18, 1954), and, in a truly unhinged take, gushed over Israel’s ‘successes’ as a nation built by sheer determination, conveniently overlooking the terrorism, displacement, and colonial violence that made – and continues to make – that possible (October 2, 1952). Perhaps the writer saw something familiar in that story – after all, Aotearoa knows a thing or two about a country ‘settled’ through the same means.
This selective blindness wasn’t just limited to international issues. Even when Critic took a stand against apartheid in South Africa, it failed to connect the dots to racism at home. Throughout 1981, in a year dominated by the Springbok Tour protests, Māori were barely a footnote in Critic’s coverage. There was one brief mention of Māori and how they were affected by the infamous Springbok Tour, and reference to the previous tours – mainly the 1970 one where the Māori players were classified as “honorary whites,” but otherwise Māori involvement, despite being central to the protests, was erased. And while Critic did their due diligence to report on the atrocities taking place in apartheid South Africa, they failed to make the connection on how it mirrored race relations within their own country. The film Uproar captures just how deeply Māori were involved in the anti-tour movement, drawing from the director's own experiences at the time. Even Greg McGee’s Foreskin’s Lament, a 1980 play that predicted the tour’s impact on race relations in Aotearoa, got a Critic review mid-protest, with no mention of Māori at all.
As subjects of curiosity, rather than contribution, there was no platform for Māori perspectives, and certainly no acknowledgment of our political realities. Instead, Māori were a footnote in a magazine that prided itself on being forward-thinking.
A Critic in Name Only
For a magazine called Critic, it spent decades failing to be one when it mattered. Even in the last 30 years, when Māori issues were impossible to ignore, Critic largely managed to do just that – staying silent when it could have spoken up, or at the very least, asked better questions. Researching this piece felt like sifting through a black hole – not because there was too much to unpack, but because there was barely anything there. The sheer, overwhelming absence of Māori representation in Critic’s archives wasn’t just frustrating, it was telling. Critic is great at asking hard questions. Just never about itself.
When Māori did make it into wider media, it was rarely to celebrate our achievements or perspectives. Instead, we became headlines when we were newsworthy in ways that served a Pākehā gaze. Actions were framed as controversies, moments scrutinised, and voices only amplified when Pākehā commentators could dissect them. Protests for Māori rights, such as the 1975 Māori Land March and the 2004 Foreshore and Seabed hīkoi, were framed as dramatic spectacles rather than legitimate acts of resistance. More recently, coverage of Ihumātao and marches against the Treaty Principles Bill followed the same pattern, centering disruption over cause, reaction over resolution. When Māori lawmakers performed a haka in Parliament to oppose the same bill, media fixated on the ‘outburst’ rather than the build-up behind it.
Māori activism on campuses all across the country – whether it was protests, the fight for te reo Māori, or the push for tino rangatiratanga – was painted as radical and disruptive. The 1979 Haka Party Incident is a prime example. For decades, Auckland University engineering students performed a mock haka during capping week, donning grass skirts and caricaturing Māori culture. The university dismissed these performances as “too trivial a matter to investigate”, despite repeated objections from Māori students. The activist group He Taua confronted the engineering students, leading to a brawl in which 11 members of He Taua were arrested. The Auckland Star sensationalised the incident, framing it as violent with the headline, “Gang Rampage at Varsity Leaves Students Battered,” rather than addressing the racism that sparked it. Treaty stories were often accompanied by a ‘both sides’ framing as if the rights of tangata whenua were up for debate – just look at the media coverage of the Treaty Principles Bill. Headlines like “New Zealand rocked by indigenous rights controversy” (GZERO, 2024) implied there was a valid argument against Māori sovereignty.
When Māori students did succeed, we were treated as anomalies, exceptions rather than the norm. The racism faced by Māori medical students was widely covered (“Auckland Māori medical students sick of entry requirement racism”), yet their achievements in the field were rarely given the same platform. That isn’t to suggest that Māori excellence stories don’t exist; anyone who’s scrolled through Facebook comments knows how quickly it gets dismissed as “special treatment”. When New Zealand’s largest media outlet, Stuff, issued an apology in 2020 for its racist reporting, the headlines focused on media self-reflection rather than the damage done (“New Zealand media giant Stuff apologises for ‘racist’ past reporting”). These patterns aren’t accidental, they reflect an ongoing narrative that positions Māori within the media only when it suits a Pākehā lens.
Bad Coverage, No Coverage
It’s a pattern that Critic has followed for years. When it comes to Māori issues, the choice has always sat somewhere between bad coverage and no coverage at all. Even up into the recent decade, Critic’s efforts for Māori Language Week have been, at best, minimal. A tokenistic headline here, a surface-level feature there – but never a full embrace of the kaupapa. It wasn’t until very recently that te reo Māori or aspects of the Māori worldview have started to be seen as something more than a once-a-year obligation, and even now, there’s a long way to go.
The contrast is even sharper when we look at other student publications. Just look at ‘Te Ao Mārama’, the dedicated Māori edition of Salient magazine – first introduced in 1973 and eventually enshrined in VUWSA’s constitution from 1997 onward. It isn’t just a one-off effort, but an entire issue led by Māori writers, editors, and artists, creating space for Māori voices. Meanwhile, Critic has struggled to offer even a fraction of that commitment.
The Shift: Māori Taking the Mic
For a time, Māori content was confined to a designated column, a box to be ticked rather than an integrated voice within the publication. Articles on Māori issues would surface sporadically, usually tied to Māori Language Week or major political events, but a consistent presence was harder to find. Critic’s disconnect from tauira Māori was so glaring that they resorted to Facebook callouts, scrambling for Māori contributors specifically for Māori Language Week. It wasn’t until 2018 onwards that Māori contributors began to carve out a more permanent space, pushing boundaries and stirring the pot. Prior to that, Critic had been otherwise silent, without so much as a nod to Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori.
The tide began to turn when Māori students refused to stay quiet. Māori contributors started claiming space, pushing back against Critic’s history of exclusion and taking control of our own narratives. The renaming of Critic to Critic Te Ārohi in 1996 under Editor Tracy Huirama-Osborne was a beacon of change, but the mahi wasn’t done. While te reo Māori found its way into articles, perhaps at first as a token gesture, it soon became an essential part of storytelling. This wasn’t just a shift in what was being covered, but who was telling the stories.
Even in the 2010s, Critic’s engagement with Māori content remained inconsistent. Māori activism and issues were still largely absent. In 2019, Critic Te Ārohi published Tiana Mihaere’s “Why We Must All Protect Ihumātao”, a rare and powerful call to action that centered Māori voices in the struggle against land confiscation. The following year, Annabelle Vaughan’s “A Seat at Our Table” exposed the constant scrutiny Māori students face in academic spaces, followed by her article “Minorities in Medicine”, which tackled the University’s proposed cap on Māori and Pasifika medical students – an issue that went largely unchallenged in mainstream media.
By 2020, the new wave of Māori contributors was bringing fresh perspectives to the table. Kaiya Cherrington explored topics such as the isolation of being Māori in a predominantly Pākehā student town (“Māori Migration to Otago Uni”) and decentering colonial ideas of womanhood (“Colonisation Made Periods Gross”). Others laid bare the everyday challenges faced by tauira Māori navigating a system never built for them, the lack of Māori spaces on campus (“Why Otago University Needs A Marae”), and the journey to reclaiming the native tongue (“Learning Te Reo Māori as a Māori Student”).
These stories weren’t just filling a diversity quota – they were holding up a mirror to student media, and shifting the narrative on what Critic could and should be: forthright, fearless, and unapologetic.
Nā Mātou, Mō Mātou: By Us, For Us
One of the most significant shifts in Critic Te Ārohi’s 100-year history has been the emergence of the Kaituhi Māori role, now known as Ētita Māori, which was established in 2022. This role signaled a move from tokenistic, sporadic inclusion to real structural change. No longer was Māori content an afterthought or a once-a-year obligation.
Ironically, it was an American editor who finally made it happen. According to Fox Meyer (Editor-in-Chief 2022-2023), the decision was a no-brainer. “My decision to make this position wasn't that deep. I noticed it didn't exist, thought 'wow, that really should exist', and then made it exist,” he said. Fox explained that while previous editors had recognised the need for such a role, the magazine’s rapid turnover meant no one had the time to formalise it. “I knew it was something that needed to be done when I started running the mag, so I made it happen right away. Some things just need to happen, and this was one of them.”
But let’s sit with that for a second – it wasn’t Critic that saw the gap and acted. It wasn’t a long-overdue internal reckoning. It was someone who saw the importance of the Māori voice with fresh eyes and, crucially, had the power to fix it. Until then, Critic barely acknowledged te ao Māori at all. Before 2022, articles about the Māori experience, language, and worldview were a rare novelty rather than a regular feature. No one had time? No, Critic just didn’t make the time – until someone finally did.
Where Are We Now – And Where We Need to Be
Critic Te Ārohi is no longer the publication it was a hundred years ago – or even thirty. Māori voices are here, our stories are being told. But let’s be real; progress isn’t the same as justice. Having a Māori name doesn’t erase decades of exclusion or being an afterthought.
It’s not just about visibility or consideration, it’s about power. Who holds the editorial reins? Whose voices shape the narrative? Is te ao Māori embedded in Critic Te Ārohi, or is it still tacked on when convenient? These are the questions that matter, and yet to be answered. Nearly one in five New Zealanders is Māori. In theory, one in five pages of Critic should reflect that. But here’s the thing – Critic has the chance to be more than just a reluctant participant in progress. No matter how many first-place awards the mag wins, it won’t mean much if it’s still coming second where it really counts. Why not push for a section specifically dedicated to te ao Māori? Why not do a Salient and enshrine the Māori Language Week issue into the OUSA constitution? If Critic Te Ārohi is serious about shifting from tokenism to transformation, it needs to stop following and start leading.