Activist and film-maker Chris Huriwai looks out his window and shares what he sees. As told to Greg Bruce.
I've got a desk that's in my bedroom at my mother's place, where I'm sitting at the moment. When I look out the window I can see classic symbols from my mum. We've got some buddhas out there and exotic fruit trees, lots of veges. She's really into her gardening and there's always interesting little creative designs dangling from the trees. It's a nice thing because it really reminds me of my childhood.
I've spent a bit of time in Auckland and Wellington and I've moved home and I'm trying to find a little block of land myself to start settling down on. There's a plot of land close to my whanau home in Ōtaua and I'm just going through some of the processes to figure out exactly where I can start building.
What I love about Te Tai Tokerau is the people. I've been dying to come back here to integrate back into the community, because when I grew up here as a kid I feel like I really purposefully isolated myself a little bit because I felt really different to everybody else.
I was really quite racist when I moved to the far north, even though my family is Māori and I was raised in a Māori community. I was bullied a bit when we first moved here and that sent me on a bit of a spiral. I started looking down on a lot of people. There's a lot of unemployment, it's a very low socioeconomic area, and in my younger days I saw the common denominator as being Māori, which led me to becoming quite a racist young individual.