Award-winning singer Maisey Rika is now an NZ Arts Laureate, receiving the 2021 Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa Award for her creative work.
She talks to Kathryn Ryan about her love of music and te reo Maori.
Maisey Rika Photo: Supplied
Rika and her younger brother JJ Rika grew up in a very musical whānau and often went along to watch their mother Honey perform in her band The Rika Sisters.
Performing music herself began quite naturally for Rika .
"The guitar would just go around [he room] and one day the guitar stopped at me. I couldn't play it of course but I just stood up and held it and had a bit of a waiata… I would have been about five back then."
As a child, she also sang at the marae, where no one told her to be quiet and instead they just sat and listened.
"I could see tears, I could see smiles. I was just happy that they felt something and I knew from then that that's what I loved to do."
Rika sang traditional waiata for her kapa haka group but first started writing and performing her own material with her brother JJ. He'd record them and upload the videos to YouTube.
The positive response was helpful, Rika says, because it's different singing a waiata you've written yourself.
"Those are your ideas and it's kind of a vulnerable thing."
After high school, she went to university - at her mother's insistence - and the day after graduation moved back home to Whakatane and started working for her iwi in heatlh services.
Then "music found her again" and 13 years ago Rika made the decision to stay on that path.
Eight years before her breakthrough 2012 single ‘Tangaroa Whakamautai’, her husband signed her up to audition for the TV reality show NZ Idol.
"Then my aunties caught wind of it, they were all giving me money to pay for gas to go up to Auckland … once I got there and met all these people that were on the same wavelength, the singers… there were heaps of us. I really loved that part."
At the auditions, the NZ Idol judges told competitors to sing a song from their hearts. Rika sang a waiata in gratitude to her aunties.
"Where I grew up it's the normal thing to sing in te reo Māori, so when they say to sing something you're passionate about, something that's on your heart, the first thing that came to mind was a waiata Māori."
Rika says she was "ripped to shreds" by the judges for singing in te reo.
Although the music industry still has a long way to go in embracing Māori language, Rika loves seeing young bands like Drax Project getting into it.
"The new generation, they see it. They see the value in learning the language - the First Nations language of this land. I get excited when I see that, I really do."
Hearing te reo Māori spoken and sang in all kinds of spaces around New Zealand is her dream.
"Inside a language is a whole world, not just the reo - a whole world, a whole culture, our belief systems, everything. And I think it would be beautiful if it was taught to all our kids."
