Hautahi Kingi

Images Provided by Hautahi Kingi

To the Whanganui people of Aotearoa New Zealand, the river is a living elder — older than any written account, and inseparable from who they are, with the quiet certainty of something that has never needed explaining.
E rere kau mai te awa nui nei
Mai i te kāhui maunga ki Tangaroa
Ko au te awa
Ko te awa ko au
“Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au – I am the river, and the river is me.” In one well‑known story, Taranaki Maunga, the ancestral mountain for iwi including Ngā Rauru, once stood among the central peaks; when he fled west in grief he gouged a deep valley through the land, and the waters that filled that scar became the Whanganui River, so mountain and river are remembered as kin rather than separate things. For Hautahi Kingi (Ngā Rauru, Te Āti Haunui‑a‑Pāpārangi), this Whanganui proverb names a world in which people and place are bound like kin, the river not a view or a resource but another way of saying “we.” From his childhood near the banks of the Whanganui River and the foothills of Mount Taranaki, to his work as an economist and senior data scientist at Google, Kingi’s life traces a line between ancestral stories and contemporary tools, a line he makes visible in writing such as his long essay “The Past Matters: Reflections on Tangata Whenua.” Across policy rooms, classrooms, and the page, he carries a way of thinking in which whenua — land — is origin, memory, and responsibility rather than property. To harm the river, in this worldview, is to harm the people themselves — a conviction the wider world finally honored in 2017, when New Zealand granted the Whanganui River full legal personhood, the first river anywhere to be recognized as a living whole with rights of its own

Born in Auckland, New Zealand, to his Māori father and Pākehā mother — Pākehā being a term for a non-Māori New Zealander of European descent — Kingi began living in his father’s homeland of Pākaraka when he was two years old. Pākaraka is a small rural settlement near Whanganui, in the shadows of Mount Taranaki on the west coast of New Zealand’s North Island. As Kingi described his father’s childhood there, “Pākaraka was an unmodern world where horses were commonly used for transportation and work. Many houses during his father’s youth did not have electricity or running water. It was also a place where traditional Māori beliefs were still deeply held.”

The Old Ways of Keeping

For instance, his father is a whāngai child — raised according to the Māori customary practice of whāngai, in which a child is brought up by someone other than their birth parents, usually within the wider whānau, in an open, kin-based arrangement that maintains the child’s connections to both sets of parents. After his older brother died at a young age, Kingi’s father was adopted into another branch of the whānau as a whāngai as a means of spiritual protection.

Two Ways of Bidding Farewell

In Aotearoa New Zealand, a marae is a community meeting place made up of a ceremonial courtyard and buildings such as the meeting house and dining hall, where Māori families and tribes gather for welcomes, funerals, celebrations, and important discussions, and where language, customs, and ancestral connections are actively lived and maintained. When asked about a specific memory he has about his marae, Kingi talked about the customs around a funeral which they call tangihanga. A traditional funeral takes place in one of the buildings in the marae. “It is an open casket funeral where the family spends the night and brings their food. Over the process of three days, visitors come in and out. There is acceptance and sharing of grief that is quite profound. ” Each night, people share their whaikōrero, or formal farewell speeches followed by a song.

The tangihanga, or tangi, concludes with a communal feast called the hākari following the burial. This meal serves as a gesture of thanksgiving and signals the lifting of death-related tapu (restrictions), with mourners often contributing koha (monetary gifts) to support it. While singing plays a role throughout the broader ceremony — particularly during the Poroporoaki, the farewell gathering held the night before burial — it is not a defining element of the feast itself. The evening after the burial is known as the pō whakangahau, a time set aside for rest and light entertainment.

In contrast to a Western funeral where Kingi explains, “the process of grieving tends to be more private and the funeral is over within an hour or so.” Western funerals prioritize individual grief and structured ceremony, reflecting a culture that values privacy, efficiency, and closure — death is mourned, marked, and then life resumes. The Māori approach, by contrast, treats death as a communal event that belongs to everyone, where time slows down, obligations to the deceased and their family are fulfilled collectively, and the transition out of life is honored with the same weight as any major life event. One tradition asks mourners to attend; the other asks them to show up entirely.

Success and the Profound Meaning of Contribution

As a well‑accomplished individual living in the Western world, Kingi was asked to define what success means to him in relation to his Māori tradition. “Career, business, or financial success weren’t discussed or considered, at least from my perspective growing up.” What mattered more was not a person’s title but their contributions: it could be “the person who ran the kitchen, an elder who delivered a speech, or the person who created carvings or songs,” all of whom helped sustain the community. In that world, family events such as welcoming a new baby are deeply acknowledged and celebrated as markers of a life well lived.

As Kingi moved deeper into Western institutions, his understanding of achievement underwent a quiet but significant reorientation. “Success and failure is a relative concept,” he reflected. “I knew that doing well or not doing well in an exam, in one part of my life, was valued and is an important thing, but meant little in a different part of my life. I knew that I just needed to work hard towards whatever I personally valued because that was the only way to gain satisfaction — and that, really, is what success means.” For Kingi, success was never about external validation — it was about living in alignment with his own values and responsibilities.

Everyone has a Hidden Talent

Flowing from this broader view of success, Kingi also emphasised the importance of recognising the diversity of talents and skill sets. “Someone may not be an eloquent speaker so they will not contribute that way, but they may be good with their hands so they will contribute that way. You cannot really judge anyone by what you see up front because they all have talents that are untold.” Even in the high‑pressure environment of Google, he notes, “people are built in to be smart. When I have a problem, there is always someone smarter than me that I can turn to.” Together, these reflections sketch a vision of success grounded in contribution, humility, and the quiet strengths that often go unseen.

Between Struggles and Negotiations

“Ka whawhai tonu mātou, ake! ake! ake!” — “We will continue to fight, forever and ever and ever” — captures exactly what Kingi argues in his 2015 essay “The Past Matters”: that the struggles of the nineteenth century are not over, but live on in the present through land loss, data practices, and ongoing claims to Māori sovereignty. The phrase arose from the New Zealand Wars of the 1860s, when Māori forces faced British troops in brutal campaigns across Taranaki and Waikato and still refused to surrender at places like Ōrākau, turning those battlefields into symbols of an unbroken resolve to resist. In Kingi’s work, that history flows forward into the present — and his own life is part of that current. As a child of that legacy, he was only nine years old when he became one of the first Māori students to enter an elite private school on scholarship, moving not outside but through a system that might easily have tried to absorb him.

That same negotiation followed him into his professional life. Kingi himself put it this way: “There are some interesting conflicts that arise in my work between core tenets of my profession and concepts that are valued in the Maori world. For example, the tech world’s preference for anonymous, depersonalized information brushes up against the importance placed by Maori on the importance of identity, and knowing who a datapoint represents before analyzing or making judgements.” In that sense, Māori were never truly overcome — military defeat did not erase their language, identity, or tino rangatiratanga, but pushed the struggle into new arenas where memory, presence, and relational accountability become forms of resistance. It is no coincidence that Kingi was born in 1987, the same year te reo Māori was made an official language of Aotearoa New Zealand, tying his life and work to a wider resurgence that proves the old promise “we will continue to fight” still beats inside contemporary stories, classrooms, code, and conversations.

A Song Across Time

In Māori culture, the karanga is much more than a formal greeting; it is a kind of ancestral serenade, an exchange of calls that draws people, place, and memory into the same breath. As the first woman rises to call, her voice doesn’t just reach the visitors—it reaches backwards, too, acknowledging those who have gathered on that ground before and the ancestors who still linger there, listening. Each karanga unfolds like a song across time: it names the living who approach, yet it also recognises that the marae is never occupied by the present alone. As Kingi explains, “it is seen as strengthening of the relationship between the physical and spiritual realm,” a reminder that any meeting is also a reunion with those who came before, and with the stories they left behind. The answering call from the visitors completes that serenade, not by erasing distance but by honouring it—two sides calling to each other across land, time, and genealogy until, step by step, they draw close enough to stand together.

Quiet Assumptions, Loud Consequences

Kingi’s perspective in the short report he co‑authored in 2016, Unconscious Bias and Education: A Comparative Study of Māori and African American Students, published under the auspices of Oranui, is that the most dangerous racism in schools is often the kind that doesn’t feel like racism at all—quiet, automatic assumptions that lower expectations for certain students while claiming to treat everyone the same. In that work, produced from his base at Cornell University, he treats unconscious bias as a “natural” human tendency shaped by history and culture, but insists that educators have a responsibility to notice how it lands on Māori and African American children in particular. For a young Māori reader, his advice is both practical and subversive: teachers are an important source of knowledge, but they are only one source of knowledge and opinion; if you are interested in something, you should seek out other people who have insight in that same area instead of letting a single classroom define what you are capable of. Speaking directly to young people who find themselves isolated in elite spaces, he tells them that if they feel like they are on their own, that is usually not true, that they got there somehow, and that they can take it as an opportunity to be unique and to forge a new path for the next ninety people who will arrive after them. When Kingi was growing up, there were no visible Māori mathematicians or economists around him, but that absence did not mean his people lacked the ability—it simply meant the system did not yet expect them there. By becoming a Māori economist himself and co‑authoring a 2016 study on unconscious bias through Oranui and Cornell, he has quietly used his own path through elite education into an argument that bias can be unlearned and futures rewritten.

The Conflict between Norms and Progress

Kingi’s reflections offer a nuanced, insider critique of how certain Māori cultural norms intersect with younger generations’ ideas of progress. In his words, “there is definitely a conflict between ways of working, so that anonymity versus focal point thing I talked about earlier,” capturing the tension between traditional expectations of humility and collective orientation, and contemporary pressures to be visible and individually prominent. He also notes that “there are conflicts in terms of what is valued, so that career success versus family success, for example,” highlighting the way professional ambition can feel at odds with obligations to whānau and community.

Kingi then moves into more contentious territory, suggesting that “there are some Māori traditions that maybe ought to be questioned, in that they are against what we might call cultural or moral progress in some ways.” He acknowledges the social cost of raising these concerns: “I’ve written just a little bit about this and received some pushback,” yet maintains that “maybe that is a conversation worth having, and that conflict needs to happen.” His central example concerns the gendered allocation of roles on the marae. He observes that “for example, there are roles on the marae that are very segregated in a way that I think is a shame.” Specifically, “the people who do the karanga are women,” while “the people who do the whaikōrero—which is the centrepiece, the high‑status performance on the marae—are men,” and “when seated on the marae, the men sit in front of the women.” For Kingi, “gender matters a lot in the allocation of roles on the marae, and I think that is not necessarily a good thing.” On this basis, he concludes, “I think it is worth questioning those things, because arguably they do stand in the way of a certain type of progress.”

Viewed through the lens of Chesterton’s fence—the idea that we should understand why a tradition or institution exists before altering or discarding it—Kingi’s stance is broadly positive and constructive. He does not dismiss Māori practices as arbitrary; instead, he speaks as someone who recognizes their depth and significance, even as he insists that “maybe that is a conversation worth having, and that conflict needs to happen.” In effect, he treats these customs as meaningful structures that first demand understanding and respect, but then invites a critical question: if certain arrangements, such as rigidly gendered roles on the marae, “do stand in the way of a certain type of progress,” is it time to reconsider how the “fence” is built, so that it continues to protect cultural identity without unduly limiting the aspirations and equality of younger Māori, especially women?

Who Owes What to Whom

Drawing on his academic work on “The Dynamic Effects of Immigration” and his chapter “International Migration: The Great Trade-Off” in Fair Borders?, where he traces how migration shifts welfare between wealthy households and workers over time, Kingi is asked what a fair “intergenerational contract” on immigration might look like—one that balances the interests of today’s rich and poor with those of tomorrow’s migrants. He almost recoils at the scale of the question, admitting, “this is a huge societal question… I don’t even know how to express it,” a striking hesitation from someone who has spent years quantifying those very trade-offs. In the interview he returns to the same terrain that animates his writing, describing immigration as sitting at the junction of “ethics… the philosophy of morality… and economics,” where choices about who can move, and on what terms, become choices about what current citizens owe to future newcomers. Framing policy as an “intergenerational contract” simply makes explicit what his research already implies: that border decisions today quietly lock in the life chances of people who have not yet arrived, often shifting returns “in favour of wealthy households at the expense of workers” during long transition periods.

No Miracle Jumps

In reflecting on career advice for young people, Kingi pushes back against the allure of prestige and social media narratives, grounding his perspective in steady effort and genuine interest. He cautions against fixating on specific companies, noting, “You need to make sure you’re doing it not for whatever company you want to end up in, because that company might not exist,” adding that even Google “wasn’t something you could have planned for” years ago. Instead, he frames success as a chain of logical steps rather than a dramatic leap: “At no point… was there some kind of miracle jump,” he explains, describing how his path grew from simply enjoying math, working hard, and progressing through opportunities. Kingi is particularly critical of how online content distorts expectations, warning that “taking content that’s online as an accurate representation” of careers is misleading, as viral glimpses of “Google parties” or perks represent “like 1% of the job.” The reality, he says, is far less glamorous—“hours at a desk… working endlessly, struggling to understand things”—but ultimately more meaningful for those willing to commit to the process.

The River Was Always Him

From childhood, the Whanganui serenaded Hautahi Kingi — not as scenery, but as a lifeline, the same current that had carried his people through generations of survival and loss. He has built econometric models at the frontier of labour research, produced work that shapes how nations understand their own people, and written essays that reach back centuries to make sense of the present — but the Whanganui still runs through the thinking, the way blood runs through kin. The proverb his people have lived by — Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au — is not a sentiment he recites; it is the declaration of a man who understands the river not as landscape but as family, as self, as the oldest relative he has. He came of age as the river was finding its own recognition in the eyes of the law — and like the Whanganui, he too has had to make himself legible to a world not built around Māori ways of knowing, without ever surrendering what those ways protect. The river was given legal personhood in 2017, but the Whanganui people never needed the law to tell them what they already knew: that to be of this place is to be of this river, bound to it the way kin are bound — not by choice, but by blood. He is, as the proverb has always insisted, the river — and the river is him.

Images Provided by Hautahi Kingi