What does it mean to be Māori in 2020? Glenn McConnell meets a new generation of Māori leaders, promising to fight on forever.

What happens to those in the middle ground? When you don't quite tick all the boxes, or when your heart is in another place, it's not easy by any means.

What happens to the tangata whenua who aren't mana whenua?

Most Māori don't live where their whānau are from, anymore. We travel and move, we have survived attempts at cultural assimilation.

LAWRENCE SMITH/STUFF Geneva Alexander-Marsters has released an album, called Te Pō, focusing on ancient Māori ideas of creation and being.

When our grandparents were young, a giant monument, the obelisk of Maungakiekie (or, as they called it, One Tree Hill) was unveiled to commemorate Māori. The memorial still stands, "remembering" a culture and people which also still happen to be standing.

Why exactly it's there seems hard to fathom. The Auckland Star reported that the obelisk's funder imagined "the Māori race" would soon be extinct. And while he was obviously very wrong, the following 71 years were not plain sailing either.

Ever since that memoriam to the living was put up, Māori have faced an unrelenting upheaval of lifestyle and culture. It's hard to say what had the biggest impact.

There was the "pepper potting". In the mid-20th century, the government encouraged Māori to leave their whānau and move to growing cities, where they were separated and put inbetween Pākehā, with the hopes of assimilation.

Schools actively suppressed te reo. And then, the state started taking Māori children and putting them in "homes", where many became victims of abuse.

Chris McKeen/Stuff A memoriam to Māori sits on Maungakiekie, or One Tree Hill.

After all of that, and more, it's no surprise the Māori world is far different now. But it seems many would be surprised to see that despite all of that, young Māori across the country are holding onto their culture and fighting for their language.

Ranginui Walker called the story of New Zealand race relations, "the struggle without end". The whakataukī he used was "Ka whawhai tonu mātou", the same phrase which met British troops as they invaded Ōrākau Pā in Kihikihi, on April 2, 1864.

"We will fight on forever."

Ayla Hoeta is someone who won't stop fighting.

At 30 years old, the mother of two has lived a few lives already. She was once affiliated with a youth gang, had twin boys as a teenager and – having grown up in a house of 10 children – she learnt quickly how to look after herself and others.

She now works as a writer and in youth development, serving a new generation of young South Aucklanders as part of a council initiative to address inequalities.

Growing up, Hoeta bore the brunt of inequality and also saw her culture start to come apart.

"As I grew up, I didn't understand why life was like this. I just thought I hated my life," she recalls.

Her two nans raised her, and many other children, with the limited resources they had.

"They were doing the best they could, but there were also 10 other kids and it was really hard growing up.

"My parents weren't around, that's the lifestyle I had, we lived in a state house, we had no money. It was hard, we were poor. We were not just financially poor, but time poor. My nans couldn't give me the love and attention I needed."

Jessie Casson Ayla Hoeta had joined a gang by 20, but now works as a writer and in social development helping young people.

There were many things Hoeta could have been angry about.

She could have been angry about her treatment as a teenager. For college, she moved to a central city high school where the teachers weren't able to understand her or who she was. She sounded different, and looked different, from almost every other kid. For that, she was all but ostracised by both teachers and peers, so she started to disengage.

It's not the easiest start to life, but that's not what bothers Hoeta.

As she grew up, raised by her two kuia, Hoeta would go regularly to Māori church services and has remained comfortable on a marae. Her kuia would talk to others in te reo, and she says they expected she'd know tikanga and what was being said.

But she didn't. How could she?

She'd never been taught te reo at home, and despite being raised by two kuia, they never passed on all of their knowledge.

"They didn't encourage us to speak Māori and they didn't see it as relevant or important because of how they were treated at school. They were hit and they were abused if they spoke Māori, so they were part of that generation of 'Māori's gonna get you nowhere'."

New Zealand has known this for years. Most of us have heard this story before. We know that the state literally batted te reo out of generations, but do we understand what that means?

The idea had been to assimilate Māori into Pākehā life from a young age. This was common in most areas the British tried to colonise, with educators and governors stating openly that they sought to "take the Indian out of the child".

And what happens when they did?

Hoeta says she was left in limbo. Her identity as Māori was questioned, and she grappled with levels of self-loathing and also doubt as she failed to fit the mould of Pākehā.

She thought, "Should I be proud to be Māori?"

Jessie Casson Ayla Hoeta (Tainui) lives in her South Auckland townhouse with her 11-year-old twin sons, Kaperiera and Mikaera.

This extraction of identity, of culture and a sense of being was sure to end in disaster. They obviously didn't know who they were up against. Decades before te reo was banished from schools, the people of Ōrākau decided not to escape but to stay and fight despite having had long run out of food.

And decades later, Hoeta – having been of the generation not taught te reo – is staging her own revolt.

Te reo has become steadily more popular in education. In the past 10 years, the number of students enrolled in Māori medium education has more than tripled from 6000 students in 2009 to 21,500 this year. What's more, the Ministry of Education says almost a quarter of students in English education are learning te reo.

Hoeta says she struggled most in life when she didn't have confidence in who she was.

"I struggled if I wasn't able to stand up and say who I am. So I thrived when I was when I was able to confidently stand up and say who I am as Māori, say my whakapapa, and then go into whatever situation I'm in."

She's learning te reo, but learning te reo when you're older is far harder than picking up a language when young. So, while she goes to wānanga she has made sure her boys learn it in kōhanga reo and kura kaupapa Māori.

"I knew even back when I was only 18, that my boys would go to a kura where they can learn their own language so that they don't grow up struggling the way I have," she says.

Through her work in community development, she sees learning about one's own culture as pivotal to breaking harmful cycles. Where Hoeta lives, on her tūrangawaewae of South Auckland, she says violence and addiction rates are worryingly high. She's lived the cycle and she still sees it repeating, today.

"You start stealing and getting into trouble, you start trying drugs and things like that because there's nothing else for you to do. Those are the cycles. Your parents did it, their parents did it, so you do it."

But, she's also seen the cycle break. And she's broken it, too.

Those issues stem from, she believes, issues around colonisation – loss of identity, isolation and economic deprivation. "It's taken generations to become this normal cycle. So it'll probably take more generations to undo," she says.

But, talking to young Māori leaders like Hoeta, there's a sense more change is just around the corner.

Sometimes, the change seems rapid as it unfolds before your eyes.

Growing up in a mostly Pākehā school, in Wellington city, studying te reo seemed to many – through 2010 to 2014 – to be a fairly pointless endeavour. It was the only class I had to justify taking. Nobody ever asked the classicists why they chose that subject, but they felt justified in questioning why I studied te reo. As I finished school in 2015, my te reo class had shrunk so much it was merged with the year below.

But then, something happened. A sudden surge, from younger students, saw, for the first time at that school, demand for multiple classes per year group. Have we reached a breakthrough, or are we just on trend? I suggest the former. After all, even banks and other cultureless corporates now offer te reo classes for their employees.

At universities, there seems to be an uptake in interest in Māori studies. So much so, I once saw a Māori studies lecturer pause and look to leave a large lecture theatre when he saw the room was overflowing with students. "Sorry for acting weird," he said, but this was a sight he'd never before seen.

For many years, all the projections looked dire. The number of fluent speakers of te reo is fairly stagnant. About 11 per cent of Māori are fluent.

It was assumed that, once living in cities, Māori would give up on their language and culture. The director of education in 1930, T. Strong, said: "The natural abandonment of the native tongue inflicts no loss on the Māori."

LAWRENCE SMITH/STUFF Geneva Alexander-Marsters is one of the first children to attend a Kura Kaupapa and went through the Kōhanga Reo system.

In his eyes, Geneva Alexander-Marsters should have enjoyed the spoils of Pākehā urban life.

The musician was raised by her Pākehā mother in Auckland City. She was born at a time when her mother remembers strangers being "openly disgusted" by biracial relationships.

When her father, Daniel, moved south, it would have been easy to lose touch with her iwi.

But her mother made sure she knew who she was. Alexander-Marsters is one of the first graduates of Māori medium education, after going through kōhanga and and bilingual primary and secondary schooling.

And she knows her whakapapa, as well.

LAWRENCE SMITH/STUFF Geneva Alexander-Marsters sings in the band SoccerPractise.

For Māori, everyone and everything can be linked together. It's called whakapapa, a way of thinking which helps you understand your place and how you relate to everything else.

Māori are particularly interested in the idea of mana whenua. Mana whenua are Māori who look after the land and have rights and responsibilities to it, because they come from generations who have lived on and cared for the land. That's why, in pepeha, Māori link back to marae, maunga and land.

Although she knew her father from Ngāti Kahungunu, on the East Coast, it wasn't until this year that she made the trip "home".

The 29-year-old singer had been making music for an RNZ podcast called He Kākano Ahau, a show about young Māori living the city life. As she got talking with the producers, their discussion turned to her own relationship with her iwi and marae.

LAWRENCE SMITH/STUFF Geneva Alexander-Masters is a musician, artist and radio host who grew up in Auckland City with her Pākehā mother.

Alexander-Marsters is, to put it plainly, into hardcore Māoritanga. Her band, Soccer Practise, just released a new album called Te Pō. It's based off early Māori thinking about creation, which far pre-dates European settlement. She says the album was also inspired by a story about Māui she read as a child. The story has been, largely, forgotten in Pākehā settings as one could say it challenges taboos.

It's about how Māui tried to beat death, by climbing into the vagina of the god of death, Hine Nui Te Pō. But she crushed him, and that's what killed the man who slowed the sun.

"I think about that all the time," Alexander-Marsters says. "As a kid, growing up, I just thought that was normal."

But as she grew up, she started to realise that many people didn't consider that to be normal. At kura, she wasn't exactly "normal" either.

One of the few connections to her iwi was one of their waka held at Auckland Museum, and when I ask if she has "tūrangawaewae" she suggests the grand Wintergardens at the Auckland Domain.

LAWRENCE SMITH/STUFF Geneva Alexander-Marsters says: "I've always been the manuhiri, never the mana whenua."

According to Statistics NZ, the majority of Māori do not live close to their ancestral marae. Around 10 per cent of Māori live close to their marae tūrangawaewae, the department estimates, with the rest living more than half an hour away or in different cities altogether.

Urban marae, universities and schools have played a major role in providing connections for Māori who can't be at their own marae.

"I've always been the manuhiri, never the mana whenua," Alexander-Marsters says.

FRANCES MORTON Musician Geneva Alexander-Marsters visits her family urupā for the first time.

At school, she used to compete nationally at kapa haka championships – but still, she remembers a distinct feeling of not quite fitting in.

She talks about always being "too white", or "too brown".

In Māori environments, she says she'd be seen as "too white".

"It's almost like they're disappointed," she says.

"They're disappointed because of things like the way I speak. My mum's a writer, so I was a terribly well spoken child. I didn't speak like they spoke. It's not because I was adverse to coloqualisms, but I just liked long words."

FRANCES MORTON Musician Geneva Alexander-Marsters visits her marae, for the first time, in Patutahi.

On the other hand, her Pākehā friends have intervened because she can't stand hearing te reo be butchered and she's not one to let outdated stereotypes be flung around, either.

"As my life became more mainstream, the less people around me understood. In third form, a friend of mine gave me a quiet word after I lost my s... at this chick for saying Towel-Pow."

"I went full militant on her, but she was purposely saying it wrong to f... with me," Alexander-Marsters recalls, adamant Māori shouldn't been to be apologetic for correcting other's errors.

She'd gone from being immersed in te ao Māori, to being in a city and school where Pākehā had, over generations, become comfortable mispronouncing and appropriating Māori culture.

"In all her suburban life, she had never been questioned."

FRANCES MORTON Musician Geneva Alexander-Marsters visits her family urupā for the first time.

That, there, is the tightrope many Māori have walked for quite some time.

When we talk, Alexander-Marsters doesn't really say much about visiting her marae in Nuhaka. It was a great experience, she says, something she'd alway wanted to do.

But it was also "jarring".

It was a world away from the life she's made in Auckland. After all, there were goat heads lying on the side of the road after the town's annual hunting competition. You don't see that in Grey Lynn.

Back in Auckland, the singer continues to fight for change. Like the immensely popular Māori metal band Alien Weaponry, she's part of a generation of musicians bringing te reo to new genres of music.

But having walked between worlds, she's also acutely aware of how many people aren't always accepting of the diversity she promotes.

FRANCES MORTON Musician Geneva Alexander-Marsters visits her marae, for the first time, in Patutahi.

When Tūhoe journalist Oriini Kaipara made her debut on mainstream TV, presenting 1 News at Midday, the fluent te reo speaker was equally self-conscious.

She became the first woman with a moko kauae to present mainstream news, an achievement which she says was met with "99.9 per cent" support. Having worked as a journalist at Māori Television and on the Māori news show Te Karere, she was equally comfortable speaking te reo as English.

And so she did. She introduced the news in te reo. Let's remember, she's working on a programme which for a long time refused to put an H in the name Whanganui. But she says she felt a duty to her people.

"I have a commitment to my family, my marae, my home, my language," she says.

SUPPLIED Oriini Kaipara hosts 1 News and Te Karere at TVNZ.

But even despite the praise, with many Māori and Pākehā thanking her for normalising not just te reo but also moko kauae, she still felt the need to check. Had she been speaking too much of te reo?

"That's something I am consciously aware of, am I pushing it too much?

"I did ask a colleague here who is senior at 1 News about whether speaking five seconds of Māori is too much. She said no. I've got a lot of support here and no one seems to think it's too much."

For the record, in total she'd only spoken te reo for about 10 seconds of an almost 30-minute broadcast. Speaking two languages comes naturally to the 35-year-old journalist, who grew up switching comfortably between English and Māori.

But asked to sit in a "mainstream" setting, she starts to second-guess herself. Even if, as she says, she had the full support to speak te reo, it makes you wonder if or for how long this self-doubt will hang over Māori who just want to be who they are.

Some inaccuracies in this story have been corrected since its publication.