Who holds the pen when your story gets told? And what does it cost a people to spend a generation as extras in it?
Most of us meet our own stories second hand. Someone else writes the script, casts the roles and decides which parts of us make the final cut. For Māori leaders in mainstream organisations, that feeling is familiar well beyond the screen: present in the room, essential to the picture, and somehow still the backdrop.
The Māori Leadership Summit 2027 is built on a different question. Its theme, Mai i te Oranga ki te Taurikura Pūmau, from survival to sustained prosperity, asks what happens when we stop measuring success by how long we can hold on and start measuring it by what we build and hand on. Few careers put that shift on display quite like the one that will close Day 1 in Tāmaki Makaurau.
Cliff Curtis (Ngāti Hauiti, Te Arawa) is one of the most recognisable Māori actors in the world. He is also something rarer: a man who spent two decades inside the most powerful storytelling machine on earth, learned exactly how it works, then came home and built one of our own.
Curtis grew up in Rotorua, where his first stages were kapa haka and mau taiaha. He trained at Toi Whakaari, New Zealand's national drama school, and made his film debut in The Piano before a breakout turn in Once Were Warriors announced him to the world.
Then came the Hollywood years, and here is the part worth sitting with. For much of that time, the industry would cast Curtis as almost anything except what he is. He played Colombian, Iraqi, Latino and Arab characters across films like Three Kings, Blow and Training Day, because the machine had plenty of roles for a brown face and very few written for a Māori man.
He took the work anyway, and he was deliberate about it. Every role sharpened the craft. Every set taught him how the industry actually operates: how projects get financed, who makes the decisions, where the power sits. By the time Whale Rider and later The Dark Horse gave him the chance to bring that mastery home, he was not just a great actor in Māori stories. He was someone who understood the whole system that decides which stories get made.
For leaders: there is a quiet discipline in building capability inside structures that were not designed for you. The years you spend learning how the system really works are not a detour from the kaupapa. They are often what makes the kaupapa possible later.
In 2004, at the height of his international career, Curtis did the thing the summit's theme is really about. With his cousin, producer Ainsley Gardiner, he founded Whenua Films, a production company with a simple mandate: back indigenous storytellers to tell their own stories.
The results reshaped New Zealand cinema. Whenua produced a young Taika Waititi's early short film work and his debut feature Eagle vs Shark, which travelled to Sundance. Then came Boy, which became the highest grossing New Zealand film released at the time. The company also ran a short film scheme with the Film Commission, executive producing a generation of emerging Māori and Pasifika filmmakers before most of the industry knew their names.
Notice what changed. As an actor, however brilliant, Curtis could only ever be as good as the roles someone else wrote. As a producer, he decided which stories got made at all. That is the move from surviving inside someone else's system to building one that holds for your people: not a bigger seat at their table, but a table of your own.
For leaders: representation is where this work starts, not where it ends. The real question for any organisation is not whether Māori are in the picture, but whether Māori hold the pen: the budget, the decision rights, the authority to say what gets made and why.
Here is the test of whether success is individual or collective: what happens to everyone else when you win?
Curtis could have spent the 2000s simply banking an enviable Hollywood run. Instead, the pattern of his career since Whenua Films has been a kind of two-way traffic. He keeps working at the biggest scale the industry offers, from Fear the Walking Dead to Avatar: The Way of Water, and he keeps converting that standing into room for others: producing first features, backing shorts, lending his name and his hard-won knowledge to filmmakers who did not yet have either.
That is the summit's kaupapa in miniature. One of the six conversations the 2027 programme is built around is the move from individual success to collective prosperity: how leaders take others with them rather than succeed alone. Curtis's answer has been to treat his own profile as infrastructure. The fame opens doors; the point is who walks through them after him.
For leaders: audit your own wake. If your success has not yet changed who gets hired, funded, promoted or heard in your organisation, it is achievement, not yet leadership.
At 4:30pm on Wednesday 17 March, Curtis closes the first day of the Māori Leadership Summit 2027 with a keynote called Not the Backdrop to Someone Else's Story. After a day that opens with Tāme Iti's fireside kōrero and runs through leadership under pressure, the personal cost of carrying your people, and collective prosperity, Curtis brings it home to the question underneath all of it: who holds the pen, and what it takes for our leaders to write the next chapter themselves.
It is hard to imagine a better person to ask it. He has been the actor in someone else's story and the producer of our own. He knows precisely what each one costs, and what each one builds.
Three questions to bring into the room:
The takeaway: survival kept the kaupapa alive. Prosperity means owning the story. Cliff Curtis's career is proof that the distance between the two can be crossed in one working life, and that the crossing is a choice.
The Māori Leadership Summit 2027 runs 16 to 19 March at JW Marriott Auckland, in person and livestreamed, in partnership with Whakaaro.