 Mote tauti maunga hakirangitiawa mātātua te waka Tauhinare Te Marae. He iriha hau no Ngāti Hine, Ngāti Kahungungu ki Wairua, Rongomai Wāhine me Waikato Tainue i ko Taniqo toku ingoa. Kia ora, my name is Taniqo. I whakapapatu or come from and link back to all those hapu that I'm from. I also have Swedish ancestry, born and raised in Cambridge in the Māori Waikato. So 10 years ago, my sister-in-law, Viena and I started a business called Soldiers Road Portraits. We had not planned to do a business. It was a organic off-the-worm kind of fly-off-the-hat idea. We went to a food festival and ran a stall and Bob, your uncle, we haven't been doing our work full-time ever since. Through our work, we realised there was a massive need for cultural connection because what we do is basically inspired from old portraiture of our ancestors, Māori ancestors, and we recreate them of people today. We saw that our process was connecting people. We thought we were just taking photos, but really there's whaka whanau ngatanga connecting with people. There's kōrero, you're talking about who you are, you're talking about where you're from, you're talking about your aspirations and so really it's an experience. It's a cultural connection experience and what we saw was, okay, yeah, we're helping people here. How can we really help? Who would really benefit from our experience? And we landed on prisoners. We figured one, they're the kind of people who need to be reminded of their worth and two, they're people that have made mistakes or made bad decisions and how can we realign their own percent of themselves, their own paradigm shift. When I got there and was able to connect with these men and realised that for every man that's in prison, there's four kids and a wife and five brothers and just this huge whanau that miss out on that connection and that just continues the cycle of this connection. I feel like it sounds so hard out when I verbalise it, but inside it sounds real. I feel like I was born in this time, in this era, to uplift and empower and whakamana our people alongside Pākehā.