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17-year-old Paetin Huch is passionate about bringing Māori and Sāmoan culture into video games in an authentic way.
At age 10, Paetin Huch (Ngāpuhi, Magiagi) designed facial filters for her first app. The now 17-year-old has just finished her last exams at Manurewa High School and is now working towards telling Indigenous stories through video gaming.
She was recently awarded the Prime Minister’s Vocational Excellence Award and Tax Traders’ Cultivate Technology Scholarship.
“I feel like I’m finally growing up and spreading my wings into my career.”
Next year, Huch will be studying at Manukau Institute of Technology.
Huch was part of her school’s Pathways in Technology programme which is a global education model that offers students opportunities to develop skills and industry connections in the tech industry.
“I was learning about coding and HTML and JavaScript and was like, ‘no this is something that I really want to pursue, especially after finding out the percentage of females and people part of my culture.”
Huch had always wanted to pursue a career in technology, but finding out that only 4% of the tech sector’s workforce is Māori and less than 3% Pasifika only consolidated her purpose.
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Huch was recently awarded Tax Traders’ Cultivate Technology Scholarship and the Prime Minister’s Vocational Excellence Award. (Pictured: Tax Traders co-founder Nicola Taylor and Huch)
“I could really make a difference in this industry,” Huch thought. “I want to be able to tell history and actual Indigenous stories.”
She said a lot of the time, incorporation of Indigenous cultures is not done in a meaningful or authentic way.
For Huch, game development merges her artistic skills and her exploration of her Māori and Sāmoan cultures.
At school, Huch is also known to be an ‘art kid’. “Before being part of the technology industry, I wanted to be an artist,” she said.
Now she gets to combine the worlds in the process of creating virtual ones.
Paetin Huch/Supplied
Huch doesn’t just want to do the coding of her video games but also design her game worlds.
Designing video game worlds that reflect precolonial lands will involve Huch’s own research and conversations with cultural knowledge holders.
Huch is on a journey of reconnecting with her Māori and Sāmoan whakapapa which had become important to her in her teens. As a child, learning English and Pākehā worldviews was seen as paramount.
“My mum was brought up in Māori but then somewhere down the line she wasn’t very good at speaking English, and she was made fun of,” Huch said. “And she didn’t really want that for us.”
“I feel like there are people out there who are like me…it’s kind of sad that we have to be grown up in order to learn more about it,” Huch said. “It’d be pretty cool for [gamers] to learn and to have fun at the same time.”
“Maybe if I bring myself into this space and try to make a difference, then I’ll see changes.”
“Getting an understanding of technology isn’t as hard as people think it is, and they’re really capable of doing it if they really put their mind to it,” Huch said.
She wants to see other young women and people from Pacific cultures giving technology vocations a go.
“We really need them,” she said.
