ŌTAUTAHI, Aoteaora – Māori Football Aotearoa’s North v South series took place in December 2025 and MFA interviewed Kate Johnstone, who’s story was already carved into the landscapes of Southland and beyond.
An advocate for young Māori women finding their way in football the same way she did, Kate was happy to share her rich whanau story in a way that embraces diversity and identity finding expression in football.
On one side, there is a strong Scottish and Romani thread, families who moved across borders and oceans, their names shifting with accents and paperwork: Johnson, Johnston, Johnstone.
“My last name would’ve started as ‘Johnson’,” Kate explains. “Then it went to ‘Johnston’, then ‘Johnstone’. There are three different branches. There are even about five other people in New Zealand with the exact same name as me, including my middle name. Sometimes I think, I want more individuality.”
“It is an oral tradition in my family that ‘Carran’ was likely shortened from ‘Carranza’ or ‘Karranza’, which is a traditional Basque last name. However, the change to ‘Carran’ would have happened likely to make the name sound more English,” she said.
Her whakapapa crosses borders in other ways too.
On her mum’s side, whānau moved from the north to Southland around the time of the musket wars. “They started in the Catlins, then Fortrose, then migrated even more south until they got around to Invercargill and Riverton,” she says. “Mum’s a Carran – that’s a very big family in Southland, very well-known.”
Her grandfather, from that Carran line, was a giant of the woodchopping world.
“He used to captain the woodchopping team in New Zealand,” Kate says. “He was very big, burly, very thick eyebrows. People used to say he was like a mix between Johnny Cash and someone else – basically a brown Johnny Cash.”
All seven of his brothers were woodchoppers, but he stood out.
“He was the man,” she laughs. “They’d go to competitions all over the South Island and sweep it clean. Then he got invited to an open invitational up north. The North and South Islands had a lot of beef – the North Islanders didn’t really like the idea of a Southlander being captain. But he proved his worth. He went to the States and to France with it. I didn’t realise how big a deal it was until I got older.”
On her Māori side, Kate’s lineage reaches back to Pōtatau Te Wherowhero. She talks about his daughter, about loss in childbirth, and about the name he carried in mourning. She’s done enough digging to know there are layers still to uncover.
“I do a lot of genealogy on both sides of my whānau,” she says. “On Dad’s side we can go back to the late 1790s, and on Mum’s side we can trace through to Pōtatau. The details of the stories are actually the key to understanding the present.”
Those details matter.
They help explain why hard physical work feels normal. Why the idea of captaining a team doesn’t feel foreign. Why she’s comfortable being the one who travels, adapts, and pushes into spaces that weren’t built with her in mind.
They also help explain why Māori Football Aotearoa feels like a natural fit: movement, resilience, whakapapa, and pride expressed through performance.
Her football is played on grass rather than in sawdust, but the qualities are the same – grit, competitiveness, humour, and a deep sense that identity and performance belong together.
Ends
Story as told by Kate Johnstone
