IHUMATAO - FOR THE LOVE OF THE LAND

By Sapati Apa 

The walk to the frontline at Ihumatao is a cold and windy one, the air is heavy and I can barely get a proper breath in as I put one gumboot in front of the other. It’s ten minutes past 1:00am, and I’ve volunteered for a frontline shift that starts after midnight, and finishes just as the sun rises at 7. 

In all honesty, I don’t want to be here. I’d rather be anywhere else than trekking through the muddy grounds, wearing five jackets and still being unable to feel my toes. I’m not a bush girl. Hell, I’m not even a grass girl. 

But I’m here because of where I live. 

My family has always moved back and forth from Wellington to Auckland, but every time we’ve lived in Auckland, we have always managed to end up in Mangere Bridge. 

For a while, Mangere Bridge was considered one of Auckland’s best kept secrets - a beautiful landscape, right next to a public farm, in close vicinity to the airport, views of Auckland’s beautiful scenery, right by the water, and of course, a rich strip of quaint cafes and restaurants. But what we didn’t know, was that if you drove a little deeper into the hills, and continued right down to Quarry Road at Ihumatao, you’d find yourself at what was left of a wreckage scene. 

Rivers running purple because of chemical spills, wastewater treatment plants placed over traditional Maori fishing grounds, and whole mountains (the size of Mangere Mountain) quarried to make Auckland roads. 

It’s horrifying to think that there was so much resource extracted from this small piece of land, resources that literally built one of the busiest parts of Auckland (the airport), and yet Ihumatao themselves didn’t have sealed tar roads and proper electricity in a lot of their houses until a few years ago (as I’m told). 

It seems that Auckland’s best kept secret was not Mangere Bridge, but Ihumatao. 

I think we all understand how complex the situation is - we all get the injustice of it, and how much it’s affecting the people involved. The ongoing consequences of land confiscation for Maori in New Zealand consistently remind us that colonialism is still very much alive. The passing of Maori land between the hands of settlers to business corporations is enough to send one into a spiral of depression. A bit of reading on Ihumatao and you might find yourself with a deep hatred for any white collared businessman you see walking down Newmarket. 

But learning about the politics of Ihumatao was not what made me wake up at midnight and trek through mud to get to the frontline. 

It was the connection that the mana whenua had with their land that made me put my feet in my gumboots. 

The way in which the leaders of SOUL spoke on their history re-told what a lot of us had learned (or hadn’t learned at all) about Māori. The description of the food bowl that was Ihumatao, and the abundance of seafood, crops and vegetables that the land provided meant that they could easily live off the land until they died. In fact, they describe stories of settlers who would’ve died of starvation if it had not been for the mana whenua. The re-telling of this narrative, of course, changed the way we thought about Maori history, but it also transformed the spirits of the rangatahi (young people) and the kuia that were both at the campfire; they were re-telling their own personal histories, and changing their beliefs on who they thought they were. I witnessed so many young Maori people connect with family members and people they didn’t know they were related to, I listened to the recounting of families, and ancestors, I observed as people crossed over space and time to connect themselves to the entire story of Māori as a whole - and all this happened on the whenua. 

The conversations that we had around the campfire at Ihumatao were life-changing ones. Ones that moved people back onto the right path, ones that changed career directions, ones that meant vulnerability. And I believe that the confidence that we had to have these conversations 

with perfect strangers came from the land, which grounded us and brought us all together for the same purpose. 

The wholeness that I felt, both within myself, and also watching other people, was a direct result of being on and protecting land that we understood as living. The human bodies around me felt spiritually, mentally and emotionally cleansed as a result of being connected to something that was once lost to them. 

Being a part of the Samoan Diaspora means that my homeland is a far away place. My country is something only told of in stories, or spoken in language that is foreign to me. My connection to that homeland is what I can perform of it - siva samoa, speaking fa’asamoa, etc. and oftentimes, I fail to perform these things “correctly”, which in turn made me feel as though I was constantly part of a competition to prove how Samoan I was. 

A competition I think we all get caught up in. 

I felt conflicted after my shifts at Ihumatao, solely because I felt like the Samoan diaspora in New Zealand were in a rat race to prove who could be the most Samoan. But these rangatahi, a lot of whom could not speak te reo, were accepted by each other simply because, they are Maori and that’s the end of that. 

I couldn’t figure it out. What were they doing that made being Maori so easily accepted by each other? Why was it that they didn’t have to perform anything in order to be given the title of Maori? 

My answer, strangely enough, came from my father. “Only Samoans in New Zealand try to prove their identity. Samoans in Samoa don’t care.” 

This was hugely profound for me, because it pointed the finger at the missing link that tied indigenous diasporic people to their identity: 

LAND

People who live on their own land, who grow food on their own land, who drink water from it, know that they are of that land. They know where they come from. Which is why, the rangatahi I was surrounded by, were immediately accepted as being Maori because, they were on the land. They were on their land. 

This was why they felt wholeness, why they felt spiritually full, because they were walking on something that they belonged to. In the same way, I feel that I often grew up with a deep lack of belonging, because I did not get a chance to walk upon the land I was born from in the same way. 

Wanna know the difference between myself and the people at Ihumatao? I still have my land. 

My family land is in my family’s hands. I will always have the opportunity to go back and reconnect. These people do not. Considering the deep connection we have to our land, I understand the travesty of the situation; the statistics about Maori health, their suicide rates and mental health all make sense. Once you take away something that connects to indigenous people as deep as land does, it causes rips in the spirit, in the mind, in the soul that get passed on through generations. 

After our deep discussions had come to an end at the campfire, I looked around, and saw that everyone was in the mood for something a little bit lighter. I proposed, “does anyone have any horror stories they’d like to tell?” There was one hand that piped up in the corner; he stood up and said: 

“Land confiscation.”