We begin floating in a womb. The water is sticky. Like a clear syrup. We appear as a parasite leeching the nutrients from everything our mothers consume. When I was born my Dad told me I didn’t cry. I just stared at everyone. I often wonder what it would be like to remember growing inside my mother’s body. The womb is the original float tank. When we are born our bodies are made up of 78 percent water. As we age only 60 percent of our body is water. Our lungs are 83 percent water.
Swimming, butterfly breathing through the water
Long ago Māori settled here. They came in droves on giant waka, bigger than houses. Following the stars they navigated across Te moana-nui-a-kiwi, where they travelled as far as India and South America. They followed ancient water currents that led to an inlet into Aotearoa. They climbed volcanoes and built fortifications around them to protect themselves from the unknown and from one another. Among them were my ancestors who travelled in the Tainui waka across many oceans to Aotearoa following a taniwha named Pane-iraira who was a whale. Pane-iraira made the waves calm for the waka, especially when tohunga would call out to them during a storm for protection. The tohunga would pull out hair from his head and cast it into the sea to say thank you.
My tupuna stopped at several places across the Pacific before coming to Aotearoa. It first landed at Whangaparaoa bay in the Bay of Plenty, before travelling to Tauranga, the Coromandel Peninsula and then into Waitematā harbour. It was carried by hand across Tāmaki Makaurau towards Manukau. From there it travelled north along the west coast towards Whaingaroa, Aotea, Kāwhia, before travelling up rivers like Mohakatini and finally resting at Maketu in Kāwhia harbour. At each stop different crew members disembarked forming several different iwi groups.
My tupuna, the first Māori king, Pōtatau Te Wherowhero was crowned at Ihumātao.
The bays around Ihumātao were once swarming with kaimoana. Fish and shellfish could always be found in the Manukau harbour to sustain mana whenua, even when food was not abundant. In 1960 the harbour was closed by the Auckland drainage board to build oxidation ponds, these large ponds caused water and air pollution. For 40 years, the people were unable to access the waters that had fed them for thousands of years. The construction of this new wastewater-management system meant the closing of Ihumātao’s ancestral river, Ōruarangi. Māngere then smelt of sewage and was overrun with mosquitoes, especially after heavy rain or a lot of sun. The ponds were removed in the 1990s. In 2003 the Ōruarangi river (now more a creek than a river) was reconnected and eventually freshwater oyster beds were reseeded.
In 2013, a freight company named Jenners Worldwide spilled 1000 litres of methyl violet dye into the stormwater system. The creek turned purple and everything died. Now Fletchers Construction Company has plans for a housing development on the remaining site. This land was stolen by Governor George Grey and sold to the Wallace family during the land wars in 1863. 400 hectares of land was taken. This land is still under dispute. Protectors remain on the whenua holding a kaupapa based around peaceful resistance. This kaupapa is informed by the leaders of Parihaka, Te Whiti-o-Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi.
Once Māori occupied 100 percent of this land and all its surrounding seas. We now only hold 5.6 percent.
There is violence everywhere.
I am in Lisboa in Rossio Square waiting for Izzy. Near where I’m standing, a crowd of Portuguese Catholics and foreign sailors persecuted, tortured, killed, and burnt at the stake hundreds of Jewish people during Easter 1506. This was after the Jewish population was forced to convert to Roman Catholicism in 1497. For simply being Jews, the crowd found them guilty of deicide and heresy. There is a monument of the Star of David to commemorate the loss of life. All throughout the square is the famous Portuguese style paving. When the monument was built the entire square was repaved and from a height you can make out a compass, the symbol of both the company that repaved the square and the symbol of Portuguese colonialism. I feel a deep sense of irony that this paving, which also advertises a company, visually overwhelms a monument dedicated to the deaths of many Jewish bodies.
There is violence everywhere.
Corporate colonialism feels more insidious than empirical forms because it is more subtle and easy. It allows the colonial power to extract resources, or profits, from the land and people without giving anything back. Corporations (or colonial powers) feel no obligation towards the welfare of the Indigenous population. They don’t worry about the negative consequences of their exchanges or the effects such exploitation has on the local economy. They simply extract the resources and pay poor wages to vulnerable people while living elsewhere (supposedly) unaware of the damage they cause.
There is violence everywhere.
Once I read a quote by a pākehā historian Vincent O’Malley where he said that if you wanted to find an important Māori pā site or waterway, you simply had to find a main highway in New Zealand.
There is violence everywhere.
Everywhere you look there are slippages. Crevices and tunnels filled with concrete. Artificial beaches. Quarrying volcanoes to make sand. Quarrying hills that burst with water underneath. These rivers and creeks once flowed into the ocean now they are so crushed up that they slip through your fingers.
/
When I first went to Ihumātao I wanted to cry in both fear and in seeing a place that looked like what a decolonised Aotearoa could look like. I found out only recently that I have whakapapa ties there. It was an eerie feeling walking around the green reserve near Te puketaapapatanga ā Hape, the smallest cone in Auckland’s volcanic field and looking onto the Manukau harbour. It wasn’t until I went there that I learnt that my tupuna had sailed through that harbour on my waka, Tainui.
No hea koe?
It’s strange being in places where you have whakapapa ties. Sometimes you feel a sense of déjà vu that’s incredibly bodily, a deep sadness you can’t explain, combined with fear or a whakamā about being an urban Māori millennial and not knowing your language, tikanga or enough about where you whakapapa to for so many reasons, such as…. colonialism.
“They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.”
Over Whatsapp, my friend taught me the Portuguese word, Saudade, which is a “.... deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absence of something or someone that one loves…. it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never return…” It made me think about how I imagine Aotearoa looking before colonisation. I’m not sure what it would have been like exactly, but the trauma I feel through generations of colonisation is a sadness etched deep into my bones.
I walk down to the waterfront in Lisboa and realise I am so far away from home looking at a river I know flows into the Atlantic Ocean. Saudade. I miss how much warmer the sea is in the Pacific. Saudade. When I start watching a live feed on Instagram of police in shiny high-vis removing protectors at Ihumātao in the middle of the night I start to sob because there is nothing I can do except pray and cry and stay fixated on my screen, sharing content about it. Saudade. My body feels numb in silent anger. Saudade. Most of the police officers are brown, many might be Māori, it makes me cry harder. Saudade. I think of the Māori officers that were strategically called into Bastion Point and the dawn raids. Saudade. It’s hard to not be there, but there's an immense privilege in not being there and being here instead. Saudade. It’s painful and I feel pathetic. Saudade. I think about my friend Vanessa and my sister Miriama sitting together on the front line and miss them both terribly and want to be at Ihumātao protecting the whenua and the both of them. Saudade
My body is buoyant. My blood is salt water and Pane-iraira who appeared like a Tohorā guided me here. I make languid movements as carefully as a whale cusping the surface for breath. On a satellite map I trace my journey from Aotearoa to Portugal and show my friend Carlotta the big difference between Australia and New Zealand to demonstrate just how far away from my whenua I am. I think about the sugar gliders I saw in South Australia flowing between branches, of the pohutukawa trees that grow in Sintra and 145 whales that stranded themselves on Rakiura last year. All of these moments combobulate my memory as a constant dislocation. The only place that is mine and that I feel I really belong to is the sea and sometimes the stars. I do not see the ocean, and particularly Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, as simply a body of water but as a wheke that connects us like tentacles from Australia, up through Melanesia, to Taiwan and across to Rapa Nui and Hawai’i.
Māui was the last son of Taranga and Makeatutara. Your mana is determined by when you are born, Māui was the lastborn and premature. Makeatutara was forced to cast him out into the sea, wrapped up in a tikitiki (topknot). Creatures in the ocean saved him and wrapped him in seaweed. He survived. When he returned from the sea to Makeatutara as a grown man, she did not recognise him.
I have always been a swimmer. The first adults I ever saw naked were my grandparents. The way their skin stretched out, like it was peeling off and the way it wobbled was terrifying to me. It instilled a fear of ageing in me that's never left. I am more afraid of ageing than I am of dying. It’s as if all the water seeps out of your pores. Once I saw my grandmother swim out very far around a buoy. She moved very slowly and had beautiful long arm strokes. When I think of her body slowly dying, I imagine her swimming in Paihia and getting further and further away from me.
My umbilical cord flows like the sea. It is as restless as Tangaroa, it is a poi, it swings between Papatūānuku and Ranginui. When the poi swings, my heart sings. My body was formed with an egg inside, like a pearl. My mother’s mother and her mother and her mother and her mother before her. These strands of DNA are stitches. These fluid lines are in my blood. They have been weaved together over rough seas. Coloniser. Colonised.
I dream of whales every night for a month.
Aotearoa is the whale stranding capital of the world. Since 1840 there have been 5000 recorded incidents, with an average of 300 whales stranding themselves each year.(1) Whales die on the beaches from heat, exhaustion or from seagulls picking at their flesh. Scientists blame climate change. Some iwi believe whales beach themselves when they are ready to die and want to return to their families, the Māori people. Some use the whales’ gift of their bodies for carvings, traditional medicines, and compost, among other things. Before using their bodies there is often a karakia, naming of each animal and removal of their bones, blubber, eyes and teeth. However, different iwis have different tikanga around whales.
These are signs from the sea that it’s sick. We cannot ignore it any longer.
“Indigenous people are hurt first and worst by climate change.”
There is a link between the strandings of whales and the crisis of the dieback disease killing Kauri trees, including Tāne Mahuta, a 2000-year-old tree. Kauri and Tohorā are brothers.
Tohorā once walked on the land alongside his brother. Eventually he grew tired of iwis hunting him for wealth and mana. He suggested to his brother that they hide in the whare of their uncle, Tangaroa, in the ocean. Kauri loved the land though and being with his kuia, Papatūānuku. Kauri was too deeply rooted in Papatūānuku to leave the land and so his brother gave him a cloak made from his skin for protection. Tohorā missed his brother and would spout water up to Ranginui, hoping his longing would be carried by Tāwhirimātea in the winds. Eventually his younger brother grew taller, so that he could see him in the sea. Iwi began to cut down Kauri and use his flesh to build waka. Seeing his brother, Tohorā rushed to him excitedly only to be attacked by humans. Not long after this he saw his brother again being attacked. Tohorā gave his body as a sacrifice, unable to walk on the shore to protect him, he was speared and killed. The iwi took his skin, like Kauri took his skin. Tohorā returns to the shore before dying to see his brother one last time. Tohorā gives his body to the iwi as a way to protect Kauri and remind the iwi to care for him, as he purifies the air and allows the deceased to embrace Papatūānuku.
Tohorā is perhaps trying to return to his brother Kauri and that’s why Tohorā strands himself on our beaches.
145 whales stranded themselves on Rakiura in Aotearoa at the end of 2018. In pre-colonial times we saw this as an offering from Tangaroa and perform sacred rituals, but now these animals have plastic rotting inside them. When these whales were found there was nothing to be done. There was no hope for them to be refloated out into the ocean. What state of the world are we living in where these creatures beach themselves in such large numbers and so frequently? The image of these creatures haunts me to this day. It feels like a sign of something to come. It made me feel afraid in a way I can’t explain. On the second day of 2019 I saw a pod of whales in the Wellington harbour and it makes me feel hopeful for the first time in a long time.
Ko au te moana, te moana ko au
-Hana Pera Aoake (August 2019, Lisboa)
_____________________
Kia ora to the internet, especially māoridictionary.co.nz for the constant support it offers to all of the pania of the reefs living away from Aotearoa. This resource helps me kupu to my tupuna. Also thanks to Miriama Aoake, Tayi Tibble, essa ranapiri, Rachel Buchanan, Jade Kake, Leonie Hayden and Vincent O’Malley for their care and aroha within their words.
Love to Uncle Noogy and Aroha Bridge. “Live, laugh, land rights”.
Protect Ihumātao, Mauna Kea, the sacred Djap Wurrung trees, Uluru, standing rock and all places sacred to indigenous people. Free Palestine. Free West Papua. Our struggles are different, but together we can draw strength and aroha from one another.
Ka whawhai tonu mātou.
Hana Pera Aoake (Ngāti Hinerangi, Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Raukawa, Pākehā) is an artist and writer based in Lisbon, Portugal. Hana is a mozzie bogan with a heart of gold, currently trying to be a skuxx in the land of João, while eating tremoços and watching old Portuguese men drink Sagres and try and fight each other while playing chess. Hana wants hot girl summer to last forever.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.