Ara Moana — Te Ao Mā’ohi ki Waiapu Ngutu Awa
Natalie Robertson

Ara Moana — Te Ao Mā’ohi ki Waiapu Ngutu Awa took place on the Mana Whenua Te Kawerau ā Maki, in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa, on whose lands Rongorongo sits. 

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"Dreaming of whenua, awa, moana – land, river and ocean.

 

In late 2021, when Dreaming the Land commenced, those of us who reside in Tamaki Makaurau (Auckland), New Zealand, had surpassed one hundred days in lockdown in response to the Covid-19 Delta pandemic, unable to leave the city. One hundred days of solitude. The reprieve seemed close, as the country moved to a new ‘traffic light’ system, with the promise that we could leave on December 15th. For those of us who connect to our tribal homelands, we yearned to go home to our whenua, our lands. But, our hau kaenga, those living at home, did not want us to visit at that time, our summer holiday period. It had been eighteen months since I went to the East Coast and even longer since I visited my family land, nearing two years. It is hundreds of kilometres from Auckland to Tīkapa, a remote rural location near the end of a gravel road, just before the coastline.

 

In The Coming of the Maori (1949), Te Rangihīroa writes:

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Captives in distant lands have begged for a pebble, a bunch of leaves or a handful of dirt from the home land that they might weep over a symbol of home. It is the everlasting hills of one’s own deserted territory that welcome the wanderer home and it is the ceaseless crooning of the waves against a lone shore that perpetuates the sound of voices that are still. (1949, 381)

In this evocative passage, Te Rangihīroa shares the depth of feeling that Māori hold for their tūrangawaewae. Even the ocean waves carry the voices of ancestors. It explains why we might weep when we see a photograph from home.

 

I called my relative Graeme Atkins, who lives at Tīkapa and begged for sand, soil and clay to be sent to me, so that I might hold it in my hands. In November 2021, he sent me three big handfuls. For me to make photos and video, holding our whenua, our land, in my hands. But during 2022, my dreams revealed other navigational pathways, linking back across Te Moana Nui a Kiwa ocean highways, to Rangiatea, today known as Raiatea, and Tahiti, once known to our ancestors as Tawhiti, a word meaning distant, far away, widely separated in space or time. I dreamed in both the daytime and my nocturnal journeys of being in tropical waters, retrieving taonga or ancestral treasures. My dreams spoke to me of things in my waking life that entwined with my dream life. Most of my dreaming was hectic, busy, chaotic, and filled with people, at a time when my daytime world was largely spent with one other person, or just a small handful of friends meeting outside.

 

And then, one powerful, revelatory dream occurred in April just three weeks before my PhD graduation. I recorded rough notes through voice recording on my phone. The notes were often made in the dark, spoken into the microphone, then not checked until later. This imprecise system of note transcription often didn’t make sense, especially the AI interpretation of Māori words, but they were enough to recall the content.

 

There was a large fish that was alive and it was picked up and then put back in the tropical waters / there was a big orange fish / lots of people as usual coming to the place but there were three mere or weapons of war or peace, or patu muka, for beating flax. There was a whalebone one that was quite porous and not very good quality with a big chunk out of it - I was asked what they would be for. There was one stone one very much like Pokaiwhenua but maybe in Waiapu blue stone, not polished though and then there was one smaller type of stone one as well but it wasn’t so good either I was clear which one I wanted. Pokaiwhenua blue stone.

 

Fish /  Stone / Water / Movement / Migration.  Three ancestral taonga. Three handfuls of earth. 

 

Months later, in early July, I travelled to Tahiti and then onwards to Raiatea. Dream elements resurfaced, especially from the dream about stone and bone taonga. In the warm tropical waters, I found myself at the marae 'Ōpū Teina, at Taputapuātea, the landmark political and cultural centre for Mā’ohi, Māori and Māoli across Te Moana Nui a Kiwa. There, new readings of my dream were obtained, and a personal graduation of being at the place where my far distant ancestors had set off in waka (canoes) to Aotearoa.