Through My Feet I Come to Know Her: (Re)Storying and Restoring Our Embodied Relationships to Whakapapa and Whenua through Hīkoi (Walking)

Abstract

Walking in the footsteps of our ancestors can provide important ancestral precedents that can support Indigenous wāhine (women) in Aotearoa in working through the challenges we might face today and into the future. At the end of 2020, a group of seven Raukawa wāhine re-walked the journey of their ancestress Māhinaarangi. She walked, whilst heavily pregnant, from the lands of her people on the East Coast of Aotearoa to those of her husband, Tūrongo, in the central North Island. Her hīkoi (walk) offers significant conceptual and physical maps that speak to mātauranga (knowledge) and traditions about childbirth and mothering; the relationships between tribes and between people and the land; intimate knowledge of diverse environments; and endurance and courage to move through space to new lands, all done with a newborn baby. Māhinaarangi was a cartographer in her own right—mapping her story, history, language, tradition, ceremony, knowledge, and therefore herself and her descendants into the land upon which her footsteps fell. Through re-walking her journey, we both take something of that place with us and leave something of ourselves there and thus are involved in (re)storying and (re)storing ancestral places with our own footsteps. Retracing the journeys of our ancestors does more than memorialise their feats; rather, in placing our footprints along their pathways, we reclaim and remake place in uniquely Indigenous and Māori ways.

1. Introduction

The stories of our ancestors hold profound power, serving as pathways to healing and wellness. This research delves into the journey of Māhinaarangi, a matriarch of the Raukawa tribe, who demonstrated remarkable strength and resilience. Her journey, undertaken while nine months pregnant, is not merely a historical account but a living narrative that continues to guide and inspire her descendants. The ancestral trail of Māhinaarangi, revered ancestor for many iwi (Indigenous nations) in Aotearoa, has multiple lessons waiting along its paths. Taku Ara Rā Ko Māhinaarangi, a Kaupapa Māori action research project, involved finding the stories along the ancestral pathway of this ancestor through employing hikoi (walking) as method and drawing together whakapapa (genealogy) and whenua (land/placenta) to understand the benefits and transformations possible for Māhinaarangi’s descendants, in particular wāhine (women).

Seven Raukawa wāhine, including myself, re-walked Māhinaarangi’s journey over 23 days at the end of 2020. This research sought to demonstrate the conceptual and physical pathways to well-being left by our ancestors. Reconnecting to these journeys through a tangible relationship with the whenua has had immeasurable impacts not only for the seven wāhine who walked the journey but also for their families.

This research affirmed the intimate entanglement between whenua, whakapapa, and wāhine. These concepts are inseparable, and deepening our understanding of their intersections through hikoi has affirmed a land-based pedagogy within our culture that is reciprocal, life-giving, purposeful, and precious.

Within our whakapapa are concepts, values, and practices that enable us to confidently project ourselves into the future. Moreover, whakapapa tells us that we have a heritage of hardship and richness, struggle and joy, and that we are descendants of creative, courageous, and sometimes outrageous people. Whakapapa also enables us to feel supported in being well. More than simply genealogy, whakapapa is very much a relational and multiply layered term. Whakapapa is about connections and growth, and within our whakapapa, we can find a wealth of resources that enable us to make sense of and transform our lived realities.

Ani Mikaere (2011, pp. 285–86) talks about whakapapa, writing:

Whakapapa embodies a comprehensive conceptual framework that enables us to make sense of our world. It allows us to explain where we have come from and to envisage where we are going. It provides us with guidance on how we should behave towards one another, and it helps us to understand how we fit into the world around us. It shapes the way we think about ourselves and about the issues that confront us from one day to the next.

Whakapapa, then, is much more than ‘genealogy’. It is an intricate web of connections, intersections, and relationships that connect whānau to enduring lifeways that are ancient in origin but that will carry them into the future and enable them to navigate the complex systems of power that are part of our colonised realities. It is multifaceted, complex, and broadly defined. As Hana Burgess and Haylee Koroi (2024, p. 12) note:

Whakapapa is often translated to the Western concept of genealogy, which confines it to the past, and can make it appear to be primarily focused on human relationships of direct biological descent (Mikaere 2017). However, as Māori, we understand whakapapa as much more expansive. Our whakapapa extends to (and from) our more than human relations. Further, whakapapa is just as concerned with future generations, and how our past and future generations relate to the rest of existence.

Similarly, whenua, a critical concept to this paper, illustrates the rich and multifaceted nature of te reo Māori. Possessing a dual meaning, meaning both land and placenta, whenua intimately connects wāhine to the land in powerful and unique ways (Simmonds 2014). One of the most illustrative descriptions is provided by Eva Rickard (1977, p. 5):

First whenua is land. Secondly, whenua is the placenta within the mother that feeds the child before birth. And when it is born this whenua is treated with respect, dignity, and taken to a place in the earth and dedicated to Papatūānuku ... and there it will nurture the child. You know our food and living come from the earth, and there also this whenua of the child stays and says ‘this is your little bit of land. No matter where you wander in the world I will be here and at the end of your days you can come back and this is your Papakāinga and this—I will receive you in death.

In what follows, I reflect on the relationship between whenua, whakapapa, and wāhine as understood through the journey of our ancestor Māhinaarangi. This research affirmed and deepened the understanding of Māori maternal knowledge and practices that are embedded within land, language, and place. Māhinaarangi’s pregnancy and the birthing story are mapped onto the land, and the reclamation of the places, their names, and their physical restoration are vital to restoring Māori maternities.

Lessons learned along the trail also revealed further the impacts of colonialism on mana wahine, maternities, and Māhinaarangi’s descendants. The trail that we walked was vastly different from what she would have seen. Changes in land tenure, land use change, the erasure of place names, the physical degradation of places, and the inability to access sites all impact the possibilities for the reclamation of her journey and her lessons today.

Finally, this research demonstrated the agency of our ancestors in making place and the agency and autonomy of our places to make us their descendants today. This point cannot be stressed enough: the whenua long remember things that may have been stolen from us. The land is our teacher, guide, healer, and leader as we navigate the complexities of a vastly different world from what our ancestors knew.

2. Through My Feet I Come to Know You

Māhinaarangi walked.

She simply put one foot ahead of the other and walked.

Hapū with Raukawa comforted inside her Whare Tangata she walked—purposefully

towards the lands and waters of Tūrongo.

The journey was long, and I can only begin to imagine what that journey entailed.

Who went with her?

Who led her?

Or who did she lead?

Why did she choose the route that she went?

Who did she meet and see along the way?

What were the stories they shared?

She walked. One foot in front of the other.

Not as an exercise in research or remembrance or memorialising but as a purposeful

movement or migration from her turangawaewae to create a new home for her and her son

at Rangiātea.

How did she feel leaving what was her home for her entire life?

Was this the furthest she had ventured in her life?

How old was she?

Was she scared?

Tired?

One foot in front of the other.

Feet moving atop the ground—no roads, no tracks.

She was the track maker, the map maker.

Her feet the makers of a journey that would be etched into the lands and the people forever

more.

Did she know this would happen?

How could she not?

She walked but did she also do this strategically?

She moved over hills, across plains, over rivers and lakes.

Knowing that she was carving out the valleys of tradition and tikanga that could transform

the lives of her great great great grandchildren and their great great great grandchildren.

She walked and walked and walked.

Along the way giving birth to Raukawa. In foreign lands.

Who helped her? Her labour pains felt in the name of the stream Nga amu wahine (the

grumbles of a woman)

Her tears felt in the waterfall Te Rere I Oturu as she farewelled the waters that flowed to

her home in the east knowing she would birth her baby in the lands to the west.

She laboured all the while still moving through space.

She birthed our ancestral knowledges onto and into the lands and waters that she moved

through.

Up ahead there is a clearing—she can see for miles.

There between the mountains Maungatautari and Wharepuhunga, it is there that she can see where her new home will be. She laboured by the rivers and gave birth at the bottom of the hills.

A place we now know as Whenua-ā-kura—the land reddened by blood/the land where a

treasure is born

Ūkaipō—the night feeding breast.

The place she breastfed her baby that forever has fused our identity to the land, the places

we can/should be able to go to find sustenance.

And then she walked and cared for her newborn and walked and did this on repeat until

she reached the banks of the Waikato River.

She walked.

One foot in front of the other until she reached Rangiātea.

A house built for her and her child by the man that she wooed with the scent of the

Raukawa tree. It is here that the tohi ritual was performed and that child was taken on as

the responsibility of the whole community.

Māhinaarangi was not on her own.

How did they set up a village? A whanau? A life?

Did she ever question what if it doesn’t work out?’

She just did it.

She just walked.

She walked until she reached that place which would become home for her and her

children. For me and my children.

Is this a love story?

Is this a story of leaving home?

Is this a birthing story?

A tribal story?

It is so many of these stories.

Māhinaarangi. I know you intimately, yet you feel like a stranger.

And so, we walk in your footsteps to come closer to knowing you and knowing ourselves.

We feel your pains, hopes, joys and struggles in our whare tangata (our womb space) and

lean on your lessons as we carry the responsibilities of the ūkaipō—the source of

sustenance for our babies and from our whenua.

And so, one foot in front of the other, we will walk your pathways, mō ake tonu, forever more.

Taku Ara Rā … Ko Māhinaarangi Te Tapairu Tapu Nui Mana Roa Tiketike o te

Tairawhiti!!

(Poem written by Naomi Simmonds in 2020)

Māhinaarangi, a descendant of Porourangi, Rongomaiwahine, Kahungunu, is the mother of Raukawa, whom my tribe is named after. Her journey, pregnancy, and birth story are powerful examples of the interconnection between whakapapa, whenua, and wāhine. Māhinaarangi showed great strength, courage, and determination when, in the latter stages of her pregnancy with Raukawa, she journeyed from Kahotea pā in the Hastings region on the East Coast of Aotearoa to her new home at Rangiātea on the banks of the Mangaorongo Stream near Otorohanga in the central North Island of Aotearoa. Māhinaarangi went into labour near the top of the Kaimai ranges about halfway through her journey, stopping to give birth to her son Raukawa at a place at the foothills of the Kaimai called Whenua-ā-Kura (the land where a chief is born) (Te Hiko 2010).

I learnt about her later in my life; she was not someone I had heard of as a young girl; upon learning of her hīkoi through my PhD research on Māori maternities (Simmonds 2014), I was fascinated with her and what lessons her journey might hold for me as a Raukawa woman and for Indigenous women more generally. Māhinaarangi is entrenched in Waikato tribal history as a prominent ancestress; thus, many carvings, images, and songs around Aotearoa pay homage to her.

I wanted to know what it means for me (for her descendants) to re-walk her journey. Not as an act of memorialisation but as an act of rangatiratanga (self-determination) and of healing and transformation. What can we learn collectively as her descendants and personally as wāhine? I wanted to understand how, by retracing her footsteps, we might (re)story her experience and look beyond romantic notions of these ancestral journeys. Instead, we consider the active, pragmatic, and material elements of how our ancestors ‘made place’ and journeyed through space. In other words, I wanted to understand the labour (and in the case of Māhinaarangi, this was true in a very literal sense) that went into making a ‘place’ for our ancestors.

Whilst I have presented parts of the journey here, there are many other nuances and variations (See Figure 1). My research has revealed more places and genealogical connections, and rather than strive for a single truth, one clearly defined pathway, I acknowledge and embrace the multiplicity of expressions of Māhinaarangi’s journey that create a colourful tapestry for us in the present and the future.

3. Hīkoi as Methodology

The overarching aim of this research was to (re)story and (re)trace Māhinaarangi’s trail to unlock new (yet ancient) knowledges and associated traditions and practices. Using a Kaupapa Māori approach (see Smith 2015; Pihama et al. 2004) and drawing from international Indigenous scholarship, this research sought to (re)generate a land-based pedagogy that grows from the ground up and is learnt through our feet and spirits and not only our minds. Methodologically, this research utilises Māhinaarangi’s hīkoi as both context and process by using hīkoi as methodology.

This work is grounded in an important body of scholarship from wider Indigenous and Kaupapa Māori theorists. Indigenous scholars’ work on land-based and place-based pedagogies grows from a long and rich tradition of learning from and with the land. It is an important precursor to this research, demonstrating how knowledge is generated and regenerated through people’s practical engagement with the land and the environment (Watson and Huntington 2008; Simpson 2014; Aldern and Goode 2014; Wildcat et al. 2014). More locally, Kaupapa Māori situates localised place-based knowledge as pathways for healing, decolonisation, and transformation for Māori (Pihama et al. 2004). In doing so, the theoretical terrain shifts from the well-known (and often necessary) ‘talking back’ to colonialism to ‘talking forward’ to present and future generations. This project focuses on researching the pathways and lifeways of Māhinaarangi. Crucial to this is understanding the potential life-transforming aspects of her journey by storying her walk and walking her story.

Employing hīkoi (walking) as a specific method was purposeful and sought to make the connection between wāhine and the whenua tangible. This is connected to and inspired by other Indigenous walking and journeying methodologies that centre on Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing. These methodologies involve embodied, relational, and place-based approaches, often guided by Elders and cultural protocols (Springgay and Truman 2018). They disrupt conventional research practices, favouring immersive, storied, and experiential methods that deepen relationships between researchers, communities, and the more-than-human world (Springgay and Truman 2018). Ultimately, Indigenous walking methodologies aim to decolonise research by centring on Indigenous epistemologies, resurgence, and self-determination.

By reclaiming hīkoi as methodology and enacting reconnection across ancestral trails, it is evident that a deeper understanding of land, language, and wellbeing can be had and that the complexities of reclamation due to deeply embedded colonialisms can also be revealed. Far from being free from politics, hīkoi, in fact, was a political act of rangatiratanga in and of itself. And like other more overtly political hīkoi, this research revealed a politics of hīkoi that is not encapsulated in ideas of walking, hiking, or tramping. Hīkoi also acknowledges our sovereign right to access the trails and places of our ancestors and is an expression of rangatiratanga (self-determination) intimately connected to the land.

In November 2020, I and six other Raukawa wāhine undertook a 23-day hīkoi retracing Māhinaarangi’s journey. Kyea Watene-Hakaria, Klee Begbie, Tyra Begbie, Lisa Begbie, Arahia Moeke, and Ngāhuia Kopa (see Figure 2) all undertook this journey supported by Paraone Gloyne, Anaru Begbie, Ahenata May-Daniels, and Hannah Simmonds, and countless other support people. We sought to understand more about Māhinaarangi and what she could teach us through waking the land. The land is a holder of knowledge, a conduit of memory, teacher and student, and perhaps the land itself remembers what we may have forgotten. The land holds who we are as wāhine, as Māhinaarangi’s descendants.

Hīkoi as a methodology supports us in reclaiming uniquely Indigenous knowledge that is embodied and emplaced and serves to reinvigorate land-based pedagogies. In other words, how we learn and share with the land is just as important and inseparable as reclaiming the knowledge of the land itself.

4. Re-Storying Her Journey—Mana Wāhine

Māhinaarangi purposefully made the journey across ridges and ranges, lakes and rivers. She travelled with a retinue of whānau (family) and supporters (including Tūrongo’s dog Waitete) some 600 km from east to west, and about halfway through her journey, she laboured and birthed over the Kaimai ranges. Her journey over the Kaimai Mamaku ranges is marked by several place names and landscape features that signify her labour. Ngamuwāhine stream, for example, is often acknowledged as one of the places where she laboured (ngā amuamu o te wāhine—where she grumbled and complained). One of the accounts of where she birthed Raukawa is called Whenua-a-Kura, referred to as ‘the chiefly land’ because it is where Raukawa was born. What is missing in these accounts is that kura has a dual meaning—it means treasured possession and chief, but it also means ‘red ochre’ or to redden. The connections of this to the kurawaka (the fertile region) of Papatūānuku, I think, are striking. Therefore, whenua-ā-kura may possess a dual meaning that not only refers to the birth of Raukawa, a precious taonga, but also to the land reddened by birth.

It is said that the whenua (placenta) of Raukawa was buried in the area. So his descendants have a particularly strong connection to this place and reaffirm the Tikanga of ‘kia hoki te whenua ki te whenua’ returning the placenta to the land (Simmonds 2014). Ūkaipō Marae commemorates the place where Māhinaarangi first breastfed Raukawa. Loosely translated as ‘the night feeding breast’ or ‘the breast that feeds in the night’, it is said that this concept was born from the words given to Tāne advising him to return to his mother ‘kei wareware i a tātou te ūkaipō—lest we forget the mother who nurtured us at her breast’. It is a term used to refer to our mothers, Papatūānuku, and places that give us physical and spiritual sustenance (Gabel 2013; Murphy 2011).

Te Poipoitanga (which is now known as the township Te Poi) is where Māhinaarangi settled Raukawa using the traditional practice of poi poi, meaning to rock or gently sway a baby in one’s arms. I am told that this was often done in the direction of their homelands to orient them and thus settle them down. The full place name is Te Poipoitanga a Raukawa (Te Hiko 2010).

Another place that is no longer physically visible is Takapau. The word takapau is also seen in the karakia Te Tuku o Hineteiwaiwa “raranga, raranga taku takapau” and is about the weaving of a ceremonial whāriki or mat that was used in ceremonies of high tapu (to be sacred, set apart) and was often used as part of the pure (to ritually remove tapu) ceremony (Yates-Smith 1998). Closer to the Waikato River, where Māhinaarangi carried onto is named Horahoratanga o ngā Maro o Raukawa—where Raukawa’s clothes were laid out to dry. When Māhinaarangi and Raukawa eventually made it to Rangiātea and were reunited with Tūrongo, the tohi ceremony was performed, and Raukawa was given his name.

I provide these examples to demonstrate that the maternal knowledge of our ancestors and of the ancestress Māhinaarangi are inscribed on and in the physical landscapes of Aotearoa. Knowledge of these names, the events that lead to them, access to these places, and the pathways between them can all transform how we understand ourselves as wāhine, as Raukawa, and inform our understanding of the relationship between wāhine and whenua.

Furthermore, in re-tracing her journey, we can reclaim her story of strength and self-determination in and of her own right, as many of the written accounts position her as wife, daughter, or mother. What we have learnt more about in this research is that she was brave and strong; she had diplomacy, strategic foresight, and love for her people and her lands, but also love for the lands and people of Tūrongo. Her ability to formulate and execute a hikoi of this nature reveals her as a woman with formidable skill and leadership.

She teaches us how to birth, care for, and raise our tamariki in unique and empowering ways. She teaches us that we can make place for our children and grandchildren through our relationships with each other and the lands and waters of our ancestors and descendants. Māhinaarangi teaches us that many cared and supported her along the way—she was not alone. And those charged with caring for her along the way understood their roles and responsibilities. They understood the importance of the collective—that the well-being of the individual was inherently connected to the well-being of the whole.

Even a mana wāhine analysis of the love story between Māhinaarangi and Tūrongo can reposition Māhinaarangi’s decision to take Tūrongo as her partner and to start the journey as one where she possesses agency and self-determination in the union. Her discussions within her own tribe about establishing a relationship with Tūrongo show her understanding of tribal politics. Such a union would ultimately bring peace to her people of the East with those on the West coast of the North Island. Romanticising the unions of these two prominent chiefs can serve to take away the lived and political aspects of their unions.

Māhinaarangi demonstrated great mana and foresight in this union and through her journey, thus securing lands for her descendants. Her hīkoi also offers significant conceptual and physical maps that speak to mātauranga and tikanga about childbirth and mothering, the relationships between tribes and between people and the land, the intimate knowledge of diverse environments, and endurance and courage to move through space to new lands, all done with a newborn baby. Māhinaarangi was a cartographer in her own right—mapping her story, history, language, tradition, ceremony, knowledge, and therefore herself and her descendants onto the land upon which her footsteps fell.

5. Restoring Our Relationships with Whenua through Hīkoi

While this research focuses on her journey, seeking to reclaim her story, it quickly became apparent that her story was intimately entangled with ours. She provides physical and conceptual maps to help us understand our place, feel connected and purposeful, and take steps towards healing and wellness. In this section, I seek to demonstrate how our 2020 hīkoi has supported another layer of restoration of land-based pedagogies, one that comes through the land and is not simply about the land.

Our hīkoi purposefully sought to pull out the words on a page into and onto the land. Indigenous ways of knowing and Indigenous knowledge lie beyond the pages of a book, the words on a page, and the presentations at a conference—they lie in the land and in our bodies. Our bodies are an extension of the environment, and therefore we feel ancient knowledge when we place our feet on places our ancestors had once stepped.

On the 23-day hīkoi, we carefully created rituals and rhythms that supported our connections to the land and environment. We composed karakia (incantations), and our journey was recorded in a composition of a pātere (chant), tracking our travel across different tribal areas. More than just ‘walking,’ this was a movement with purpose and purposeful migration. It was a mindful and active connection to lands, waters, and environments. It was considered a connection with each other and ultimately with ourselves.

It took practice, the active construction of time and space, to learn and enact. Some days, in our complete exhaustion, we had to hold space for our rituals, knowing they were as crucial as eating and drinking. Quickly, though, these rituals became rhythmic, greeted us with enthusiasm and strength every sunrise, and held us in love and healing every sunset. For 23 days, we were held in the certainty of our ritual despite the incredible uncertainty of the journey ahead.

Our journey folded the past, present, and future into one another. It taught us about the obligation and responsibility we have to our ancestors and generations yet to be born—you cannot walk past the spring where Māhinaarangi bathed newborn Raukawa and see that it has been trampled by cows and not be responsible for its protection and restoration. We learnt that the stories cannot be separated from geographical locations, from actual physical places within the land.

Our hīkoi taught us that the lands and waters we walked looked vastly different from those that Māhinaarangi would have seen. Physical transformations, roadways, wineries, agriculture, cities, and industrial areas were encountered along the journey, but so too were ideological transformations: individual land holdings, ‘Crown land’, permits for access, being denied access to sites, contestation over ‘ownership’ and settlement were all things we encountered along the way.

The inability to access certain sites demonstrated the marked shifts in power and control over our wāhi tapu. We had to seek permission to access sacred sites. We had to be escorted to sites by non-Māori. We had to see sites completely degraded and cows in the spring where Raukawa was once bathed. We saw the sacred place names of Māhinaarangi’s journey replaced with shortened versions or erased completely. Places have been named incorrectly because old survey maps mark a wāhi tapu as a singular point on a map and not as a landscape.

The reality is that today, the locations of many of the places our ancestors lived, journeyed, birthed, and died are no longer accessible, including many of those associated with Māhinaarangi. We only know them through stories and not through a physical relationship. In questioning this, we expose the layers of colonial inscription in the land. Laying claim to places through naming, renaming, surveying, mapping, privatising, and developing land is a key part of the colonial project,

Despite these colonial impositions on our whenua, our hīkoi also taught us a lot about how our lands can hold us, support us, and provide strength, resilience, and aroha (love) when we cannot find that within ourselves. We also felt how the land can hold us and how we can hold the land. We felt the visceral connection to the land in our blood and bones. As Manulani Meyer writes:

Land is our mother. This is not a metaphor. For the Native Hawaiians speaking of knowledge, land was the central theme that drew forth all others. You came from a place. You grew in a place and you had a relationship with a place. This is an epistemological idea… One does not simply learn about land, we learn best from land.

(Aluli-Meyer 2008, p. 219)

A growing body of Indigenous work considers the dialogic relationship between land, the environment, ancestral places, and the health and wellbeing of individuals and collectives (Kimmerer 2013; Simpson 2017; Tuck and McKenzie 2015). Indigenous knowledge frameworks within the land were undermined and cast as ‘inferior’ to Western biomedical and biophysical approaches to health. The dominant ideology that people and land can be treated as separate is challenged through Indigenous knowledge frameworks that demonstrate the inextricability of human well-being from the health of our lands, waters, and environment (Moewaka Barnes et al. 2018; Simpson 2017).

The transformations supported by the land through hikoi did not just occur on the trail for us but have reverberated long after the hikoi itself. Many of the journey’s ‘hua’ (the fruits) still reveal themselves to us. All the wāhine and support people involved have shared the very personal and profound transformations reclaiming this relationship has had on them. Some reclaim their language, others transform their careers, gain confidence and purpose, feel secure in the love and mana of their ancestor, and find a tangible bond to the land that was only known through stories before.

6. Conclusions: Ancestral Pathways Taking Us into New Futures

Leanne Simpson writes that “everything we have of meaning comes from the land—our political systems, our intellectual systems, our health care, food security, language and our spiritual sustenance and our moral fortitude” (Simpson 2012).

Ancestral pathways and the stories and practices associated with these journeys can support healing and wellness for many of us today. They can provide a conceptual map to support dealing with contemporary challenges and individual and collective growth. Through hīkoi, I believe that we can look to ancestral precedents and consider how they can support us in the challenges that we face in current times. Ancestors like Māhinaarangi can and should be considered role models and examples of what we can strive for. Ani Mikaere makes the following point: “Part and parcel of looking at the world through the prism of whakapapa is imperative to treasure those physical manifestations and expressions of ancestors that connect us to our origins and enable us to project ourselves with confidence into the future” (Mikaere 2011, p. 298). This project has at its heart an assumption that reconnecting to the lands, environments, and knowledge of our ancestors through hīkoi can provide alternative futures for individual and collective wellbeing, and that learning from and with, not simply about, land offers a conceptual and physical map that restores the unique ancestral pathways and lifeways embedded in our tribal geographies that can carry us into unique and flourishing futures.

Taku Ara Rā ko Māhinaarangi—my pathway is that of Māhinaarangi, a step in a much longer journey that stretches back generations and reaches forward to those yet to be born. It will be and is a lifelong journey of reclamation, physical restoration, slow recovery, and uncovering. It is a journey that uplifts our inherited imagination through hīkoi and supports telling our stories in new (old), embodied, and emplaced ways. It is a journey that recognises that we are the land that we place our feet on and that it is through our feet that we can come to know once again the power of our ancestral precedents.