Mātauranga Māori – that which is passed down

Reverend Haki Wirihana gives us a glimpse into his upbringing and how knowledge handed down from his whānau taught him ways to protect water quality and maintain the mauri of the river.

Question for discussion:

• What does Reverend Haki mean when he says that plants filter the water?

NOTE: The historic footage of the Waikato area in this video clip is not of Reverend Wirihana’s whānau, or from the Ngāti Hauā rohe. It is only intended for illustrative purposes.

Transcript

REVEREND HAKI WIRIHANA

I was born in 1937 and brought up with my grandparents and parents. Our homestead was beside the river. There was a lot of families used to live along the rivers. My grandfather had Clydesdale horses, and my job was to give the horses water, to make sure that the troughs were full.

Those things brings back memories to me and is also learning one of the teachings that I had was about water. They used to tell us about the trees along the riverbanks. I’ll always remember my grandfather and father telling me those trees and all the run-off from the farms and the dairy cows and all that, it goes down there and it comes down, and those tī trees and tōtara, fern and flax – they filter the water, and that’s why we leave them alone. Don’t touch them. Let them grow.

The river was our cupboard. We got our eels from the river, and we got freshwater mussels and not only that, the watercress. The watercress is a water plant. My parents used to say when you pick the watercress, don’t pull the roots out. Make sure you tramp it down, because that is also a filter. I’ve told my kids this.

In this day and age today, a lot of our families don’t know those things. This is an area that we have to target and make sure that they know it – the wellbeing of the water and keeping it as it is.

And I tell you what, there’s signs you know that there’s something going wrong with the water is when you see a lot of froth on the water, and you know, oh somebody has done something.

Because our mokopunas and that swim in that river – we’ve got to make sure that it’s clean. But I’m not only talking about my particular river, I mean, this happened to all the rivers.

It’s water that’s handed down from our ancestors and it’s holy. We have to enhance it and enable it, and that’s all part of the mauri of the river.

Acknowledgements

Reverend Haki Wirihana
Ngāti Hauā Iwi Trust
Ngāti Hauā Mahi Trust
Black and white historic footage (1956), People of the Waikato, National Film Unit, Archives New Zealand
Licenced under Creative Commons CC BY 3.0
Stills of watercress, Jon Sullivan. Released under Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC 2.0