Posts Tagged ‘Nic Low’

Ka Roimata o Hine Hukatere

It came as something of a physical shock. a blow to the senses. To visit Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatere for the first time in eight years, was devastating. This mighty glacier, that sits among the ancestors, a taonga of our people, a presence once so physically commanding, is shrinking into oblivion.
Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatere has been subdued, humiliated by the actions of humans, actions remote yet undeniable. To see this retreating giant is to understand impermanence, to understand the real and terrible results of industrialisation, of climate change.

Review

The long-anticipated book about Rehua is finally available. A labour of love written by Claire Kaahu White working closely with Dr Terry Ryan, the book has 16 chapters and 335 pages. If you were looking at a comprehensive story about Rehua you may be disappointed and the title is a little misleading. As the book covers not only Rehua Marae, but Māori Affairs Trade Training in Christchurch, the different hostels and key moments and people that were influential in the development of both the trade training scheme and Te Whatumanawa Maoritanga O Rehua Marae through the first 50 years.

Cultural Connection

A voice sings out: Areare-mai-rā-ōu-tarika!

Thirty-four voices sing back, in a chorus of different accents. Some are Aussie, some Kiwi, most of them somewhere in between. Some ring proud and confident; others cradle the unfamiliar Māori syllables like a new parent cradling their first child.

Areare-mai-rā-ōu-tarika!
Lend me your ears!

Tāku Kupu ki te Ao

We’re starting here because this was one of the first places where Māori and Pākehā met regularly in Christchurch,” Joseph says on the brick forecourt of Victoria Square. “This used to be known as Market Square, and it’s where Ngāi Tūāhuriri came to sell various goods to the early settlers.

Waka revival

Waka play an integral part in our migratory history, as the means by which our tīpuna voyaged here from the ancestral homeland of Hawaiki. They are woven throughout our mythology, with Ngāi Tahu stories asserting that Te Waipounamu itself is the waka of Aoraki, our tipuna mauka, capsized in the ocean with he and his brothers turned to stone along its back as the principal mountains of the Southern Alps.

Haerenga
Three weeks in Te Rua o te Moko

Nā Nic Low. The morning was hot, but Auntie Jane Davis and three other Ōraka-Aparima tāua, Betty Rickus, Vera Gleeson, and Rangimaria Suddaby, walked the beach wrapped head to foot as if battling a blizzard. Which they were: a blizzard of namunamu. Each fought off their own personal storm cloud of sandflies as they scanned…

Te Heke ki Korotuaheka

The route to and from the inland plains, where tī kōuka and weka were harvested, is an old one, and the Te Maiharoa family have been travelling it for a long time. In 2012 the whānau retraced the trail of their ancestors from the coast to present-day Ōmārama, and in 2016, it was time to walk the return journey, tracing the Waitaki River back to coastal Korotuaheka.

Beneath the cloak of Aoraki

Each year Alpine Recreation takes four Ngāi Tahu whānui on the Ball Pass Guided Hike free, to learn basic alpine skills, climb high into the Alps, stand close to Aoraki and look upon his face.

Te Matatini 2015

The pōwhiri is about to begin. Two great encampments stand before the mānuka palisades, Ngāi Tahu to the east, the motu to the west. The Rātana band lines up. Warriors pad through the crowd to take their place out front, patu pounamu cradled in their arms. One breaks away to greet a kaumātua. They grasp shoulders in a quick fierce hongi, voices quiet.

The first language of Te Waipounamu

Rock art is one of the oldest and most significant of the traditional arts, and considered by some an early form of written language: meaningful marks left for others to read. Some of those marks offer a glimpse of the world in the time of moa and pouākai (Haast’s eagle). Earlier that morning I’d witnessed a drawing of the giant eagle soaring across a cave roof at Frenchman’s Gully. In this landscape of hawks and falcons, it’s easy to imagine the artist looking up to see that vast shadow pass above.