When the time came for the Makiha family to pull down their house, they decided to bury it. Piece by piece, they dismantled the wooden frame and weatherboards, laying them carefully to rest, like an ancestor, in the Hokianga soil.
“It is only right to bury it,” says Rereata Makiha, who led the family through the ceremony. “Buried within the ground, to sleep. Prayers are recited so that it may lay to rest forever, as if she is a person.
“A homestead is much like a mother, it looks after the family. It protects, feeds and nurtures the family – if you care for your home, it will care for you.”
More than a building, the Makiha home, now being rebuilt, is one of a constellation of homesteads scattered across Aotearoa New Zealand. Often understated, at times astonishingly remote and inaccessible, these homes have endured through generations of Māori families, tying bloodlines to the place of their ancestors.
Some can be reached only by boat, helicopter, or many kilometres on foot – others are enclaves in cities that have transformed around them. For many families, they represent more than physical shelter: they are physical manifestations of the unbroken ties between whānau [families] and the land.
Director and producer Kimiora Kaire-Melbourne takes the Makiha family’s journey and other untold stories of homesteads as her subject in a new Whakaata Māori documentary series, which examines their significance to different generations of six Māori families, and the work to save them.
Kaire-Melbourne says “tūrangawaewae” is the most accurate word to describe importance of land and home to the Māori worldview: “[It] literally means ‘where your feet stand’.”
“I felt it was time that those homesteads, many of which are over 100 years old now, be acknowledged for the role that they’ve played to help Māori as a whole maintain their connection to their tūrangawaewae and to their home.”
Many Māori families maintained homesteads in defiance of a tide of colonisation that saw huge numbers of Māori driven off their land. By 1920, just 8% of New Zealand land remained in Māori ownership, down from 80% just 60 years earlier. The change in ownership heralded a dramatic population shift, as thousands of people flocked to the cities in search of paid work. Between the mid-1930s and 1980s, Māori went from about 80% rural to about 80% urban, in what Te Ara History calls “one of the fastest rates of urbanisation in the world”.
“Māori are not a homogenous group, we’re all very different, have different lived experiences. But I think that something that a lot of Māori have lost through the impacts of colonisation and urban drift over time is people have struggled to reconnect or haven’t had that connection [to the land],” Kaire-Melbourne says. “Not to forget who you are, but to lose sight of it.”
For some families, maintaining the homes has taken years of effort. “I think that if you saw it, you’d be wondering why we ever tried to even save the house,” Tangimaioakumatua Moring says of the Ponga homestead. “It was in a bad state of repair.”
Moring, now a grandmother herself, was born in the house, in the small bedroom near the entranceway. Hanging behind her on the patterned wallpaper are paintings and photographs of generations of ancestors, including her koro, the man who built it. The fact it is still here, she says, is the result of 20 years of work, fundraising and committee meetings to maintain and to bring life back to the house.
‘It’s that sense of belonging’
“I felt it was my place to make sure that the house was saved,” Moring says. “I really was determined to come home.” For her, a journey back to the Ponga house required a trip by helicopter to the Parinui land in the remote Hokianga. “It was very emotional, coming home,” Moring says. “It’s always like that for me when I come home because my tūpuna [ancestors] are there. And I just feel: coming home is really coming home to them.”
In recent years, faced with the pressures of Covid-19, the high cost of living and a housing crisis that locks many new buyers out of the market, some of those houses are taking on added significance for new generations seeking a place to call home.
For the Makiha family, the pandemic helped spur on plans to rebuild on the homestead land, creating future homes for the next generation. “The effects of Covid, the effects of economic crisis as we’ve all endured and the yearning to return home to our whēnua was the reason and the purpose – we came together as a whānau and developed these housing aspirations,” Maihi Makiha says.
Kaire-Melbourne’s own family homestead in Rūātoki was part of the inspiration for the documentary, she says. It was maintained by her own koro, ensuring his great-grandchildren would always have a home to return to.
“For generations Māori have felt the need to leave their tribal territories, whether it be for work opportunities, education, whatever it might be … And for that reason, some of these homesteads have been vacant or abandoned. But for those families who have been able to maintain homesteads that’s a beautiful thing,” she says.
For the families she documents, it helps forms the bedrock of their lives. “It’s one of those foundations that I think every whānau should have. It’s that sense of belonging,” says Matemoana McDonald. “I think that’s what the homestead actually does: it has its own wairua [spirit] that you feel when you come on to the whenua.”
An earlier version of this story referred to the documentary channel as Whakaata. It has been updated to Whakaata Māori.
