“You Don’t Plant Walnut Trees for Yourself”: Wahine Māori and the Land That Shapes Us

Abstract

This article investigates narrative and storytelling as critical methods for understanding how relationships with land in Aotearoa New Zealand are shaped by colonial histories and ongoing systemic displacement of Māori (Indigenous peoples of Aotearoa). Colonialism is not a past event; it continues to structure daily life, disrupting our embodied connections to whenua (land) and reshaping what we call home. Drawing on the research project Tō mātou kāinga, tō mātou ūkaipō, Whānau conceptions of home we explore the concept of body–land, emerging from Indigenous women’s struggles and grounded knowledges, to examine how the land is not only a living genealogical ancestor but also a maker of our bodies and identities. Through narrative, we trace the ways land has been taken and commodified under colonial logics that frame it as property to be owned and extracted from, which contrasts with Indigenous ontologies that understand land as kin and relationality as central to existence. By centering Māori women’s embodied experiences, this article articulates home as a relationship rather than a fixed place and considers how these understandings open pathways toward relational, sustainable futures. This work contributes to broader conversations on decolonial praxis, Indigenous feminist theory, and the embodied politics of land and belonging.

1. Introduction

The relationship between Indigenous women’s bodies and the land is a revered and resilient embodiment of cultural knowledge and spiritual being that resonates with Indigenous peoples worldwide. Critical Latin American Indigenous feminist scholarship has made sense of this through the concept of cuerpo–territorio, or body–territory, an ontological orientation that positions women’s bodies and the land as inseparable (Cabnal 2010). This Indigenous feminist framework strongly aligns with Māori ontologies and offers significant forms of resistance as they challenge contemporary Western capitalist dichotomies that position the land and body as separate entities, recognise the status of Indigenous women and affirm that Indigenous sovereignty is only possible when there is restoration of both Indigenous lands and bodies. This paper seeks to weave our unique thread into the wider Indigenous tapestries, exploring how Mana Wāhine (Indigenous women’s authority and approaches1) and contemporary articulations of ‘Home’ contribute to global feminist dialogue and anticolonial resistance.

Māori, the Indigenous peoples of New Zealand, recognise the alignment of body and land inherently in our own cultural values, ceremonies and language (Mark and Lyons 2010). For Māori, the concept of whakapapa is our guiding principle where genealogies of land, body, spirit and time are folded and layered upon one another. Through this, Māori understand themselves as part of comprehensive and interconnected collectives of whānau (networks of extended family), hapū (subtribes), iwi (tribes), whenua (land) and histories which are intimately connected to our ancestors and wider environments (Royal 2012). All living entities—land, trees, animals human or other—share connection through their possession of a shared origin, a form or ‘body’, a spirituality, a life force, a divine essence and vitality (Salmond 1985). Whakapapa therefore encodes Māori worldviews where landscape and person are both bodies that descend from the same generative and spiritual source (Murton 2012).

To Māori, land is a living relative, and the bodies of land and people unfurl and grow in an ongoing reciprocal relationship. Examples of this relational ontology can be found in words such as whenua, denoting both placenta and land, or iwi denoting both bones and tribal nations of territories, or tangata whenua a term used to describe Māori that translates to people that belong the land. Connection to land is also demonstrated in the way Māori express identity, for example, it is commonplace for Māori to reference connection to tribal geographic features and localities such as mountains, rivers and oceans when formally introducing themselves (Smith 2023). These linguistic and cultural features present in Māori culture parallel cuerpo–territorio and demonstrates how the body–land interconnection is embodied by Māori in an Aotearoa New Zealand context. Furthermore, the connection between body and land is just one dimension of a wider Māori ontological approach to the world, where boundaries between self, body, land, environment, spirit, past and present are enmeshed (Ka‘ai and Higgins 2004). This expands to Māori notions of Home, where home is understood as an expansive dimension of identity, physically and spiritually connected to our wider environments (Jahnke 2002). It also relates to the intrinsic feeling of love for the land on which we are ‘home’, where “a notion of home must be built on the idea of love: a deep and abiding sense of love that comes from belonging.” (Jackson 2022, p. 17).

Colonisation has had far-reaching and damaging impacts on Indigenous women worldwide. This is true in Aotearoa New Zealand, where colonisation has had distinct and aggressive impacts on wāhine Māori (Mikaere 1994). At the ontological level, foreign understandings were imposed on multiple aspects of life through gender, land, and sovereignty. For example, pre-colonisation Māori conceptualisations of gender were fluid and dynamic (Mikaere 1994), roles were shared and wāhine Māori were prolific leaders, knowledge holders and figureheads in their tribal territories. However, colonial strategies that implemented systems of Patriarchy and Christianity functioned to “other” Māori women, advancing colonial agendas that subordinate women into Western gender hierarchies and making us outsiders in our own lands (Le Grice 2014). The imposition of colonial patriarchal systems that othered Māori women also regulated and restricted diverse sexualities, thereby reproducing the wider colonisation of whenua, where control over women’s bodies echoed attempts to dominate and redefine the land itself (McBreen 2019).

Colonial legislation such as the Tohunga Suppression Act ruptured Māori women’s spiritual practices, as legislation sought to redefine what were legitimate knowledges, ceremonies and healing methods through a colonial lens. By outlawing Māori healers and their practices that prioritised our embodiment of the land, Māori women’s ways of being and knowing were undermined (Simmonds 2011). The symbolic, spiritual and literal violence faced by Māori women therefore functioned to constrain wāhine Māori leadership, knowledge practices, relationships with the land and expressions of identity.

A fundamental colonial mechanism of power that impacted Māori women’s power and authority was the violent and forceful dispossession of Māori from their physical and spiritual homelands (Simmonds 2011). The deliberate and strategic theft of Māori land through force, legislation and falsification was a mode of both spiritual and material violence enacted on the lands, and bodies, of Māori women. The pervasiveness of patriarchal values that took place on occupied lands disconnected Māori women from holistic and traditional support systems and strengthened Western gender roles, as social structures shifted to prioritise individualist cultural norms and nuclear family structures that left women economically dependent on men (Mikaere 1994). For example, a key piece of colonial legislation that shifted relationships with the land to English capitalist systems of ownership was the introduction of the ‘10 owner rule’—this legislation allowed land title ownership to not be granted to more than 10 people, quickly corroding tribal and communal land relations (Kingi 2008). The impacts of colonial land legislations were cumulative and multiple, restricting access to cultural and economic resources, and obscuring Māori women’s leadership roles, knowledge systems and abilities to live in relation to the natural environment. Land dispossession severed spiritual relationships to the land, obscuring Māori women’s status, knowledge and identities as these were unrecognisable under a colonial patriarchal system. As such, colonial violence and displacement on Indigenous lands cannot be separated from violence on Indigenous bodies. Indigenous struggles for land rights and sovereignty are therefore intimately linked to the liberation of Indigenous women’s bodies under capitalism and heteropatriarchy (Rodríguez Castro 2020).

Mana Wahine Theory

Western feminism and dominant approaches to research have long been criticised by Māori community activists and scholars for their inadequacy in capturing Māori women’s social realities and inability to understand Māori women’s knowledges (Le Grice 2014; Mikaere 1994). The importance of Māori women’s relationship to land and diverse realities exists and maintains its power outside of Western paradigms, however, its rejection from wider knowledge systems has led to the formalisation of Māori defined theories and approaches that are grounded in Māori values, epistemologies and ontologies within feminist and research spaces (Jahnke 2002). Mana Wahine as one form of Māori praxis acknowledges the status of Māori women and prioritises Māori women’s knowledges, perspectives and experiences.

The precolonial status and leadership of Māori women is inherent within Māori social organisation and reflected in Māori cosmological stories that centre on the influence and power of wāhine Māori (Forster et al. 2015; Kahukiwa and Grace 1984). However, due to colonial re-presentations of Māori stories and histories, the roles of Māori women have been marginalised to depict them as passive, unimportant or invisible (Skerrett 2023). For example, in cosmological stories, Maui has become a globally recognisable figure across the Pacific, where integral wāhine in the same stories, such as Murirangawhenua and Hine-hui-te-pō are decentralised (Hetaraka 2024). Another example from our political history is the assumption that only male chiefs signed our foundational 1840 Treaty, Te Tirit o Waitangi, revealing the colonial belief that only men held political authority and denial of Māori women’s political power (Johnston 2005). This distortion of Māori narratives and realities unjustly alienated the authority and power of Māori women, ignoring their importance and altering their stories to centre male protagonists (Le Grice 2014). These examples demonstrate the contemporary significance of Mana Wahine approaches for Māori women to be in control of their own narratives and knowledge systems.

Mana Wahine theoretical approaches re-indigenise and decolonise knowledge production and interpretation to align with Māori worldviews. Mana Wahine places Māori women at the centre of analysis and interrogates structural and social assumptions about Māori women’s realities and experiences. For example, one of the distinguishing features of Mana Wahine is that it does not separate itself from Mana Tane (Māori men’s status and knowledges), with this separation also a result of colonial domination, and as such Mana Wahine challenges imported gender hierarchies that do not align with Māori worldviews (Simmonds 2011). However, Mana Wahine theory does not find its sole purpose in challenging damaging colonial narratives or being in relation to colonisation—it is a living, embodied and dynamic approach to knowledge that reaffirms and progresses Māori women’s aspirations. Furthermore, Mana Wahine recognises and explores the diversity of Māori women’s realities; it is a framework that aligns with intersectionality and seeks to understand a multitude of realities and knowledges, resisting the idea that there is a singular or ‘authentic’ expression of Indigeneity (Le Grice 2014). Mana Wahine therefore contributes to wider Indigenous agendas that advocate for Indigenous reclamation of our land, identities, expressions and narratives.

2. Materials and Methods

This article draws on a single, in-depth transcript from the research project Tō mātou kāinga, tō mātou ūkaipō, Whānau conceptions of home: supporting flourishing home environments (Tō mātou kāinga, tō mātou Ūkaipō) undertaken in Aotearoa New Zealand. Tō mātou Kāinga is an expansive Kaupapa Māori research project that explored interpretations, embodiments and challenges of home for Māori across whānau, key informant and iwi narratives (Lindsay-Latimer et al. 2024). This inquiry unfolded as part of this larger tapestry of interwoven voices about the unique and precious ways that home can have varied meanings for Māori within our colonial and cultural realities. Home, land and relationality have potent and far-reaching significance to Indigenous peoples worldwide, as our cultures, languages, customs, creations and wellbeing are affectionately bound to our sense of place and embedded in our stories. Naturally, data collection for this research often took a form that was more intimate than a researcher-participant interview, as people shared deeper reflections of home, often through significant pūrākau (stories), histories, genealogies and life experiences.

This paper explores a narrative analysis of one of the deeply profound sharing of stories and whakapapa that was experienced between the paper’s second author and Hineruru. What began as a standard interview in a booked library room evolved into what would become an over 5 h sharing of experiences and reflections, not because it was planned but because her stories and remembering required this expansiveness. The interaction was more akin to swimming through memories, following streams of recollection wherever they led, sometimes being pulled by turbulent waters and at other times floating along gentle streams. Although it does a disservice to the kōrero (conversation) to try and summarise hours into a few sentences, Hineruru shared reflections on the power of mātauranga Māori and the multiplicity of home, accounts of her tupuna (ancestors) and Māori collective resistance and mobilisation, she spoke to the land as both our identity and our maker and the responsibilities that come with these. She shared painful stories from her own whānau and their struggles to remain connected to and protectors of their land. She also shared stories of hope, resistance and reclamation. When our booked room could no longer contain the flow of remembering, we moved, first to a car and then a restaurant, to continue in the sharing. During these transitions our migration allowed for more contextual telling of her stories, as she was able to point to specific places and landscapes that both situated, and were characters, in her unfolding narrative. It was not lost on the interviewer the irony that this interaction was held first in a library, a typical Western receptacle for books and stories, on what was stolen Indigenous land, with the land being the receptacle and holder of Māori stories and histories in Aotearoa.

As the stories shared in this moment were so rich and varied, we have not shared all of Hineruru’s reflections in this article. Instead, we share elements of her pūrākau that speak to the significance and struggle of land, home and mana wāhine. The resulting narrative was approached not as data to be picked apart and investigated, but as a beautiful koha from Hineruru to our research team. As such the analysis attends to the personal as well as the political, it reflects our power, resistance and responsibility as wāhine Māori and as such the researchers bring their own layers and contours as Māori women to the assembly of this story. The narrative takes us through a remembering of our relationship to the land.

3. Results

This analysis is grounded in kaupapa Māori research principles, which centre Māori worldviews, values, and aspirations, and in mana wāhine theory, which recognises the authority and lived experiences of wāhine Māori as vital sources of knowledge. The narratives were approached not as isolated testimonies but as part of an ongoing whakapapa of story, carrying memory, identity, and collective experience.

Storytelling itself is a methodology within te ao Māori (Māori worldview): stories are how knowledge is passed on, how values are taught, and how relationships to the land and to one another are affirmed. In this analysis, particular attention is given to the metaphors woven through the narratives. Metaphors are not simply decorative language but vessels of meaning. They articulate relationships between body and whenua, embody experiences of dispossession and resilience, and project visions of intergenerational hope.

By focusing on story and metaphor, this methodology honours the cultural forms in which knowledge is expressed and ensures that interpretation does not strip the narratives of their depth or context. It also recognises that wāhine Māori voices carry layered meanings: they speak from positions of kaitiaki (custodian), of nurturers, of fighters, and of visionaries for future generations. Through this lens, the narratives reveal not only the lived impacts of land loss but also the ways in which Māori continue to sustain, regenerate, and imagine futures grounded in whenua and whakapapa.

3.1. The Land Is Our Maker

“[…] we’re on the ancestral land of my whānau covered under jolly housing and roads as it is, but this is the heart of our lands right here, so this is my home. There’s the place that I grew up, my grandparents’ house. That’s my home. It’s my home, it’s our ancestral land. We’ve owned that as long as there’s been ownership. It was given to my tīpuna2 in 1889.”

This paragraph situates the speaker firmly within her own lived experience, grounding her voice in both body and whenua. She locates herself not as an isolated individual but as part of a continuum of ancestral connection, where land is never separate from people, memory, and kinship. References to grandparents highlight this intergenerational relationship, where whakapapa binds women and land in ways that exceed Western definitions. This contrasts sharply with the colonial practice of carving whenua into blocks, a system of grids and titles that reduced living ground into saleable commodities. Such practices imposed a foreign logic of categorisation and ownership, fundamentally at odds with Māori understandings of belonging, responsibility, and care. The phrase “we’ve owned that as long as there has been ownership” draws attention to this tension: it acknowledges the imposition of a Western notion of property, while at the same time asserting a prior, deeper custodianship that is not reducible to market terms. In doing so, the speaker reclaims both the body and the land from colonial fragmentation, insisting on continuity, connection, and the endurance of Indigenous ways of knowing.

“I think our home was more collective. The deep home. The deep, these are out our roots home, this is where our tīpuna lived, it’s where they died, it’s where they’re buried, it’s where they did the day-to-day things to feed themselves, to clothe themselves, to have home.”

The speaker once again invokes the ancestors, calling them into presence as part of an ongoing relationship rather than as figures of the past. This anchoring through whakapapa is deepened by the metaphor of roots—of trees extending into the earth, part of the wider taiao (nature). The imagery evokes a sense of being held in place by connections that run beneath the visible surface, sustaining life and binding people to whenua. What might at first appear to be a contrast—the ‘doing’ of everyday tasks alongside more sacred or ceremonial acts—is reframed not as opposition but as a complementary duality. The coexistence of tapu and noa3 becomes a reminder of balance: burials and death practices are not set apart from daily activities but exist within the same cycle of living with the land. In this sense, the speaker gestures toward an integrated worldview, one where sacredness and the ordinary, the ancestral and the present, all sustain each other in harmony, much like the roots of a tree that both anchor and nourish.

“I think for Māori home is really, home is doing, home is being, you’ve got the saying and I did put this in my writing, about ahikā. The fire doesn’t light itself, someone’s gotta do it. You’re not ahikā if you’re not home lighting a fire. So it’s not so much the fire is there, it’s the act that you do it, you act as kaitiaki for the land, you do these things, you’re engaged in these things.”

The idea of ahi kā—literally keeping the home fires burning—appears as a powerful metaphor for the living relationship between people and whenua. The fire is not only a human act of occupation and continuity but also resonates as something held deep within the belly of the land itself, an internal warmth that signals life and endurance. This imagery reinforces the understanding of whenua as more than soil or territory; it is alive, breathing, and sustaining. Within this relationship, humans are not owners or extractors but caretakers. Their role is to tend, to keep the flame alive, ensuring that the connection between people and land remains unbroken. This is kaitiakitanga at its core: the responsibility to guard, nurture, and protect, in recognition of the reciprocal life that whenua gives. The metaphor of fire thus embodies both constancy and responsibility, reminding us that to live on the land is also to live with the land, bound together in mutual care.

“[…] because homes are a network of relationships and if you think about what feels like home and what doesn’t there’s a lot involved in that […] You have this relationship with the whenua, and you have a relationship with things and people around you.”

The speaker returns once more to the image of networks, the necessary roots that bind humans and nature together. These connections are not decorative but essential—threads of relationship that sustain life in both directions. What is evoked here is a recognition that the human body and the body of the land are intertwined, each dependent on the other. The relationship is spelled out as a kind of micro- and macrocosm: the small gestures of care and responsibility at the human scale reflect and sustain the larger rhythms of the natural world, and vice versa. In this way, land and people are not separate entities but parts of a living whole, nurtured into balance through reciprocity. This balance is not static but dynamic, an ongoing process of tending and responding, where the vitality of whenua and the wellbeing of people mirror one another.

“Home is such a deep part of Māori identity ‘cause look at the pepeha, we introduce ourselves, we talk about our home, where we come from. It’s a fundamental part of the way we think about things, and we think about ourselves. I think it’s identity. […] identity in the home. Especially as Idigenous people, when you’ve had assaults on your identity for generations, that home can be something that actually helps you be resilient to that. ‘Cause land loss, sort of English words, land loss doesn’t really convey the meaning of what actually was lost. A farmer loses his farm, okay he’s probably feeling kind of bad and sad about that, and you would, but for all sorts of reasons it’s not the same as losing your ancestral home.”

The speaker’s reference to pepeha centres belonging within a cosmological frame. A pepeha begins not with the self in isolation but with the cosmos, moving through mountains, rivers, and whenua, locating the speaker in a genealogy that connects the human body to the story of creation itself. By naming these relationships, pepeha affirms identity as grounded in place, and it makes visible how we belong by situating ourselves within both land and whakapapa. In this sense, pepeha is not only an introduction but an act of resilience: a declaration that even in the face of colonisation and land loss, our connections endure through language and story.

This perspective offers a sharp contrast with the Western worldview. For Māori, the loss of land is the loss of belonging, history, and identity, which is a wound to the very foundations of self and community. By comparison, for a farmer shaped by colonial systems, the land is primarily a means to make a living. Losing it is regrettable but not existential, a financial or practical displacement rather than a fracture of identity. This contrast highlights the implications of colonisation in Aotearoa, where farming practices have not only contributed to dispossession but also to the degradation of the land itself. The difference, then, lies not only in how land is used but in how it is understood: for Māori, whenua is kin; for the coloniser, land is resource.

“It’s sort of a mistake people make when they say, ‘When Māori arrived on their shores,’ or, ‘Kupe was a Māori explorer,’ he was not. We weren’t Māori when we came here. […]. Just connected with this land. Because we don’t look like the people that we came from. We look a lot like them, especially if you go to Tahiti or Hawaii, but […] if you go around to each you can tell we’re different. We look a bit different, we speak differently. The land is what created us and that’s why I sort of stick to, we didn’t come from somewhere else.”

The land is not simply where we stand, but the force that has created us, shaping body and soul across generations. Whenua is more than backdrop, it has carved out who we are, leaving its imprint in the rhythms of daily life, the language, the practices, and the very sense of self. This recognition contrasts sharply with the history of colonisation, where Western systems sought to classify and define Māori within narrow categories. Such attempts at definition overlooked the profound shaping power of the land, treating Māori identity as something fixed and externally imposed rather than as a living relationship grounded in whenua. By reducing Māori to a single, Western-drawn idea of who they are, colonisers denied the depth of connection, the bond that generations of living with and through the land had forged. The writing pushes back against this flattening, reclaiming Māori identity as inseparable from whenua’s enduring presence. It furthermore contrasts sharply with the history of colonisation across the Pacific, which has overlooked both the depth of connection to whenua and the wider genealogies of movement and belonging across the Pacific. By reducing Māori to a single, Western-drawn idea of who they are, colonisers denied the shaping power of land and the voyaging traditions that stretch across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa. This writing resists that flattening, instead reclaiming Māori identity as inseparable from whenua and ocean, from Kupe’s journey and from the enduring bonds of place that continue to shape us body and soul.

3.2. Losing the Land: Embodiments of the Whenua

“[…] colonisation has created this soul wound, this emptiness, and so how do you address that soul wound?”

Here the loss of land is described as a wound; not a superficial cut, but a deep gash that strikes at the core of being. This metaphor collapses the distance between the body of the land and the body of the people, showing them as inseparable: when whenua is taken, it is as if flesh itself is torn open. Such imagery evokes both physical pain and spiritual rupture, for the wound is not only to the skin but to the soul, the seat of our celestial being. In this sense, land loss is not merely dispossession in a legal or material sense; it is an assault on the very essence of life, on identity, belonging, and continuity. The metaphor insists on the profundity of the relationship, where whenua is not property to be transferred or sold, but a living embodiment of people’s existence, and its injury resonates through generations, scarring both body and spirit.

“We’re haemorrhaging land. The Māori Land Court’s still acting to prise land out of whānau hands into other ownership.”

The speaker continues with the metaphor of bodily hurt, intensifying into the language of violence and rupture. The Māori Land Court, with its legal mechanisms of division and sale, is evoked not as a neutral institution but as a tool of force, prising land away from Māori. This act is imagined as tearing into flesh, a brutal separation of people from their whenua. The phrase “we are haemorrhaging land” makes the violence unmistakable: land loss is not a slow or distant abstraction but an uncontrolled bleeding, a draining away of life-force that weakens the body of both people and whenua. In this imagery, colonisation is revealed not as an administrative process but as a kind of ongoing assault, a trauma that cuts deep into body, history, and spirit. The wound is never simply healed, for each loss leaves scars, reminders of what has been violently taken.

“Because we had one aunty who wanted to sell, and I could not do anything about it. Even though a large part of it was actually Māori land, couldn’t stop it. I had rights under the Māori Land Court, but those rights were a mirage. If you go along and they say, ‘Oh well, yes you do have the rights to buy it,’ what do I have to do? You have to have the same as or better offer. If you’ve got a cash buyer with two million dollars sitting there you can’t beat that.”

The paragraph turns to the direct experience of the mechanisms of alienation, showing how the introduction of individual rights fractured collective relationships to land. The example of an aunty wishing to sell captures the way a Western concept—ownership as individual entitlement—was imposed upon Māori systems of collective guardianship. What might appear as freedom in the Western legal frame becomes, in practice, a source of harm, driving wedges between kin and prising people from their whenua. The relationship between land and money is laid bare here: whenua becomes commodified, measured in value rather than belonging, its life reduced to transaction. Yet these supposed “rights” are revealed as a mirage, a shimmering illusion that promised empowerment but instead delivered alienation and loss. The metaphor underscores the deception at the heart of the colonial project, where legal forms masked dispossession. Behind it all lies a stark power imbalance: the state and colonial structures set the rules, while Māori were left to navigate frameworks never of their own making. The result was not choice but coercion, and the deep severing of people from the land that sustains them.

“We had promises of free native plants for a reforestation project. We had promises of people who would come and plant the plants for us. We had sponsors, we had sponsoring agencies saying, ‘If your bank says no, tell us how much you need, and we will look at putting a stream of money in.’ So, we had massive support, we still couldn’t do it. […] It’s gonna be chopped up and sold for lifestyle blocks and someone’s gonna make a shitload of money on it, but that symbolised, we’ll do it, but that symbolised our climate resilience because it was in a non-vulnerable spot. It had water supply, the stream had been ruined, a lot of the whenua had been ruined but we had all the plans and the resources to reforest it, to regenerate it, to provide kaīnga for those in need, to do all those things, Māori Land Court stopped it in its tracks because the farmer’s sheep were more important.”

This kōrero highlights tensions between visions of care, regeneration, and community on one hand, and extractive, profit-driven systems on the other. In te ao Māori, whenua carries a double meaning: it is both land and placenta. This duality ties the health of land directly to the health of people, especially women, whose bodies carry the genealogical continuity of future generations. The narrative of promised regeneration—native planting, reforestation, restoring the stream—can be read as acts of healing a body that has been cut, damaged, and polluted. The metaphor of chopping is particularly violent: land is not simply divided but chopped up. Colonisation’s “chopping up” of Māori land echoes the cutting into a woman’s body, severing her ability to nurture, feed, and sustain. The imagery collapses the distinction between ecological violence and bodily harm—what happens to the land happens to the people, particularly wāhine, who embody the link between body and whenua through birth, placenta, and whakapapa.

Embedded within the vision is an ethic of care. The speaker describes collective hope, support, and promises—people coming together to plant, to heal, to regenerate. Yet this nurturing labour is dismissed in favour of the farmer’s sheep, a symbol of the colonial-capitalist prioritisation of production, money, and property over care and life.

“I was so upset in the Māori Land Court. I cried through the first thing we had. It was mana destroying, it was terrible. I was fighting for our land, ‘cause some of the land had been converted, a lot of it, to general title and I said, ‘I was a baby. I was a little child when that land was converted. No-one spoke for me. No-one spoke for my future. No-one even asked me what I thought.’ […] that was the experience, and the reason I’m talking about this is because we felt that was our home and I cried in Court. It was bloody terrible, and then we got the big down finger. We went to appeal, our side did. I said to the wider family, ‘Do you want to appeal this? I’ll pay for it if you do.’ My kids all said, ‘Yeah, we want to appeal. We want our ancestral land. We don’t want it sold. Appeal it.’ […] I’d been walking, I’d been out there and jumped the fence and got some stones out of the awa [river] there and was taking them home in a bag. I’d been walking and I’d found this hawk’s wing feathers. Very distinct ‘cause they’re kind of orange and striped, so I put that in my bag with the stones, kept that […] I sat there, and I could hear as soon as the appeal started that I was going to get trashed in Court. Absolutely flipping trashed. So I thought, ‘It’s going bad,’ and I had this little bag there and it had the feathers and the stones in it, and I was sitting, and I put my fingers in the bag, and I actually said goodbye to the land while it was happening because it was leaving. […] That was one of my profound moments of my life right there. To have to do that. […]. So it’s still happening. We’re still getting trashed.”

This account weaves grief, resistance, and intergenerational struggle together, showing how land, body, and spirit are entangled. The speaker’s words reveal the depth of emotional, spiritual, and genealogical rupture caused by colonisation and the machinery of the Māori Land Court. The repeated imagery of weeping highlights not just personal sadness but a collective mourning. Tears become an expression of mana being destroyed: the loss of agency, the silencing of her role as kaitiaki of her whenua. To cry in Court is both a release of pain and a protest against the systems that reduce ancestral belonging to legal categories. The act of being unheard as a baby symbolises a deeper dispossession: she was denied voice, future, and mana from the very beginning. This resonates with the violence of colonisation, where generations are cut out of decision-making, alienated from their own whenua. Furthermore, by invoking her baby-self, the speaker draws attention to how decisions about land are decisions about future generations. To separate the child from the land is to sever whakapapa—to neglect land is to fail the next generation.

Despite the grief, the narrative shifts to resilience. Her children’s voices are central: they want to appeal; they want their ancestral land preserved. Their willingness to fight demonstrates that the bond between whenua and whānau endures, even under legal and systemic oppression. This reflects the ongoing role of wāhine as anchors of intergenerational struggle, carrying forward memory, grief, and determination to reclaim what has been lost.

The imagery of gathering stones from the awa and finding the hawk’s feathers extends the theme of connection to whenua. Stones carry weight, permanence, and memory of place; to carry them home in a bag is to carry a piece of ancestral ground back into her care. The hawk’s wing feathers, distinct and marked with orange stripes, act as tohu (symbol). The kāhu is a guardian, its feathers a reminder of resilience and protection. These taonga gathered from the land function as spiritual counterpoints to the Court’s violence; they affirm that whenua continues to give, to guide, to strengthen, even when legal systems deny belonging.

The speaker’s story is one of grief transmuted into resilience. The Māori Land Court proceedings violently stripped her of mana, silencing her voice as both child and kaitiaki. Yet her tears, her children’s determination, and her gathering of stones and hawk feathers all testify to enduring bonds between body, spirit, and whenua. Through this lens, the narrative affirms that while colonial systems seek to alienate, the practices of mourning, carrying, and remembering enact resistance and re-connection to ensure the whakapapa between land, whānau, and future generations endures.

3.3. “You Don’t Plant Walnut Trees for Yourself”: Whenua and Intergenerational Hope

“What actually happened, and this happened up and down the country, is that Māori, we fought for our land, we fought for our homes, we fought wars up and down the country that went on for more than one generation. We fought through the courts, we fought the government, and I mean figuratively speaking fighting as well, and we did some actual physical fighting but there was all the other sorts of fighting that went on. We protested, we mobilised, we formed committees, we formed action groups.”

Here the speaker draws on the imagery of war to describe Māori resistance to land loss, framing the struggle not only as historical but as ongoing and intergenerational. The repetition of “we fought” establishes a rhythm of persistence, ‘ka whawahi tonu mātou’ (we will fight on), emphasising both physical battles of the nineteenth century and later forms of struggle through courts, government processes, protests, and committees. This layering of “fighting” across different contexts suggests that colonisation is not a past event but a continuing system that requires continual resistance.

The language also highlights whakapapa: the fight for land is not just for one generation but is inherited, carried forward by descendants. The struggle becomes a legacy, passed on like ancestral memory, binding generations together in a shared cause. The use of war imagery—mobilising, forming action groups, protesting—evokes collective strength and resilience in the face of ongoing dispossession. Ultimately, the metaphors of battle here underscore both the violence of colonial systems (especially the Māori Land Court) and the determination of Māori communities to protect whenua and identity across generations.

“Sure, we lost a lot of land. We lost nearly everything, but man we fought, and in those fights we learnt. We learnt how to mobilise, we learnt how to be politically active, we learnt how to do stuff together, we learnt how to take on the government, we learnt to take on other powers that be. […] We can step up. At the basic unit, or the basic Māori political unit being the whānau, and then hapū, iwi, even a social organisation, we know how to advocate at that level, and it does take a people movement. We’ve been waiting for the Crown for how long?”

The passage juxtaposes immense loss (“nearly everything”) with imagery of resistance and learning. The repetition of “we learnt” transforms dispossession into a site of transformation: from loss emerges political consciousness, collective organisation, and strength. Though the scale of land alienation is overwhelming, the speaker refuses to position Māori solely as victims; instead, the imagery conveys resilience, adaptability, and determination to keep fighting.

When the speaker shifts to the “basic Māori political unit” of whānau, scaling up to hapū, iwi, and beyond, the imagery creates a layered vision of collective movement. These units evoke not just abstract organisations but bodies of people standing together on whenua. This imagery of mobilisation highlights tino rangatiratanga: self-determination enacted through collective strength, rather than passively waiting for redress.

Finally, the invocation of “the Crown” acts as a symbolic counterpoint. The Crown represents colonial authority, a distant and enduring force of control. In contrast, the imagery of whānau, hapū, and iwi grounds authority in whakapapa and whenua. The contrast underscores a refusal to wait for colonial permission, and instead asserts a movement built from the ground up.

“I have to say, there’s a really ancient fig tree and there’s really ancient walnuts there. Really old. Like well over 100 years old. Whenever they ripe, like the nuts are ready or things are ripe, I always think of my tīpuna, because they must have planted those trees knowing that they would never really see them producing, especially the walnuts. They take years, they take like 20 years to really get anywhere, and to get really good harvest of nuts you might not see it in your lifetime. Because they were older when they planted it, so they would have known but they planted it for us. They planted it for future generations to have food. That’s why they did it. So they planted those trees, and they nurtured them for the future. […] So whenever I have stuff off those trees I eat some of the figs or pick up a couple of sacks of walnuts, I always think of them. I think of how they did this for me and ‘cause my kids obviously weren’t born, I was only a tiny kid myself when my kuia died, for the future generations unknown.”

The imagery of the fig and walnut trees works as a powerful metaphor for intergenerational stewardship of the whenua. These trees are “ancient” and deeply rooted, symbolising endurance, continuity, and foresight. Their slow growth—particularly the walnuts that take decades to bear fruit—embodies a patient, deliberate form of care: an act of planting and nurturing whose full benefits may only ever be realised by those yet to come. In this sense, the trees are living embodiments of kaitiakitanga, the responsibility to protect and sustain the whenua not only for ourselves but for future generations who will inherit both its burdens and its abundance.

The repeated emphasis that “they planted them for us” carries an ethic of manaakitanga, a form of care enacted across time. The actions of her tūpuna reveal a commitment to communal rather than individual wellbeing: even knowing they might never harvest the bounty of the trees themselves, they acted with hope, foresight, and generosity. Such decisions are grounded in reciprocity: the land feeds the people, the people nurture the land, and in turn the land continues to provide sustenance for generations unknown. This cycle affirms that care for the whenua is inseparable from care for the whānau and the home spaces that grow upon it.

The speaker’s act of eating from these trees today—gathering walnuts, tasting figs—is more than nourishment. It becomes a ritual of remembrance, a way of communing with ancestors whose hands once planted and whose vision was cast forward through time. The simple act of gathering food is transformed into a conversation with the past and a promise to the future. The evocation of “generations unknown” gestures to the expansive reach of whakapapa: a continuum that extends beyond the self, beyond the immediate family, and into a horizon of future lives who will still be held and fed by the whenua. Ultimately, the imagery of these trees transforms them into living symbols of intergenerational hope. Rooted in the whenua, sustained by ancestral foresight, they continue to nurture Māori bodies and futures. They remind us that to plant and to care is also to create and protect home spaces, ensuring that the whenua is not only a place of survival but also a place of belonging, abundance, and continuity.

4. Discussion

4.1. Body–Land, Mana Wāhine, Storytelling, and the Politics of Embodied Resistance

This discussion builds upon the previous pages, where Hineruru’s voice first emerges. Her story becomes the foundation for weaving her lived experiences into the broader context of women, body, and land. It is the story of one wāhine Māori—but it is never just ‘her’ story. It is the story of her whānau, her tūpuna, and the whenua that has shaped and sustained them across generations. Her voice carries the weight of intergenerational memory, grief, and resilience, and through her storytelling, we hear the echoes of those who came before and those yet to come.

The narrative is deeply embodied, revealing how colonial violence has disrupted the intimate and spiritual relationships between her whānau and whenua Māori, while also illuminating the enduring practices of resistance, care, and regeneration that continue to thrive.

In centering this story, this discussion section moves outward to engage with broader theoretical frameworks that help us understand the complexity of these relationships. The discussion situates these narratives within a wider context of anti-colonial and anti-patriarchal struggle.

Here we also foreground the power of storytelling as a way to reclaim our relational knowledge-making. Hearing wāhine tell their stories is not only an act of voice—it is a refusal of silence, a reassertion of mana, and a way of understanding complexity through a te ao Māori lens.

The concept of home, which was the original starting point for the To Mātou Kāinga research project, is redefined here through the land–wāhine–body connection. Home is not a fixed, patriarchal structure; it is a living, breathing relationship. Home is whenua. Whenua is body. Body is whakapapa. This understanding moves beyond indigenising Western notions of home—it transforms them. The most essential sense of belonging is carried in our bodies, in our stories, and in the whenua to which we will always return. Through this lens, the discussion explores possibilities where wāhine Māori continue to enact sovereignty, nurture futures, and resist colonial erasure by living in deep relationship with our land, bodies, and our histories.

4.2. Whenua as Maker: Embodied Identity

The story of whenua and tangata that Hineruru tells foremost unsettles the notion that land and people stand apart. Through mātauranga Māori, the land emerges not as a passive stage but as our maker. It breathes life into bodies, shapes our identities, and holds memory in its soil and waters. The story told here moves beyond the tangible, draws attention to the quiet, enduring relationship with the land—a connection felt in rhythms, seasons, and silences. In this view, wellbeing is not an isolated human condition, but a pulse shared with rivers, forests, and earth itself, which reminds us that to harm the land is to wound the body. This is in accord with Indigenous frameworks that challenge dominant ideologies that drive the systems that treat land and people as seperate and unrelated (Moeweka Barnes and McCreanor 2019).

The recognition of land as a generative force, one that shapes body and soul across generations, resonates with Indigenous feminist articulation of body–land as a co-constitutive relationship. In this view, land is not merely material but territorial, spiritual, and relational (Altamirano-Jiménez 2022; Rodríguez Castro 2020).

Hineruru’s narrative resists colonial attempts to fix Māori identity within narrow, externally imposed categories; instead it reclaims identity as a living relationship grounded in whenua and whakapapa. This aligns with mana wāhine thinking, which considers wāhine Māori as holders of embodied, ancestral knowledge and relational sovereignty (Pihama 2020). As Kylee Quince asserts, “Mana wāhine is about the denunciation and rejection of violence and colonial gender hierarchies and the deconstruction of that public private divide …[and] the notion of individualism” (Quince 2022, p. 20).

The body–land idea, as expanded by Altamirano-Jiménez (2021, 2022), emphasises the body as a place shaped by webs of relation with the human and more-than-human world. Hineruru’s narrative here affirms this ontology, as it presents Māori identity as inseparable from the rhythms, languages, and practices of place—a primary knowing of our body, by knowing our natural environments (Cajete 2000). This relationality challenges Western ontologies of separation and objectification, offering instead a worldview where land and body are mutually constitutive and spiritually entangled, and where body and land constitute the “link between self and place” (Murton 2012, p. 100).

4.3. Grief, Dispossession, and the Violence of Land Loss

Hineruru’s account of land loss through the Māori Land Court reveals the deep emotional, spiritual, and genealogical rupture caused by colonial legal systems. Unlike the reciprocal Māori concept of whenua, the notion of land as property was formally established in Aotearoa through the ‘English Laws Act’, which marked the ‘legal’ starting point for appropriation of Māori whenua, and an ideological shift in land as a means of economic power (Moeweka Barnes and McCreanor 2019). Building on earlier colonial legal frameworks, the subsequent ‘Native Land Act’ dismantled communal landholding and, in turn, displaced wāhine Māori from their roles as property owners and influential figures within iwi, hapū, and whānau (Quince 2022). It became a primary instrument for eroding Māori women’s economic authority and paved the way to the kind of experience that Hineruru portrays in her narrative about the Native Land Court.

Beyond material loss, the impact of the land loss Hineruru describes endures as deep emotional wounds—grief, anger, and disorientation. Development processes that alter land also leave physical imprints on human bodies. When territories are removed or displaced, the intricate relationships between people and the more-than-human world that shape and sustain those territories are fractured (Altamirano-Jiménez 2022). Hineruru’s tears are not only expressions of personal grief but acts of protest—embodied refusals of the machinery that seeks to sever her from her ancestral territory. This resonates with body–land as a concept that foregrounds the body as a site of colonial control and resistance (Altamirano-Jiménez 2021).

Within mana wāhine thinking, grief is also politically charged. Grief can be understood as an active, transformative force rather than a passive state. For wāhine Māori, positioned as kaitiaki of land and life, mourning can become a deliberate act of resistance against colonial dispossession. It is not only an expression of loss but a political stance that reclaims agency, and asserts the enduring relationship between women, whenua, and whakapapa. Through grief, wāhine Māori reweave connections to land and community, challenging systems that sought to sever them and affirming cultural continuity as a form of survival and resurgence (Pihama 2020). Furthermore, in Hineruru’s narrative the gathering of stones and hawk feathers from the awa affirms that whenua continues to give and guide, even under systemic oppression. These acts of spiritual and material reclamation echo Indigenous feminist practices that theorise the body as a site of sovereignty, memory, and futurity (Sabsay 2025; Ace 2021).

4.4. Intergenerational Hope and Kaitiakitanga: Planting Futures

In Hineruru’s narrative the imagery of fig and walnut trees planted by her tupuna serves as a metaphor for intergenerational care and foresight. These trees, slow-growing and deeply rooted, embody kaitiakitanga and manaakitanga; ethics of care enacted across time. The act of planting for future generations reflects a relational understanding of land as a source of abundance and belonging, not merely survival (Forster et al. 2015).

The trees become living symbols of hope, rooted in whenua and sustained by ancestral intention. This vision aligns with body–land thinking that highlights collective, inter-elemental, and interspecies relationships (Johnson 2024). Such frameworks invite us to see land and body as co-constitutive, where vitality flows through reciprocal exchanges rather than hierarchical separations. In doing so, these practices disrupt extractive logics that commodify nature and fragment relationships, instead affirming Indigenous sovereignty (Moeweka Barnes and McCreanor 2019). This approach also resonates with feminist ethics of care, which prioritise communal wellbeing and long-term sustainability over individual gain (Rayner Fried 2019).

Finally, the narratives affirm that the body is not only a site of trauma but also of joy, creativity, and possibility. Within mana wāhine and body–land frameworks, the body is reclaimed as a territory of sovereignty—capable of dreaming, nurturing, and building futures. Indigenous women assert their right to voice and relational existence. This reclamation challenges colonial and patriarchal systems that seek to control and silence Indigenous bodies. Instead, it affirms the body as a source of knowledge, resistance, and regeneration. Through storytelling, ritual, and everyday acts of care, wāhine Māori enact futures where land and body are protected, nurtured, and celebrated.

4.5. Entangled Histories: Indigenous Feminist Dialogues

The experiences of Indigenous women, while distinct, are entangled through shared histories of colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. The concept of body–land invites us to theorise these connections and recognise how land and body have been—and continue to be—sites of violence and resistance across geographies.

The narratives in this article contribute to this dialogue by illuminating an example of a wāhine Māori enacting resistance through mourning, memory, and care—practices that refuse erasure and affirm relational continuities between body and land.

These acts of protection are not isolated gestures but part of a broader Indigenous feminist struggle against resource extraction and territorial dispossession, struggles that insist on the inseparability of ecological and cultural survival. Through this stance, Indigenous women’s rejection of colonial and capitalist systems moves beyond the notion of survival alone; it becomes a deliberate enactment of interconnectedness and autonomy, placing Indigenous existence and futures at the heart of its purpose (Altamirano-Jiménez 2021). Such practices foreground sovereignty as lived and embodied, challenging extractive logics while sustaining ethical worlds grounded in reciprocity, responsibility, and care.

5. Conclusions

Storytelling and Reclamation

Central to Hineruru’s narratives is the power of storytelling. Hearing wāhine tell their stories is a powerful act of voice and reclamation. It is through storytelling that complexity is communicated and understood—not through abstraction, but through lived, relational experience grounded in te ao Māori. These stories are not only expressions of personal truth but also acts of resistance, knowledge transmission, and cultural continuity.

Storytelling affirms mana wāhine where wāhine are holders of ancestral memory and agents of transformation. It is through their voices that the violence of colonisation is named, and the strength of intergenerational connection is affirmed. In this way, storytelling becomes a methodology of body–land—a way of bringing bodies, histories, and places into conversation to imagine otherwise futures (Vasudevan et al. 2023).

The idea of ‘home’ (which guided the To Mātou Kāinga research project) is reimagined here through the powerful interconnection of land, wāhine, and body. Rather than aligning with Western, patriarchal notions of home as a fixed site of ownership or domesticity, this understanding locates home in the whenua itself. Whenua is not only place—it is body, and through this body, whakapapa is carried, lived, and remembered. This reframing of home moves beyond indigenising Western concepts; it reclaims and redefines home through the enduring strength of mana wāhine. Home is relational, ancestral, and embodied. It is carried in the stories, the tears, the stones, and the feathers. It is planted in the trees that will feed future generations. It is felt in the rhythms of the land and the voices of wāhine who continue to speak, resist, and nurture.

The narratives analysed in this article offer a powerful testament to the enduring connections between women, body, and land. Through the lens of mana wāhine, body–land, and storytelling, they reveal how colonial systems have sought to sever these relationships, and how wāhine Māori can continue to resist, remember, and reimagine. These stories are not only personal but deeply collective, rooted in whakapapa and oriented toward future generations. They affirm that land is not only a place of survival but also of belonging, abundance, and possibility. In doing so, they contribute to a growing body of Indigenous feminist thought that seeks to build otherwise futures—futures grounded in care, sovereignty, and relationality.