ABSTRACT

Aotearoa-New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland, is more properly called TāmakiMakaurau, ‘Tāmaki of a hundred lovers’. The Indigenous metaphor evokes the many migrations to this region, and battles fought by Māori because of its beauty and rich resources. At its narrowest, Tāmaki-Makaurau is just 2 km wide, a land bridge and portage between the harbours known as Manukau and Waitematā, and the Tasman Sea and Pacific Ocean they open into. The names of both harbours also recall the desirability of this area: Manukau refers to the many migratory birds who settle there each year (Taonui 2012) while Waitematā refers to the beauty of shimmering ‘obsidian waters’, because its calm sea was thought to resemble the glassy surface of volcanic obsidian rock.1 Close to the portage between the harbours is Māngere, named for its ‘lazy winds’ (ngā hau māngere) that create a nurturing microclimate. Fertile soils and abundant seafood have nourished people here for more than 800 years; this is not a place in which to be merely sustained, but in which to flourish. Today, Māngere is home to Aotearoa-New Zealand’s busiest airport and to thriving business and industrial estates, the international award-winning Villa Maria Vineyards, and suburban settlements. This global city is also home to Ihumatao, Auckland’s longest continually occupied Māori settlement, nestled next to the ancestral river, Oruarangi. ‘Ko au te awa, Ko te awa ko au’ – ‘I am the river and the river is me’ – say the people of Ihumatao, who for centuries have entered the river’s waters and been fed by its many children. If sustainability can be measured by continuity of people and place over an extended timeframe, then Ihumatao is an example par excellence. Makaurau Marae is the community’s tangible centre, comprising an open grass space, a large carved meeting house, a dining hall and commercial kitchen complex. Leaders of Makaurau Marae – including the late Maryanne Rapata, to whom this chapter is dedicated – have developed close working relationships with the businesses who are their neighbours, and with Auckland Council, initiating entrepreneurial activities and enterprises targeting the

inseparable well-beings and sustainability of the people of Makaurau and their environment. In July 2013, Oruarangi River ran purple. More than 1000 litres of toxic Methyl violet dye, spilled in an industrial incident, ran into the stormwater system, which drains into the river and out to Manukau Harbour.2 Alerted by Villa Maria Vineyards, upstream from Makaurau Marae, Auckland Council reacted promptly to contain the spill, but 3.5 km of estuarine environment were polluted. The river lost most of its fish, shellfish and eels;3 its people mourned. In a report to Auckland Council, Makaurau Marae representative Paula Adams wrote:

Like the pumping of blood through a vein, Your flow was cut off and so a source has died. We your people cry for you, for ourselves. You were our sustenance, our playground; We have survived 800 years on this land with you always there Glistening around us, The water flowing back and forth.