- (WHISTLES) - Always a favourite on every rural road ` Hyundai Country Calendar. He's spreading the word that we need to better protect our waterways. - I'll be talking to industry groups, landowners, farmers. - And the farmer who's helping to revive traditional Maori food-gathering places. - It's not just a relationship between Maori and Pakeha ` I can see it being a pathway forward for farming. (COUNTRY CALENDAR THEME FADES) Captions by Faith Hamblyn. Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2023. - About time to get our sunnies out, really. - A chilly winter morning on the Canterbury coast. Makarini Rupene and his whanau have come to harvest on one of their traditional food-gathering places, which are called mahinga kai. - Just about there. - This is the estuary of the Ashley River, or the hapua of the Rakahuri, as it's known to Makarini. For him, it's also a place of direct family connections, of whakapapa and bloodlines ` his grandfather lived beside the river. - You boys wanna shoot through up there, and then just pull the net in over. Our old paoa, he was born here on the river. Our whanau back in the 1800s had a house, a whare right here. I've been coming here since I was 4 years old, gathering our mahinga kai. Mahinga kai is one of our food resources. It can be medicinal, but this is one of our harvesting areas. Our people, our whanau have been fishing here for 700 to a thousand years. We'll be harvesting patiki, which is flounder; kahawai; and hopefully, we'll have some mango ` shark. Today I've got my eldest boy, Makarini, my youngest son, Kaihi, and my youngest daughter, Jewlz. Just as I was brought up, living here, I've brought them up, doing the same, coming down here to harvest mahinga kai. For me, as a child, this was my playground, but it also was my classroom, you know, educating me about our place in our world and how we connect to it. And it's also our pataka ` our freezer ` where we come and gather kai. - Makarini is not only a harvester of kai ` his day job is as a cultural land management adviser for Environment Canterbury. And in that role, he's spreading the message about protecting our waterways, for Maori and Pakeha. - It's about looking after everyone. Obviously, for us as mana whenua, it's for us to uphold our mana and kaitiakitanga ` protecting our waterways, our natural environment, our taonga species. What we're doing is creating a better world, not only for Maori, but for everyone. We just love having fresh patiki, tuaki and yellowfish. You know, you can't beat it, just straight out of the hapua there and on the fire and breakfast. It's something I've been doing with the kids since they were babies. They've been bought up this way. - Makarini's family also has a long history of fighting to retain areas of land beside their mahinga kai ` his great-great-uncle went to court to retain them. - We were awarded a series of fishing easements, and this is one here, uh... here at the Rakahuri hapua Te Aka Aka. We're allowed to come and live here for 220 days of the year, to carry on our tikanga, our kawa, our customs of food gathering and our way of life. (GENTLE GUITAR MUSIC) - Makarini's taking his message into Canterbury's hinterland. (BIRD SQUAWKS) One who's embraced it is John Faulkner. He farms on the banks of the Waiau Uwha River, after buying land here 20 years ago. - I fell in love with the place; the mountains, the landscape, the people, the rivers ` everything. It's just absolutely phenomenal. - John grew up in Waikato. - I came from a little town called Morrinsville, and we had two marae within 7km of us, one Kai a te Mata and Rukumoana, which was the seat of the first Maori Parliament. Learning from Makarini, and others, on the importance of mahinga kai and the cultural aspect, it just set me off on a journey. It's culminated in what I'm trying to achieve here. - John and Makarini met nearly 15 years ago, when they were on a committee overseeing Canterbury's water management strategy. - Those cabbage trees, we've only had them in for two years, and you can see they're 8ft high. - Quite awesome, eh. Several years back, John asked me to come out here, and he said to me, 'Hey, I've got this idea. 'What do you think? 'I wanna turn this into a nohoanga,' cos we'd talked about we're on the Waiau Uwha, it's been a traditional, uh, migrational route, up over into the lakes, up over into Te Tai Poutini, the West Coast, and to his credit, it looks amazing. - John's planted native trees and shrubs. These plants are rongoa Maori ` used for medicinal purposes. - We've got 64 to 70 species of rongoa Maori plants, and they're all endemic to a 5km radius of this site, so you wouldn't find anything that is out of place here. A hundred, 200 years ago, Maori came through here; they would've found these plants. - I just couldn't believe the change ` this has gone from what felt like a bit of barren pasture land to, wow, we now have... have plants in the ground, we've got that feeling of the... that, uh, bringing the mauri back to the area. (PERCUSSIVE MUSIC) The more plantings we can have on each side of our rivers, our waterways, it helps protect our water and our taonga species. - Yeah, we've got a real bad weed infestation here, so if you put the buckets over them, you can virtually guarantee you can spray close to the plant without getting a mortality. What I'd love to see is, over time, that the local iwi come in here and use it as a learning resource for telling their cultural story of the past, of the journeys that they had from one coast to the other. We've got wetlands, we're got mahinga kai points all over the place, and it can be something that we can all be proud of, as New Zealanders. (GENTLE MUSIC) (MUSIC CONTINUES) - We're on the Banks Peninsula, also known as Pataka-o-Rakaihautu, which is the food storage of the chief Rakaihautu. (WATER LAPS) - Port Levy, or Koukourarata, is another place where Makarini Rupene learned to gather kai. (GENTLE MUSIC) - I have a lot of ancestral history and relationship to this area. As a young fella growing up, I dived a lot of the coastal areas around here, and I've really seen the changes through the impacts of land use and also climate change. Once upon a time, throughout some of the bays, I was able to gather large paua, but over last 30 years, I no longer find them. Just gonna head out and grab a feed of kutai, uh, mussels. Part of gathering kutai mahinga kai is, uh, looking after our old people, feeding our whanau, being able to feed hui and tangihanga. And also a big part of our tikanga and kawa is manakitanga, looking after others, so it's a way of us putting on a good kai for them. (POIGNANT MUSIC) Sometimes you get a bit of leaching off septic tanks. We get a lot of sediment runoff now, from the land being cleared and used for different pasture and grazing, and that has a massive impact on our shellfish. (POIGNANT MUSIC) Right. Just heading off. I'll see you later. Kia ora ra. - In his work as a cultural land management adviser for Environment Canterbury, Makarini often hosts field days, reminding farmers what they do on their land feeds into waterways. (CAR ENGINE STARTS) - We call it ki uta ki tai ` from the mountains to the sea. Today I'm meeting with industry groups, land owners, farmers who are interested in understanding, uh, how the land use from up the top has an impact down the bottom, how it has an impact on mahinga kai, around some of our matauranga ` Maori practices. - It can be challenging work. - It can be quite confronting at times. It does take some land owners and land users out of their comfort zone. But once they understand the importance of how we use our environment and how it impacts on people like myself, as a mahinga kai practitioner, they then realise that they have a role to play in their land use. - The first stop is the sheep and beef farm of Alistair and Genna Bird, near Oxford in North Canterbury. - We start with a pepeha. That shows our relationship, our connection to area. So for myself, I go ko Maukatere te maunga; ko Rakahuri Waimakariri nga awa; ko Te Tai o Mahaanui, ko Uruao, Kurahaupo, Takitimu, uh, nga waka; ko Ngai Tahu te iwi. Ko Ngai Tuahuriuri, Huikai nga hapu. Ko Makarini Rupene taku ingoa. Kia ora. No reira. Mahinga kai, it's our natural resources; it's the places we come and gather them. I use all these catchments to gather all the different species that feeds, uh, my family. - The Bird family has won environmental awards for their work on the farm. - One of the awards was for the water-quality work that we have done. We fenced off all the creeks and have started some plantings. There is a balance between financial and environmental, so we're just trying to get that balance and continuously working with that. We're always careful about what we do here and how it affects further downstream. We're very wary we're at the top of the Cust River, and there's a huge amount of people down below us. - The next stop is on the lifestyle block of Marilyne Pasco, further downstream on the Cust River ` any pollution or rubbish from upstream flows on to Marilyne's property. - Oh gosh. You can see a lot of stuff in the water, can't you? - Oh, yeah, but that's not as bad as it was yesterday ` - Right. - ...it was even worse. We'll feed the eels. I've got one in here called Goliath. I hope he behaves himself. - We talk of the kauhaka or the kauhanga, this being the corridor, from the source, the mountains, to the sea. So this is a fish passage. Some of our taonga species ` taonga is like a treasured species ` one of them being the long-fin eel, endemic only here to Aotearoa, Te Waipounamu, New Zealand. And they like to travel inland. They have a life cycle where they need to, also, migrate back out to sea. - We had trees falling across the river, and because it's downward flowing, it's important to keep it clear. - She's dedicated to revegetating with native bush around the riverway. She really loves it. She opens her gates to anyone, really, because she has taonga, native, fish species here in the river, and she just loves to feed them and, uh, have people come and enjoy what she's got here. - The final stop of the day on the field trip is within a few kilometres of the coast. - We've got the Cust, the Ohuka and the Silver Stream ` so these, again, all areas that feed right back out over to the catchments. I utilise these rivers all the time. I have a real concern now with the heavy metals, one of them being arsenic. - Environment Canterbury senior science adviser Channell Thoms has studied freshwater fish, including kakahi, freshwater mussels. - Freshwater mussels, when they reach this size, they're usually approximately between 40 to 50 years old. So they've been in there doing their job for quite some time. - They filter out the toxins in the waterways. I ate some a couple of years back and ended up in hospital with campylobacter. It just shows what impacts land use has on our mahinga kai taonga species. Yeah, there's a lot of people so keen and interested in getting a better understanding of what we talked to today ` things they didn't realise, things they see on their farm and are really now keen to have us over to talk to it a bit more. - And Makarini is living up to his responsibility to provide mahinga kai for his iwi. (TINKLY MUSIC) For Makarini Rupene and his whanau, tuna, or eel, is an important food source. He regularly catches and smokes it in the backyard of his home in Kaiapoi, near Otautahi Christchurch. - We live on it seasonally. We gather it and harvest it, spring, summer, autumn. Because I have a special relationship with one of our carvers, he gets the native timber out of the swamp, so this is 600 or 700 years old, and it has a beautiful flavour. It's important for us to be able to get it, work it traditionally, to carry on, teach my children those old practices, so that then we can koha to our elders, or if there's tangi, hui, parties, birthdays, we like to put it on the table to feed everyone. It is a big part of our mana, just like a lot of our taonga species of mahinga kai, if we're unable to gather them and work them, and then koha them, gift them, it impacts on us. We are seeing that short tuna heke seasons, through pollution. Uh, we have to put rahui on to close areas, and so we can't take the tuna to work and to feed our people. We'll give these about 24 hours. Obviously, I'll do a bit of a check later in the day, just to, um... just to see if they need a top up. Hopefully, when we've pulled them out tomorrow, they're looking beautiful, golden and good to eat. (RELAXED MUSIC) They've come up looking beautiful, with that golden-red colour ` just what we want. This is part of the confluence, where the Kaiikanui connects to the Kaiapoi River. In the past, it was waka-landing area. It was part of the river that fed the local pa site village that was in this area. It was a significant mahinga-kai-gathering area, full of all our taonga species ` kanakana, tuna, eel, patiki, inanga, whitebait and kakahi freshwater mussels. The water quality is not great. At times, it's classed as unswimmable. It does suffer through different land use that comes from back up the stream. We have a lot of sediment build-up though it now. We've lost all our native plantings around it. At this time of the year, you can see the... the willows have died off, and so it looks very bare. - The whenua, or land, beside the river is being replanted and redeveloped ` a joint project between the community and iwi. - We really pushed for an area to be put back into a mahinga kai area. Cos we'd lost so much of our natural resource areas, we thought this area would be perfect. We're doing a joint project, to plant this back into a 500-year vision, full of all native plants, trees and shrubs. The vision of having a whare wananga, which is an education hub, to educate, um, schools and... and community about the importance of this area. We're gonna have pathway trails talking to the history of our iwi and hapu. So, who knows what the Maori name for eel is? - ALL: Tuna! Awesome! We're just looking here now at... at some of the old traditional fishing nets. - In the meantime, Makarini's taking his message to the younger generation. Today, he's visiting Kaiapoi Borough School. - I think it's a great opportunity to get to children while they're young, to open them to what's out there. A lot of them, in this day and age, you know, they don't, uh, connect to the rivers or the environment. Yes, buddy? - The eels can't see very good. - Right. And, yeah, they like are nocturnal. You got a question? - They have tiny teeth, but they're really sharp. - They do. They have several rows of very, very small teeth, so they like to suck on. (CHILDREN CHATTER) I remember as a young child some of those first memories, and that's hopefully what I'm doing for them is... is giving them their first memories of a natural world. (POIGNANT MUSIC) It's just something that's driven within me, to uphold the mana of Papatuanuku, our environment. I don't look two or three years out ` I look to 500 years out, for our future generations, so that they can carry on our traditions of harvesting our mahinga kai ` mo tatou, a mo nga uri a muri ake nei; for us and our future generations after us. - Next time ` - We don't see our farm as a farm; it's a whole ecosystem. - Oh, you want a cuddle, do you? - ...farmers caring for their animals, the land, a river and their community. - It took us a while to become land owners, and it was so exciting for us, that we just wanna do the best damn job that we could do. - That's next time on Hyundai Country Calendar.