(Can you guess what these are? I'll give you a hint: upoko is like poʻo, tapu is like kapu, and waewae is something you leave behind when you're walking in the sand!) It is a very volcanic area with fertile land that Te-Wai-o-Hua iwi has lived on for over 800 years.
When I visited Ihumātao, besides telling us about all the amazing and inspiring (as well as tragic) history of this wahi, they showed us some of the cool planting techniques that Te-Wai-o-Hua has been using for a long time. One example is that they use volcanic rocks to keep their māra (māla in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi) a little warmer. Even though Aotearoa is in the Southern hemisphere, because the latitude here is higher, it means we are farther from the equator than Hawaiʻi, so the temperature variation here is larger. In the winters, it gets down to around 40 degrees F here! The volcanic rocks release a gas through their pores, and this keeps the rocks warm, so building walls around the māra helps to keep the plants just a little warmer. Another example is called huaparekore, which are guiding principles to garden by. One example is that they put mussel shells and food scraps into the hills so that when it rains, some of the nutrients from the decomposing scraps would wash down into the gardens below.
Having much of their land seized and having to fight to hold on to what they still have is definitely a major challenge that Te-Wai-o-Hua has faced, not just with the protests in 2019 but ever since British colonizers decided to take their land for quarries, large-scale agriculture, and even an airport.
