Grandad always said
“You gotta be a useless bugger
if you go hungry here.” Because you’ve got a Mad Butcher behind you
and you’ve got a Seamart in front of you.
Plus, you’ve got your māra kai.
Here's a bit of wild pork leg.
That uh, one of the nephews dropped off yesterday.
Producer: How does that compare to Pak’nSave?
It’s free. A trade.
Aye, there's no comparing.
We live on an island.
There is no malls here.
There is no Countdown. There is no Pak’nSave.
We depend on our whole environment
to look after us.
Nobody else is going to come and do that.
Kia orana tātou katoa. Ko Rodney Ngawaka tōku ingoa.
Hea te motu o Aotea.
Our island and the 51 other islands
and rocky outcrops that are attached to it
is what makes up our home.
It was common amongst te iwi Māori
that you knew your tribal estate in and out.
You starved if you didn't.
This is one of the maps or a map
that I've been working on. All the blue
are talking about birds.
They're also talking about trees.
Different types of trees.
These ones here, all the way around are villages
in the pink.
Your hunting spots are attached
to your papakāinga (village).
This area here, up in here, is called Kaiaraara.
“araara” is trevally.
It's a breeding ground for trevally.
Our village is our food cupboard.
And so to have an understanding
of your village,
this is my food cupboard.
This one here
has come.. It’s a wild pork.
It'll be dinner tonight,
actually.
It's a local beef cheek.
Hasn't been bought out of Pak’nSave or Countdown.
We make our own bread.
I don't know many people that don't make bread
in the island here.
My favorite to eat
only because you can use a lot of leftover food.
Is the Asian 2-minute noodles.
But I tell you what, adding
chilli powder, silver beet
from out of your garden
leftover fish.
These two here
have fed me
all the way through summer and all the way through winter.
They need to know how to live
off our whenua.
Our children need it more
now than ever.
Because of the cost of living.
To bring our shopping from out of Auckland
is absolutely ridiculous.
If you get $300 worth of shopping
you’ll probably pay $40-$70
in freight to get that here.
We're down in the māra kai
the garden that is attached
to the Whare Tupuna o Rehua
just up the road here.
The pathway is to try and be more
self-reliant on the things that we've got around home.
Obviously we got beans and that
and over here you got zucchini and over here
different types of herbs, kale.
What we all realise
if we don't do this,
then we're having to pay huge amounts of money
around simple things.
Oh! Look at these!
They’ve done better than my ones.
Haven't seen these ones come in my packages just yet.
Here, I'm not driven by money.
You're better off to do internal trading with islanders.
One of the most beautiful things that I experienced
with my sons that I brought up
here at home and in the rohe of Ngātiwai.
We always gave food to kaumātua and kuia.
Every week that you gave kai away
your aunties and that would start making bread
and you'd go there and you'd, you know, you
give a bucket of kina
and they got a rēwana bread.
“Here, take this home for dad, boy.”
You know, you got to help each other out.
The most important
thing on the planet
is our spiritual well-being.
Our spiritual, our physical, and our mental well-being.
And that is dictated
not by Pak’nSave and Countdown
and the Mad Butchers.
It’s actually dictated
by where you come from.
When that runs out
you're going to go home. Where is home?
What do you know about home?
Can you feed yourself at home?
If you don’t know that
then you are colonised.