- This is a story that my dad told to me,
and it was from his sister, so my aunty.
They're walking through the forest
and the bird song was different.
And she said to him,
"The bird song is different.
There's something wrong with the forest."
This is the heartland of Te Kawerau ā Maki.
My tūpuna lived in this forest.
They touched the trees that we are fighting
so hard to protect.
- Oh man, this is not good.
(woman laughs)
- When I was studying kauri dieback,
I went up north and went through
a forest with an old kaumātua
and I had so many questions to ask and, you know,
so many different things
I was wondering as this young scientist
and he was just silent the whole time
and then looked at me and said,
"Stop trying to learn about the forest
and just learn from it."
(bird chrips)
This kaumātua went on to say all sorts of things,
how the tree canopy and the bird song that he could hear
and see,
said so much more about the health of the forest
than anything else or that, you know,
mulching up seaweed and putting it in the soil is really
the ocean's kind of opportunity
to also help heal these trees.
And then I went back in, you know,
I talked to a lot of my science lecturers and different
people about, well, this, you know,
bird song can tell us so much more than we realise.
And so many people just said, oh, you know,
that's a bit far-fetched or you can't publish that
in your dissertation as evidence.
Why not?
- When we're working with our Kaumātua,
they talk about the frustration.
You know, the research finally says
after decades and centuries,
that ecosystems where indigenous people live have better
ecological outcomes than those that are blocked off
for conservation purposes.
And then turn around and say, "Oh, look, it's okay.
Now you can do it because we've proved it."
When we've known it for--
- Ever.
- Tens, hundreds of years.
(woman laughs)
Yeah.
- In the science world,
mātauranga Māori hasn't been given the mana
that is afforded to it because,
if it's not written on paper,
or if it's not researched enough in the mainstream context,
then it doesn't carry enough weight.
Personally,
I think hundreds and hundreds of years of research
is enough weight.
However, how do you fit that into a report?
- When we realised that the forest wasn't healthy
and kauri in particular,
we had a number of conversations with our Treaty partners
at Auckland Council
and at DOC
about what to do about it.
- When Te Kawerau ā Maki were thinking about placing
the rāhui on the forest,
we did commission some scientists to write some reports.
Auckland council received those, went "Great",
and got some more reports done.
And then there were more reports.
- Until the last one came in mid 2017 that said,
"In a five-year period increase has jumped an awful lot."
And we were now faced with what looked like
about one in five kauri zones
were showing symptoms of infection.
- But basically the fact that the manu weren't singing
as much as they were, that was an indicator for us.
We didn't need a scientific report.
Well, Te Kawerau ā Maki didn't need a scientific report
to tell us there was something wrong.
However, for mana whenua to fit within the current
political landscape,
it was implied that non-Māori knowledge carried more weight.
- There's this coloniallistic notion
that indigenous knowledge is cute,
touristy at best.
But it certainly has no value in coming up with solutions
that are technical.
But Māori had nowhere else to go like,
this is, this is their place.
This is their whenua.
So they will fight tooth and nail for it.
So bringing Mātauranga is probably the
best chance you have of saving a lot of our ecosystems.
I'm lead by mātauranga.
We're coming up with our own solutions
for problem that's here.
It's about looking internally to see the solutions we
can come up with without developing an agrochemical,
like a fungicide,
bringing that from overseas and spraying it around,
which is the other option.
What we do is we try and understand what's happening
in the soil.
We go and take soil samples from
places that doesn't have the disease,
because we think, why doesn't it have the disease?
Is it because it's just not there yet?
Or is it got organisms in there
that inhibit it from coming in?
And we're trying to find that out.
And whether we can exploit that.
- Currently we have millions of visitors into our forest,
and the Ngahere doesn't have time to recover.
That's why Te Kawerau ā Maki place the rāhui on the forest.
To keep people out
and to give Ngahere and Papatūānuku time to regenerate.
- I had reached out to
DOC, council, MPI,
asking for assistance,
that we were going to do the rāhui.
We weren't asking permission because it wasn't anyone
else's permission to give.
And I got no response or
was told
"You can't do it."
"It won't work."
"You're not allowed."
- Kawerau came to us and requested
all the tracks be closed
so that there would be an official rāhui over
the Waitākere Ranges.
We were supportive of that rāhui,
but obviously we also needed enforcement powers
and the budget to enable all that track closures.
The issue is that sometimes the legal constructs,
the Pākehā constructs,
that the Western ideals that we've stuck,
don't always respect
or put manawhenua values on the same level
and that needs to change.
And I think it is changing,
but we're not there yet.
- After banging heads for many years,
we've turned a corner now.
- We are working extremely closely with Te Kawerau ā Maki
and the whole way through the closure,
there was a huge amount of work.
We've never seen anything like this before where
millions and millions of dollars
of track upgrades and permanent closures
to protect our forest is pretty significant.
There had been track closures in the past,
but that just wasn't fast enough.
And I think they showed us that we needed to act faster.
- What we have here is Phytophthora agathidicida.
So it's the pathogen that's causing kauri dieback.
And that's what grows up in the trees
and ends up starving the trees.
To fight something like kauri dieback.
You need a range of skillsets, right?
Not only scientific skill sets,
but also those mātauranga skillsets.
Not one group can have all those skillsets.
It has to be a coordination of effort
and a sharing of the resources.
It takes it out of you to try and fight against the majority
and continually be heard to argue your case.
That's what you're going to see more of
and you're going to get people
who are just tired of doing it
and they'll either give up or on try
and do their own little thing.
But that doesn't matter because the outcome
is going to be same.
So kauri will go extinct if we continue on this way.
- We should be using all avenues of knowledge possible.
And so having a mātauranga Māori lens
and a Western science lens and forming that discussion,
absolutely.
I think that's definitely for the betterment of everybody
in terms of sharing culture, but also the whenua.
It's just about acknowledging that Western science isn't
the be-all and end-all of everything.
- Mātauranga Māori is gaining a little bit of momentum
and that's so exciting because it means
we can be a part of it.
I'm soaking up as much of it as I can
so that I can give something back to you.
I can give something back to my people.
- And if mātauranga has already been left
to the end as a sort of crisis point response
then it makes it even more important
to learn going forward into a world
where your one day going to have
to teach your own children all the mistakes
you've made along the way.
And if you can try to mitigate
or avoid the mistakes that have already been made
as best as possible,
then why wouldn't you?