00:16Whatu naro naro te tangata, toi tu te whenua.
00:22As man disappears from sight, the land remains.
00:28In Aotearoa, New Zealand, the land carries names shaped by time.
00:34Names held by mountains, maunga, traced by rivers, awa, and etched along Te Takutai or Te Moana,
00:43the coast.
00:44Through the voices of our local runaka, we hear how these names are more than markers.
00:50They are living links to ancestry, to place, and to the Māori language today.
00:57This series invites us to look again, and to understand the landscape, not as a background,
01:03but as an ancient story, still carried by those who call it hum.
01:09This is toi tu te whenua, e kōrero ana te whenua, e whakaromo ana mātou, where the land speaks,
01:17and we listen.
01:19Listening in to the land is archaeologist and curator Māori at Tu Kura Otago Museum, Dr.
01:25Gerard O'Regan, who has in recent years been helping lead digs with Tirunanga o Moiraki,
01:32peeling back the layers of history that lie across the Moiraki Peninsula.
01:36The beach at Tū Takahikura has much to say. It's material riches confirming the kōrero carried
01:43in the whakapapa of Tirunanga. These tohu make the past tangible, grounding history in the landscape.
01:51For O'Regan, they trace personal history, family history.
01:55Kia ora mai koutou. Ko Aeno Kutawari i tū mai i te Matarae nei o Moiraki. Ko Tahu Potaki i
02:03te wharei i tū i te taha o te Araakiwa,
02:06kei Awarua. Ko Teitei, ko Hinekino te horo, oku taua, mai i tēnei kaika o tātou, o kaitahu whānai.
02:21Nō reira, tēnei te mihi, tēnei te mihi. I'm Gerard O'Regan. My tū taua who came to Moiraki,
02:34one was Teitei. She came from down in the Fauvo Strait. She came up here and married one of the
02:41whalers. In coming up here and marrying the whaler Haberfield, she was actually revisiting
02:48the footprints of Hutupuna, Taoka, whose pa was over at Katagi point there. My other taua from Moiraki
02:59was Hinekino te horo. She was one of the ones who came south from the Kaapoi area, from the
03:09time of the Ngāti Toa Raids by Te Raupraha. These two movements from north to south in about the 1830s
03:18represent important strands in the Moiraki story. Much has changed here in the intervening years,
03:24including the addition of a new name at the beach. The place we are here is Tūtakahikura. It's often called
03:33Barracuta Bay. Barracuta being one of the fish that was of huge industrial importance to our old people
03:43back in the time of early Pākehā contact and before that in our pre-European period. The reason
03:52Barracuta was so significant was because you could catch it in great quantities
03:58on season when it was schooling and you could pāwheta it, you could split it open and sundry it.
04:05So you could catch it easily and preserve it easily and in quantity and therefore
04:14Makā or Barracuta always had a significance to our old people.
04:19Tūtakahikura has less pro se origins.
04:22Our understanding is that Tūtakahikura was one of the tūpuna of the Arai Tūru waka.
04:30In our upokorunanga, David Higgins suggests that he thinks Tūtakahikura was he wahine
04:38associated with the waka.
04:41Today, Tūtakahikura is the name for both the beachfront and the bay and is surrounded by a
04:48long list of other names attached to various features. Rocks sitting just offshore carry the
04:54names Tūtimakohu, a reference for another ancestor, and Tokatara. The point at the eastern end of the bay
05:02is the rocky headland of Tāwhiroko. At its base lies Hikipuku and Urupā.
05:09Just in behind the beach is Whina Taitai. One of the names applied to the Urupā that lies there.
05:16To the north is Kaua, another Urupā, but also the name of a small creek and the little beach behind
05:23which a collection of cribs are nestled.
05:25So within the space of a few hundred meters, we've got multiple place names pertaining to
05:33our old people's occupation in this landscape. Some of the place names reference different layers
05:40of our history in this landscape. And that helps us, I think, relate also to the different
05:52layers of history we see coming through in the archaeological footprint that our old people have
05:59left here. This area, this whole area here, while it was the important Kaika or Kaik, the settlement,
06:08led by Te Ramuruhu from the 1830s, at the same time, it was a place where we know from the
06:19archaeology
06:19there has been much earlier occupation. We see evidence of pre-European occupation here
06:29through little pieces of agate, the stone sources, the stone source of which is some of which is
06:36found up here on top of this hill. It was a local stone source that was being used, but at
06:41the same
06:42time our old people were also bringing in stone from elsewhere. We have found tools made out of
06:47pounamu from the west coast, pounamu brought here from Taipotini, the west coast, or potentially from
06:55up in the Otago sources, up by Whakatipu. Such vines lie beside the more humble evidence of everyday lives,
07:03the hangi stones and the charcoal. But this evidence also pulls powerfully on the imagination,
07:10sending it spinning back through time.
07:13The hangi stone and the charcoal stain that we see, the black charcoal stain in the sand,
07:18is also a reminder that at some point in time, various of our old people,
07:24can't put a name to necessarily all of them, but various of them have been here, stopped here,
07:30and occupied this place, and left their footprints. One of the things with
07:36the whole of the Moiraki Peninsula is there are archaeological sites dotted across the landscape.
07:47We talk of them as archaeological sites because there is archaeological evidence.
07:52To us the wahitupuna, they're ancestral places. The archaeological evidence is only one part of it.
07:58The runanga's recent finds paint pictures both revealing and intriguing. One, a penny from about
08:05the time of Matiahatira Morehu's arrival at Moiraki, had a bowl punched in it. The implication is that it
08:13is worn as jewellery. It's not so much the dollar value of it, but rather the ornamental value of it.
08:20Somebody has worn that and it's been significant to people.
08:23As these finds lie layered in the earth, they create a stepped pathway back through time,
08:30from one to the next, repopulating the locations with every detail.
08:36And when we think about our place names, and applying our place names in those different layers
08:41of history in our place names, that actually gives a greater embodiment to how we engage with that
08:47heritage. The archaeology gives us a very tangible way of connecting to our old people and thinking and
08:54exploring what might have been their life ways here. By using our place names, by using our traditional
09:05taunaha, then we end up with a bit of a more comfortable embodiment of the work we're doing
09:16with the physical heritage. All of this sits within the overarching narratives that lie on the land here.
09:23The name, Tu Takahikura, connects the bay to Pukitapu, Moka Tere, Moka Atua, and other tipuna of the Arai Te
09:32Uru Waka,
09:33to the waka's ocean-spanning epic tale. And, at the same time, it offers those who care the opportunity to
09:40hold its traces in their hand.
09:42One of the things I talk about with taunga and working in a museum setting,
09:48is, as with any heirloom, if somebody gives you a taunga, if somebody gives you a treasure,
09:58you hold it. And the more you hold it, the more it enriches you. The more it enriches you,
10:05the more you want to learn about it. The more you learn about it, the more it further enriches you,
10:14and then the more you want to hold that. And that's the active process of treasuring.
10:20So rather than thinking just about the thing as a treasure, it's actually the process of treasuring
10:28which keeps that treasure held firm and protected and handed down generationally, or intergenerationally.
10:37And that is the same with using our place names. If we don't use our place names, if we don't
10:44reinforce
10:44them, that's when they get dropped, that's when they get forgotten. But the more that we look at
10:52whina tai tai, and we wonder what the meaning of it is, the more that we use it, the more
10:57that we
10:57try to learn about it, even if we don't ever get to a strong definitive answer, we're still holding
11:06it, treasuring it, and it is therefore enriching our connection and our experience of these places.
11:15And that's something that's really important to do, especially when we talk about places that are of
11:21archaeological, well, of archaeological interest. In the past, it's been very easy over the last
11:28hundred years for the archaeological narratives to dominate the stories of place and the significance
11:37of place. But using and applying and thinking about our traditional place names with our archaeological
11:47sites actually reminds us and reinforces to, not just us, but all to the archaeologists, to the
11:56archaeological students we have working here, and to the wider community, that the archaeology is one
12:04dimension of a history, of a heritage. It is the totality of that which is what we need to carry
12:11forwards and make sure is there for the future generations. In Aotearoa, the land speaks, not
12:18out loud, but through its names. They are ancient, they are poetic, they carry power. Each one is a
12:26part of our whakapapa, passed down by generations who knew this whenua deeply. These names aren't just
12:33labels, they are stories, in the rivers, in the mountains, in the land beneath our feet. Some were
12:40lost over time, others were changed, or silenced. But the land never forgot, and neither did the people.
12:48This is about listening again, about speaking the names, and reconnecting with what's always been here.
12:55In the next episode, we conclude the series by talking with those carrying the copapa forward,
13:00reinforcing the importance of place names, and the intergenerational stories they hold.
13:06This is Toitu Tifinua. The land remains, and so do the names.
13:43This is Toitu Tifinua. The land remains, and so do the names.
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