Kōhao Rau Rangatahi Rau
Reconnecting with whānau and whenua through working with earth pigments
by Merenia Sawrey- Feb 2023
Mirimiria te one i ahu mai ai koe
Korikoria ōu matiwae i te taikoraha hei tātai ki ō tīpuna
Tirotiro atu iho ai i te Ōhiwa ō Awanuiārangi,
e tū, e tū, e tū tonu ana.
Rub the dirt from which you came
Wriggle your toes in the mudflats as a
connector to your ancestors
Simultaneously look out and within at the standing place of Awanuiārangi, stand, stand, we are still standing.
Fingers pressed, toes recoiled, contagious grins reaching up to wide-open eyes – together we are seeingwhat is right in front of us for the very first time.
We are excited... We are intrigued... We are cousins playing in a creation-scale sandpit with toys we found exactly where our tīpuna left them to be found. But that is not to say that they were easy to find.
The treasures are well hidden, beneath decades of displacement; in the shadows of foreign-owned properties; and in the tight corners of a fuzzy sense of familiarity.
We follow our cool and confident tuakana, who have been here before. They are leading us astray, towards the exposed mudflats, where the re-discovery awaits. We follow them, while shedding our U.V filtered sunglasses, our water-resistant shoes, our apprehensive coat, our job titled-pōtae, and every other adopted accessory that, all of a sudden, feels very silly in this context.
Forty rangatahi who share whakapapa to Ngāti Awa, have chosen to spend the long weekend together; hei wānanga. Invited for the purpose of connecting both with each other and with our places. So, we are here, at Te Horo, looking out towards the standing place of Awanuiārangi, te Ōhiwa ō Awanuiārangi. We are in awe of our cousins, Sarah and Lanae, and they generously tell us their secret to revitalizing customary practices in a modern, colonized era.
‘We just keep coming here to play with the dirt.’ Our wonder hangs off their every word.
Back at base, we uncurl our fingers, revealing respective crushed colour to each other. We guide the pestle around a concoction-filled mortar, brewing a paste that we can call our own. No one says it, but we think this feels like magic.
We swipe a pigment-loaded fingers across bare, white pages. We rinse dyed bandanas and hang them to dry. We take up so much space with our colour until it starts to feel like home again.
As rangatahi Māori today, we can admit to feeling the fragility of our indigeneity. We all compensate in different ways, and want to be more confident culturally, intellectually, financially, politically, socially, and personally – to do justice to the decolonial trajectory our tīpuna fight for. Our generation has been presented with a special set of circumstances. Just as our history is perplexing, our future is precarious.
Often, we feel we don’t have the time to learn the knowledge that we need to lead the next leg of the journey for our iwi, or for our whānau. We need to feel more confident at home. We needed what we had been gifted on this day. We need grounding. We need tangible. We need practices and experiences that call us home. We need to do it together.
Kōhao Rau Rangatahi Rau was a rangatahi wānanga held in 2021. Funded through Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Awa and Te Puni Kōkiri, uri of Ngāti Awa reconnected with each other and the whenua over a long weekend. All photographs are taken by our whanaunga Te Kawa Robb. Thank you so much for sharing your experience with us Merenia!
