Amid the destruction wrought by Cyclone Gabrielle, marae stand as places of refuge, support and aroha. By Rebecca Macfie.
On the Sunday before Gabrielle unleashed her violence across Hawke’s Bay, whānau gathered at Waipatu Marae on Hastings’ eastern edge, to raise money for those in Tairāwhiti still reeling from Cyclone Hale a month earlier.
They called it a “slash fundraiser”. They wanted to manaaki those whose struggle with log-strewn farms and beaches, smashed riverbeds and barely passable roads had been overshadowed by the weather bomb that hit Auckland on January 27.
“Our northern whānau needed some support, so we just whistled everybody up over the week,” says Ngahiwi Tomoana. He is a kaihautū (co-ordinator) at Waipatu Marae and, until last year, the long-serving chair of Ngāti Kahungunu, the large iwi that stretches from Paritū, east of Wairoa, down to Turakirae at the southern tip of the North Island.
It was a seamless operation, long practised, not just with frequent tangi and hui, but also through decades of trauma. After the loss of thousands of jobs from meatworks and manufacturing plants in the 1980s and 90s, after Cyclone Bola in 1988, after the 1996 eruption of Ruapehu, which sent ash to the coast, after the Havelock North campylobacter crisis of 2016, and after floods, Waipatu and other marae in the district have pulled stricken whānau and communities into their collective embrace.
In the past 18 months alone, Waipatu has produced 16,000 hangi meals to feed poor communities during Covid, for school lunches when foodbanks were closed by lockdowns, and for fundraisers.
By three in the afternoon on the day of the slash fundraiser, they’d made $12,000 for their cousins to the north from the sale of meals and raffles. Gabrielle was brewing. They cleaned up and said, “‘Well, that’s it, we’d better go and batten down the hatches at home,” says Tomoana.
Two days later, Waipatu Marae was, once again, a place of refuge from catastrophe. When word went out that rivers had broken their banks, the manaaki machine went back into action. A large generator, bought several years ago with $70,000 raised through Ngāti Kahungunu community events, was fired into action, and the call went out to those in a position to help.
“We have whakapapa, which is an enduring network of people; you just call one and the whole family tree lights up and they all turn up at the marae,” explains Tomoana. “That’s what’s happened in this instance. One call went out – we said, ‘We’re the hub, we’re going to support every other marae’ – and bang, the place was full of support people, and they’re still here now.”
Waipatu had come through the cyclone intact, but many marae in the district were severely damaged. On the first night, 60 refugees bedded down on mattresses in the wharenui; by the end of the first week, there were 120, mostly from the settlement of Waiohiki – eating, sleeping, showering, and contributing to the work that needed to be done to keep everyone fed, comfortable and calm.
Meals were also being produced daily for 300-500 people out in the community. Donated goods were pouring in: 200 pairs of underpants and 200 T-shirts, razors, hairbrushes, Panadol, gout pills; trailer loads of produce from growers whose crops were not buried under contaminated flood water and silt.
“People just turned up, dropped in and left. We didn’t even know who they were. They knew what was needed,” says Tomoana.
Rotorua reserves
By the Monday after Gabrielle, the number of people staying at Waipatu had dropped to 100, but the marae was ready to expand again to absorb 40 helpers from Rotorua. They’d seen the scenes of destruction on the news and, equipped with wheelbarrows, shovels and diggers, were heading there with the intention to stay for three weeks to help clean up. They wanted to bring their own food and be self-sufficient, says Tomoana, “but our manaaki dictates that we should feed them”.
Elsewhere, too, marae that escaped the raging rivers are a backbone of the crisis response. The Hastings suburb of Flaxmere was largely untouched, and at Te Aranga Marae, “we were ready to receive, at a moment’s notice”, says Henare O’Keefe, a kaihautū at the marae and Hastings’ “official ambassador”.
The marae model – with its deeply ingrained ethic of manaakitanga, whanaungatanga and aroha – “can just kick in at the drop of a hat. There’s no policy, no KPI ticking. It’s just ‘bang’,” he says. “We didn’t know how many were coming or when they were coming, but we were ready to go when they did arrive. And, boy, did they arrive.”
More than 40 RSE workers, who had only the clothes they stood up in, were sheltered on the first night. They were then taken in by other Flaxmere refuges, Malamalama EFKS church and Flaxmere Community Centre, while Te Aranga absorbed whānau fleeing the settlement of Ōmāhu. Many there had lost everything to the raging Ngaruroro River, homes were severely damaged, and the marae and urupā were under water.
Up the coast in hard-hit Wairoa, Hinemihi and Taihoa Marae are among those to have come through the cyclone intact, moving quickly to provide shelter for people with nowhere to go and serve as welfare hubs for the distribution of donated food and goods. Hinemihi is feeding the volunteers and whānau who are shovelling silt out of flooded properties, preparing 600 meals a day. Locals say there are plenty of whānau banding together to help, and some farmers’ wives in the district are coming in to relieve the cooks in the marae kitchen.
In the tiny settlement of Waipiro Bay in Tairāwhiti, where fragile road access to Te Puia Springs and Ruatoria has just been restored, local man Blue Harrison expects the 50 residents will remain without electricity for another month yet. Taharora Marae – one of three in the village – is serving as a lifeline. Generators have kept freezers running and those who need sanctuary are staying there. “Taharora is the centre for the community right now,” he says.
Smooth efficiency
As Henare O’Keefe says, marae welcome big numbers of people all the time, sometimes for days. “And they’re very good at it. It’s not foreign.”
It’s also done voluntarily and “on the smell of an oily rag”.
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer travelled across from Taranaki to visit Hastings and Napier marae. She was horrified by the devastation, but entirely unsurprised by the smooth efficiency of the marae efforts.
“The moment that something horrible happens, whether you’ve just lost a loved one or lost your whole community, the first thing you want to do is group together and collectivise and share your trauma … To be able to go to a safe haven, which is non-judgmental, which can bring everybody in, no matter what your history, no matter what your occupation, no matter what your profile … but importantly to have a place where you can contribute, too.
“When you work together and eat together and you have places that pull you together like that, it’s an absolute bastion of hope.”
She argues the critical role that marae play as core social and physical infrastructure needs to be better recognised and supported, as well as protected from the effects of ever-more serious climate catastrophes.
Te Pāti Māori last week called for a $100 million relief fund to be set up for marae, urupā and papakāinga flood protection and relocation, as well as $100m to fund a Māori National Service Defence framework to provide the same resources and infrastructure to iwi and hapū as local government in the wake of natural disasters.
“Marae are asking questions: what’s next? What are we going to do if we get another downpour next month,” she says. “Most iwi and marae know their at-risk areas. They know where the mauri of their awa have changed … When they see their ancestors’ bones being washed down the river, they get it.”
In the final week of the 2020 election campaign, Shane Jones, then a New Zealand First Cabinet minister, allocated $100m in funding from the Provincial Growth Fund for marae upgrades. It was part of the wider $3 billion fund for “shovel-ready” projects announced in the early months of Covid, which included recognition of what he calls “wellbeing infrastructure”.
There was a swift backlash, with Jones accused of vote-buying in the seat of Northland. Two years on, and after multiple crises in which marae have repeatedly stepped up to support communities, he says his fund has been vindicated.
The money went on upgrades, the likes of plumbing, spouting, wiring, painting, sprinklers and parking. The funding went out to 351 marae, including 110 in Hawke’s Bay and Tairāwhiti and 34 in Tai Tokerau/Northland.
“I’ve always known that marae are often the only publicly orientated facilities in small communities,” says Jones. “They’re predominantly run on a volunteer basis and that ebbs and flows, and [many] things can impact on that: how many have gone to live in Australia, how many people can afford a trek back from Wellington or Auckland to contribute towards a working bee?”
Dwindling reserves
But while some, including Tomoana, believe marae culture is resurgent, others fear for its survival as elders die and many young Māori in urban areas are disconnected from their ancestral homes.
Te Arawa scholar Paul Tapsell, who has written passionately in Kāinga: People, land, belonging of his own whānau’s connection to Maketū and the ravages of colonisation and environmental degradation, says tribal marae are still marginalised and there is no sign of a genuine on-the-ground partnership with the crown.
“When New Zealand needs marae during a crisis, we are here. However, if our marae need the Crown in times of crisis, we get a ‘sorry – please apply to TPK [Te Puni Kokiri] or Lotteries.’ Yet our people keep giving, because that is what we do; we look after, manaaki, all those living on our ancestral estates, even if they have long since been taken from our control.”
When the cargo vessel Rena ran aground off Bay of Plenty in 2011, resulting in more than 350 tonnes of heavy fuel oil leaking into the sea then washing up on nearby beaches, the marae at Maketū hosted coastal monitoring and clean-up crews for weeks. “It all came out of the pockets of our local people – hau kāinga. The same thing is happening now in Hawke’s Bay and the Gisborne coast,” says Tapsell. That contribution to the Rena effort was never properly recognised or compensated, and it “financially crippled our already struggling community. It’s still talked about today by those who still remain.”
He says around half of marae can no longer afford insurance, and many have coverage only if their post-treaty settlement entities have undertaken to pay the cost. He gained this insight from visiting more than 760 tribal marae between 2009 and 2013, the outcome of which was Maorimaps.com, a charitable organisation he co-founded in 2007 to help Māori reconnect with their ancestral homes.
It is a service under huge demand, which perhaps points to the best hope for the future strength of marae. Tapsell says they receive about 30,000 visits a month, mostly from young people looking to anchor their identity beyond an iwi organisation. “We are assisting them to realise that unless today’s urban-raised generation connects with their ancestral marae, there will be no one left to keep them going.”
In the meantime, back at Waipatu Marae, the refugees from Waiohiki are still working and talking, cooking and cleaning, going out to clear up their damaged homes, and planning as well as they can for the enormous task ahead. The days are framed by karakia, and uplifted by waiata.
As Denis O’Reilly, one of those refugees, says, there is deep stress and everyone knows the recovery will be long and hard. But in the wharenui, there is joy in one another’s company. “People want to belong.”