Project 60 - Tū atu, tū mai – he karaka manu ki kā manuhiri (The Platform Project)
Tū atu, tū mai – he karaka manu ki kā manuhiri
Tū atu, tū mai – he karaka manu ki kā manuhiri
Vicki Lenihan (Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe, Ngāi Tahu) Paemanu Ngai Tahu Visual Arts
Images: Justin Spiers
George Street, Dunedin, between Moray Place and Frederick Street
Property Partner: Harada Investments, Throp properties and Landlease Funds Group Limited
Video credit : Iain Frengley
Ka rongo koe i kā manu? Ka kite koe i kā manu?
Ka rongo koe i kā manu? Every day I take my daughter for a hikoi and ask her about whether she can hear the birds. Every so often we see one come very close. Ka kite koe i kā manu? In many cities across the motu I’ve imagined what they must have looked like before the settlers arrived. What plants grew here? What waterways flowed underneath the concrete we walk on? What kind of plants grew here? What birdsong could the tīpuna hear?
It was some of these questions multimedia artist Vicki Lenihan (Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe, Ngāi Tahu) considered when she was developing Tū atu, tū mai – he karaka manu ki kā manuhiri for her tūrakawaewae, Ōtepoti. A gentle intervention, commissioned by the Dunedin Dream Brokerage for the Platform Project, Tū atu, tū mai – he karaka manu ki kā manuhiri was an interactive audio installation along George Street that played from dawn until dusk. Consisting of native birdsong recordings from around the town belt, each site included QR codes and flyers, including Braille transcriptions that describe biological and cultural information about the many manu that are Indigenous to our city. Some of the manu recorded include tūī, tīwaiwaka, kōmako, and tauhou. Living in Ōpoho, Lenihan is always listening for manu and sometimes even hears pūtakitaki and kākā across the North East Valley, as well as the sight and sound of the kārearea and the majestic kāhu. In her mara she often hears kererū, which is a sight I too am used to in my own mara, where a resident kererū gorges himself on berries in the morning before struggling and whooshing towards Rakanui in the late afternoon. While gorging himself I think of the way native birds carry native seeds dropping them on to the ground. In the last year since I moved to my house on the Ōtākou peninsula I’ve noticed three new kōwhai trees and I wonder whether this is from our resident kererū.
Tū atu, tū mai – he karaka manu ki kā manuhiri translates roughly to stand over there, stand here - the call of the birds to the visitors. To karaka (or karanga) is an expression of welcome and a means of providing the connective tissue or safe passage between the physical space that exists between two groups on marae (the visitors (manuhiri) and mana whenua). The karaka is not just the call of one person to another, it is the calling of all tīpuna, living and dead, as well as the entire mana of the marae. In this instance, the call of native manu is a call to all mana tiriti, mana whenua and maataawaka to consider and explore our city as it undergoes its gradual changes through the George Street redevelopment. Not unlike the process of karaka on marae, where the kaikaraka acts as the conduit between the past, present and future, so too does Lenihan’s manu karaka help us to negotiate the past, present and future infrastructural, social and environmental systems.
So, what exactly is our past and how does it factor into our future? On July 31, 1844 at Koputai, 25 chiefs signed the Otago Deed, selling approximately 400,000 acres for £2,400. Of the 400,000 acres, 150,000 acres was chosen for the ‘New Edinburgh’ site. In addition to this land, verbal agreements were made to reserve 10% of all land sold, known as ‘the tenths’, in trust for mana whenua. Earlier in June 1840, along with many other chiefs across the motu, Karetai and Korako signed Te Tiriti o Waitangi in Taiaroa Heads. Of course, over many years the promises agreed to in Te Tiriti were breached and the ‘tenths’ agreement was never honoured. Dunedin, the city, was established in 1848 by Mr Charles Kettle, a surveyor for the notorious New Zealand Company. Following a gold rush in the Otago province in the 1860s, Dunedin’s population and wealth increased dramatically and for several years it was New Zealand’s largest and richest city. However, this was a time of displacement and decline in autonomy for local iwi that continued for over a century.
Historically, British property legislation has entailed defined borders, the renaming of places (Otago rather than Ōtākou), and an often violent process of individual privatised land ownership which emplaces settlers and attempts to displace Indigenous societies. The legacy of colonisation and its subsequent urban development on Indigenous lands has meant there has been a push for the elimination of Indigenous ‘memory’ (existence, heritage, experience) and ‘materiality’ (physical presence, structures, places). This model of property legislation and the relations of ownership was and is grounded in the dispossession and displacement of Indigenous people. This violence is engendered by the tried and tested methods of extraction, measurement and the quantification of the ‘value’ of land, a process carried out throughout many other settler colonies around the world. Given this history, we must ask ourselves what our obligations are now and what must we do to ensure that, at the very least, local iwi are afforded equal decision-making power - not just a tenth - in how we reimagine our city today. These partnerships have been damaged severely over centuries; empowering mana whenua to not just be observers, but actively participate in how we live in our city, is overdue. After all, Te Tiriti conferred rights of access, execution, control, and authority in decision-making processes, as well as equity of outcomes for health and wellbeing for mana whenua.
Not unlike the whakataukī Ka mua, ka muri, it’s important we understand the past so we might know how to walk into the future. By thinking through and imagining what our city would be like if our Indigenous manu were as prevalent as they once were, Lenihan offers a wero, and challenges us to reinscribe the role of mana whenua into the place we live. The redevelopment of George Street offers us, as residents of the city (who are manuhiri on someone’s else’s whenua), the opportunity not only to respond, but to uplift the pūrakau and mana of local iwi. It encourages us to consider other histories and how these can be shared and how they make our city special. This subtle offering of birdsong might heed their call to slowly undo decades and centuries of denying local iwi’s right to not only belong here, but to claim a stake in its future. It’s as the British Marxist economic geographer, David Harvey wrote in his essay, The Right to the City, “The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.” It makes sense that mana whenua are claiming the right to have some shaping power over these processes and Tū atu, tū mai – he karaka manu ki kā manuhiri reflects the ways in which Ōtepoti, as a city, has been made and remade. It is also the collective right to remake ourselves, as we remake our city. Perhaps we might remake ourselves in a way that values stories which are often not told or are hidden in order to make visible all of our stories into a patchwork of experiences that have shaped and will continue to shape our city.
This gentle karaka of birds also reminds all of us of other ways of making kin with other beings. The Potawatomi Nation academic Robin Wall Kimmerer often describes this Indigenous way of knowing as understanding that species are not only other beings or persons, but teachers, who can share with us new ways of sharing the world and of how to live. Maybe, Lenihan’s project might encourage us to not only to celebrate more of the stories of our city, but also to collectively work to balance the tinana of Papatūānuku and be genuine kaitiaki who not only regulate her life support systems, but fulfil our duty to enhance and sustain those systems for our children. A common whakataukī amongst Ngāi Tahu is “Mō tātou, ā, mō kā uri ā muri ake nei - for us and our children after us”. What kind of city do we want to leave our children and their children in? My hope is that it is one where we can hear the birds when we walk down George street.
When reflecting upon ways to bring Indigenous philosophical knowledge and design systems into dialogue with other systems and forms of knowledge – geological, ecological, biophilic – to consider the materiality of public space, we must remind ourselves that the future is not prescribed. The tension between now and tomorrow, between the present state of the world and the future state of the world is never necessitated. The present does not contain the future as a linear development. It is always non-linear. When we pause in respite from the endless emails and roadworks lining our city’s main street as it undergoes yet another change, we should pause and think, Ka rongo koe i ngā manu?
- Hana Pera Aoake (June 2022)
1 K Raerino, A Macmillan, A Field, R Hoskins. Local-Indigenous Autonomy and Community Streetscape Enhancement: Learnings from Māori and Te Ara Mua-Future Streets Project. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2021;18(3):865. Published 2021 Jan 20. doi:10.3390/ijerph18030865
2 Mason Durie, Te Mana, Te Kawangatanga—The Politics of Maori Self-Determination. Oxford University Press; Docklands, Australia: 1998. p. 280
3 David, Harvey, “The Right to the City.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27 (4), 2003, 939–940. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0309-1317.2003.00492.x.
4 Robin Wall Kimmerer “Nature Needs A New Pronoun” in The Material Kinship Reader: Material beyond extraction and kinship beyond the nuclear family. Kris Dittel and Clementine Edwards (eds.,) Onomatopee 208: Rotterdam, NL, 2022, 342
Hana Pera Aoake (Ngāti Hinerangi, Ngāti Mahuta, Tainui/Waikato, Kāti Waewae, Waitaha, Kāti Mamoe, Kāi Tahu ) is a mother, artist and writer. Hana works across many mediums and has published widely and sometimes organises exhibitions, readings, and conversations. Hana published their first book, A bathful of kawakawa and hot water with Compound Press in 2020. Currently they work with Morgan Godfery on Kei te pai press, a publishing and education project. They live in Te Rotopāteke, Ōtepoti with their partner and pēpi studying Te Reo Māori.
Ka taki te tītī
Ka taki te kākā
Ka taki hoki ahau
Tihei mauri ora!
Imagine our main street alive with the sound and sight of native manu, their colourful presence a joyful indication that our environment is healthy, for them and for us.
Many of the verdant suburbs of Ōtepoti Dunedin are busy with the daily bustling of manu, an echo of a not-so-distant past when these intelligent creatures had the run of our lush hillsides. Despite modern human interference, the landscape upset by infrastructure and introduced species, endemic and native birds flourish in our wilding, forested neighbourhoods. On any given day, kererū on a progressive feast whoomph between backyard fruit trees; tūī perform spectacular aerobatic stunts between double-voiced treetop surveys of their territory; korimako share their space opera in-jokes; pīwaiwaka tease and tattletale; tauhou fuss and flash their silvery eyes; pūtakitaki pairs keep to themselves and keep vocal tabs on each other, and kākā take stealth reconnaissance flights into the people zone from their northern citadel. After nightfall, rūrū relay messages from te pō. These and other native manu help make our city the place we love to love. Each of these taoka species plays an important role in our ecosystem but they can’t succeed without human support.
If you would like to see and hear more of our endemic and native feathered friends in your backyard, reach out to Predator Free Dunedin
Then, imagine our main street alive with the sound and sight of native stories, their colourful presence a joyful indication that our environment is healthy, for all of us.
Mauri tū, mauri ora!
Vicki Lenihan – Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe, Ngāi Tahu
tDub©2022
This mahi toi has been produced for the Platform Project, supported by Paemanu: Ngāi Tahu Contemporary Visual Arts.