ŪAWANUI A RUAMATUA WAI: MOVEMENTS FROM WATER TO WAI
FEBRUARY 2024 by INGRID HORROCKS & TEAH CARLSON
Cyclone Gabrielle Tairāwhiti, Anniversary Week
Four women spilling out of Lily’s van at Makarori. Three from here, one from elsewhere. Hair, waves, dresses, flapping shirts, thighs, wombs, disks, spines.
When we take our feet to the warm water, bury our toes, a mā whai strokes silently by, wings as fluid as water, all the colours of sand. A kaitiaki.
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On the beach, a fragment of crayfish shell, a reminder of alert red orange.
An image of Carmen’s daughter, Te Waiotu, standing in a river mouth soon after the cyclone, piles of slash behind her. I really love the water, she says. Being detached from it – I get really sad. Really anxious. I just can’t get all the logs out of the water and I can’t clean the water.
Teah asking, baby in arms, but what do we need,
as wāhine ma?
The weight of exhaustion in the air, so humid it makes faces wet.
As Ingrid arrives the wai calls,
she has been cleared to swim after an operation,
the soft inner lining of her womb removed.
Hinemoana holds her in the shallows.
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Four women on the sand. Hair, waves, legs, sticks for drawings and words. Carmen writing first about our kaitiaki,
mā whai, then ma wai, who will do it, and
ko wai, who are we, and
he wai, how can we go back?
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Lily tells about the toxins poisoning the crayfish. Fish exported. Kai moana depleted, sickened, nothing to eat. She draws a crayfish on the tideline.
Two days on, she will stand in the project exhibition space dressed as another kaitiaki, a kōura, crayfish, all claw and boiling rage.
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Up at Ūawa we watch as Mere bends down into the stream with a clarity tube taking samples, the word Disolve on the back of her waders. I love investigating our awa.
Her reference point from the 2018 flood: tuna hung on fence lines, suffocating, you could hear the sound of their gasping.
After the water has bubbled in, she takes aim down the sightline of the tube.
52 centimetres clarity.
She gets right in the river..
19.9 degrees.
Conductivity 574.
DNA captured.
Two snails and one karawai – a tiny cuzzy of Lily’s kōura.
A water boatman, racing round with a couple of oars.
Only when we step out of the river does it become clear how small the space allowed for the awa is, a precious, fragile passage, a canal held lush with riparian planting, moving through fields of maize. We need to start upstream, Mere says. Everything comes from the source.
Beneath all the talk, the awa flows toward the sea, its sound weaving with wind in the harakeke.
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These are some of the most sediment-laden rivers in the world.
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In the cyclone we watched water come from two valleys, then it went dark.
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Being told that that family there, the father with a baby on his hip, lost their home to water. That there, a swimming boy was killed by slash in the sea.
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Drawing stick in hand, Carmen says, Sometimes I get stuck in the darkness, and I thought I better come back to the light. I thought of this place here. Takutai. Where we stand. The tidal form.
At Tatapouri a group feeds stingrays, a circle standing in the moving sea. The whai can recognize the heartbeats of different people. Beat to beat. Pumping vibrations of shared blood and wai.
We are more than half water.
In the sand, Teah maps the river mouth along an MRI of Carmen’s spine, shows the shared pressure points of pain between body and whenua. But as Teah draws the pain a year on, Carmen stands beside her, her body soft, her back tall again, though there is still pain. Her daughter Te Waiotu is not here, but a year on she is up too, surfing, riding waves.
Over the coming days, while feeding her baby, with the help of her whanau, who bend and saw, etch and hold, Teah creates a lightbox, Ū awa nui.
We work together to describe it.
The work embodies layerings of whenua, wai, body and kupu.
It is about pain and the journey of not being believed,
a representation of the devastation but also the beauty that remains.
Map of the mouth of Ūawanui a Ruamatua
Magnetic resonance image of a slipped disk in Carmen’s tūara. The disc bulging out. Pain like childbirth.
These tohu are here..
We can’t ignore that,
We need to pay attention.
We were talking about Papatūānuku, earth mother giving all these signals.
We wanted to make
something beautiful
to embody our wai.
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At sunrise, some of us swim, bed faces softened by watery dreams. The sun rises pink then gold, a karakia is said, then we enter, young and old, the sun shining on us and from us, salt on our tongues and skin, as the earth tilts forward, bending, tilting with all its oceans, taking us with her in her slow, gracious spinning through the sky, moving always toward new light.
Wa-i, we came together and laughed, dreamed, created. Three days or three lifetimes we are not sure, one thing we know is we wove light, in an imperfect time, a creative pressure, we shone, spoke into the unknown and called for sandy beaches, swimming awa and moana, a healthy home for our kaitiaki.
Words gathered by Ingrid Horrocks (Pākehā), Teah Carlson (Ngāti Porou), Carmen Farlie (Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti), and with gratitude to Lily Stender ((Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti) and Mere Tamanui (Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti). The words from Te Waiotu Fairlie (Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti) appeared in a piece in the Guardian on 25 February 2023, in ‘Like a tsunami’: the role of forestry waste in New Zealand’s cyclone devastation. [With thanks to Te Waiotu for permission to use.] Thank you to Amanda Roe for inviting us to swim, and to the whole Ka Mua Ka Muri whānau, for inviting us to participate in their creative collaboration.
