The images presented document aspects of progress and growth for a significant wetland and coastal restoration project taking place at Kuku, Horowhenua, southwest coast of North Island, Aotearoa, New Zealand.Footnote ¹ The work is undertaken by representatives from various hapū known as Ngäti Te Rangitäwhia, Te Mateawa, Ngäti Manu, and Ngäti Kapumanawawhiti ki Kuku, who are affiliates of a larger tribal group, or iwi, Ngäti Tükorehe. The research project (undertaken while working as senior curator Mätauranga Mäori at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington) links cultural landscape issues and activities to the concerns for cultural property as revered taonga with special qualities within museum collections. The term taonga is relevant to understanding culturally venerated items within museum holdings while honoring their associated peoples, tribal lands, and waterways from where they derive. As significant cultural material, taonga are valued because of their associations. Cultural landscapesFootnote ² are also well regarded as land-, sea-, and water-based taonga—an encompassing term that denotes their intrinsic value and intricate natural, cultural, and spiritual interrelationships. As museum professionals rethink cultural property issues in different ways, the academic research has also embraced the concept of land- and water-based taonga to bolster ecological, cultural, and spiritual contexts that persist in ancestral lands in tribal tenure.

The activities of ancestors and their ensuing generations in Kuku have influenced and shaped the lands, waterways, and resources over time. The overarching environmental program for wider tribal land holdings in Horowhenua aims to restore biodiversity and improve relationships between peoples and their remaining natural resources. The action taken for dune wetlands is a forerunner to a range of projects and processes that aim to reinstate health to the whole tribal environment, from the mountains to the sea, an area significantly modified by intensive agricultural operations.

The understanding of Kuku's cultural landscape is founded on lands and waterways that remain in hapü (collective of families) and whänau (family) ownership in the first place: where a range of close relationships and associations have accumulated over generations between peoples; land holdings; and freshwater, marine, and forest resources. Recontextualizing narratives of place through detailed discussion and reexamination have generated dialogue that renews the prerequisite to transfer what remains of customary relationships and knowledgeFootnote ³ about the coastline, its former papa kainga (ancestral settlement areas), related wähi tapu (burial grounds), and contiguous dune wetland (of which Te Häkari wetland is a part) to new generations of environmental guardians.

Current responsibilities to place at Kuku stem from early nineteenth-century inter-iwi contests. Activities of those times established other intertribal alliances and allegiances. They also initiated the rights afforded by long-term occupation and settlement through cultivations and resource use, the interment of ancestors in designated places, the shared collective enterprises or other events that cemented ties with related tribes,Footnote ⁴ and the experiences and protocols that accumulated between spiritual entities and people in natural areas. The tribal farming enterprise offers economic support to tribal shareholders.

Because the coast and dune wetland are associative cultural landscapes, there are ongoing, powerful relations with remaining natural and spiritual elements, which require contemporary kaitiaki (environmental guardians) to actively protect their values and environmental principles therein. Respected leaders within the tribe persist in using whakapapa (genealogical narratives) to emphasize how important it is to know the intricacies of interrelationships between the people, their lands, and their responsibilities to the tribal region.

The focus of the extensive environmental program is to devise models that reemphasize former commonplace interlinkages between linguistic, cultural, and biological diversity and to then catalyze a range of necessary activities that reinstate mauri or life vitality to once highly valued ecosystems.Footnote ⁵ The model responds to the late twentieth- or twenty-first-century consequences of human demands on the global environment. The principles behind indigenous language or cultural revitalization are also directly related to the aims of improving environmental futures where biocultural diversity is a local ideal for kaitiaki in Kuku. What remains of local knowledge around fragmented natural ecosystems has been consolidatedFootnote ⁶ for environmental taonga.

All work activated for the coastal dune wetland system is devised to sustain and improve what remains of tangible and intangible aspects within ancestral landscape. The program of activities restores valued biocultural diversity; the relationships between peoples and their remaining natural resources; and returns health to a special coastal and dune land environment, albeit significantly modified by agricultural practice. The research combines artistic, photographic, and academic practice. These combined methods explore environmental issues facing local regions and envisage more effective ways to protect and enhance valued ecosystems within cultural landscape. In some ways such research equates with how curators negotiate the intricacies of knowledge, associated tribal authority, and context that exists around and within valued cultural material within collections. Current museum research actively rebuilds relationships between cultural material and their peoples as descendants of the creators of origin.

The images (Figures 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, & 8) included here indicate a range of before-and-after changes made for a dune wetland stream system. Since 2002 the collated images highlight the differences made when water levels were reinstated in a dune wetland region. Water clearly helps revert marginal pasture to a more natural state, as is evident alongside a natural stream system that reflows from a formerly drained wetland, known as Te Häkari. The name Te Häkari refers to a feast or an area appropriate for its once highly valued food, fish, bird, weaving, and temporary house-building resources. By impounding natural waterways with temporary weirs or blocking artificial drain outlets, water returns to contour and rejuvenates a series of interrelationships, that had been rendered invisible by intensive farming practice.

Figure 1.

Te Häkari Stream before rehabilitation, July 2003. Photograph by Paula Loader.

Figure 2.

Raised water levels from late July 2003 to January 2005; January 30, 2005. Photograph by Huhana Smith.

Figure 3.

Wet Delta Region, September 2005. Photograph by Huhana Smith.

Figure 4.

Te Häkari Stream, June 2, 2006. Photograph by Huhana Smith.

Figure 5.

Wet Delta Region, November 26, 2006. Photograph by Huhana Smith.

Figure 6.

Wïwï, November 26, 2006. Photograph by Huhana Smith.

Figure 7.

Mainly Wïwï, November 26, 2006. Photograph by Huhana Smith.

Figure 8.

Wet Delta Region, February 23, 2007. Photograph by Huhana Smith.

The common Mäori wïwï describes a number of species of Juncus including Juncus gregiflorus, a reed that grows profusely in wetlands, stream banks, and other damp places. In observing the changes, wïwï is a plant tolerant of a wide range of conditions. Reversing water drainage in the wetland region mitigates the damage created by cows pugging and polluting the marginal pasture with effluent. Wïwï produces large quantities of microscopic seed that remain viable in the soil for many years. Therefore when the reinstated stream flowed from Te Häkari wetland again, the stream literally remembered how to be a reed- and sedge-rich riparian area. Such luscious growth has regenerated dense, deep, and light green clumps of narrow, wiry stems, which are then buffeted and shaped by northwesterly winds. Such prolific growth of wïwï, other reeds, and sedge grasses assist in alleviating surface and subsurface water quality issues caused by agricultural nitrification. Natural vegetation filters the contamination generated by unsustainable dairy farming practices. Revegetating stream banks and excluding stock creates the best cleanser and buffer to pollutants reaching water, all important for improving habitats for biodiversity and their associated benefits for improved human well-being.

With such environmental transformation underway around Te Häkari dune wetland and stream within a coastal tribal dairy farming operation comes the notion of fluidity: a way of thinking or generating knowledge around the natural and cultural environment. The thinking revolves around waterways coiling toward the ocean, or wetlands with their associated waterways literally recovering their memories and becoming healthy wetland streams again. The potential of such fluid thinking reimagines peoples' sense of belonging to place and actively reinstates their relationships to tribal land and waterways as valued taonga. In playing with the potential and creativity that arises from active and effective ecosystem restoration, the results encourage and reconnect human relationships to the fish, plants, birds, and animals that inhabit and feed at this rich delta region. This fluidity and flexibility in thinking extends to the complex research processes conducted around taonga as valued cultural material within museum collections. Any barrages and blockages to people accessing their culturally revered material are carefully removed or cleared by curatorial research, often with the active involvement of related participants. In these moments of reconnection, reconciliation, and healing, water flows again as tears.