Figure 7.1: The Wairoa River, near Tauranga, circa 1918 Photograph by Frederick George Radcl¡ffe. Reproduced courtesy of the FG Radcliffe Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library (G-6933-½).

identity. This ancestral landscape was therefore a trust that Tauranga Māori were bound to pass on to their descendents.

Many individual components of the ancestral landscape are undoubtedly taonga, including urupā, wāhi tapu, kāinga, mahinga kai sites, and certain maunga (mountains) and awa (rivers) of particular significance. However, they cannot simply be considered as discrete components. As Desmond Kahotea points out:

The use of the concept ‘ancestral landscape’ has emerged where there has been a history of the artificial separation of cultural landscape into discrete and ‘manageable’ entities (sites and places) created for cultural resource management purposes … This approach isolates cultural sites from the cultural context for which they have been created and the meanings that remain for tangata whenua.⁶⁸

The significance of any one taonga, considered as a component of the ancestral landscape, can only be understood within the context of the whole which gives it its meaning. The rights of rangatiratanga, and the responsibilities of kaitiakitanga, were directed towards

68. Document T18, pp 11–12