maintaining the integrity of the ancestral landscape, and with it the tribal identity of the people.

A strong spiritual link undoubtedly existed between each hapū and the lands and seas over which they held the rights of rangatiratanga and the responsibilities of kaitiakitanga. The exercise of their kaitiakitanga, and communal participation in gathering resources from these taonga, was key to maintaining the tribal identity of the people. It reinforced the bonds between the people, and between them and their tūpuna. As Taiawa Kuku explained: ‘To take away any part of our land or sea is to nibble away at the very fabric of our being. Take away enough of our taonga and we simply cannot exist.’⁶⁹

The underlying reasons for this were indicated to us by Mark Anthony Nicholas of Pirirākau:

Without our whenua tupuna, we cannot reach fulfilment, we maintain a state of stagnant waiting for generation after generation after generation. It is a numbness, a void, a return to the darkness where living was as nebulous as space and where thought was unable to be carried.⁷⁰

It is self evident that Tauranga Māori no longer have authority and control over most of their ancestral landscape. Much of this loss is comparatively recent. Te Aroha Luttenberger remembered her kuia and koroua:

were very much in control of all things pertaining to the papakainga. Not so today. Strangers today dump their rubbish and old car wrecks over the cliff desecrating our urupa. They don’t know there is an urupa there and they probably don’t care...⁷¹

The gradual result is a loss of the ancestral landscape, and with it, tribal identity. As Huikakahu Kawe of Ngāi Te Ahi lamented,

Slowly we are losing our culturally identifiable footprints and our connections to significant sites. The land is being bulldozed and changed to such an extent that the relationship that we have with it is irrevocably changed. The contours of the land which we were connected with are now no longer there. We say to each other... ‘Where has that hill gone that we used to play on? Ha, that’s right, there it is.’ It’s now down in what used to be our swamp where houses now stand.⁷²

In sum, the evidence of the many tangata whenua witnesses who appeared before us impressed on us the manifest depth and consistency of feeling for their remnant ancestral

69. Document J21, p 3

70. Document B6, p 8

71. Document G27, p 4

72. Huikakahu Kawe, brief of evidence, 26 June 2006 (doc R21), p 6