Natalie Robertson, Oriwa, Kimiora and Ashlee Atkins children asleep under pohutukawa tree (facing east)

Te Tai Rawhiti, Te Ika a Maui, Aotearoa.
East Cape, North Island, New Zealand.

Every summer, I return to the lands of my Maori tribe, Ngati Porou, camping at Omaewa, Port Awanui, on the coast where my grandfather grew up. Vehicle access is four-wheel drive only. Family and friends arrive throughout Christmas and New Year in trucks laden with gear.

Nearby, Pokai-Pohatu, our marae (customary communal place) at Tikapa, faces east towards Waiapu, our ancestral river; and Pohautea, our ancestral mountain. Looking back up river, Mount Hikurangi, dominates the skyline, flanked by the mountains Aorangi, Wharekia, Taitai and Whanokao.

At dawn, my cousin sets a fishing-net in the ngutu awa (river mouth or beak). Later in the morning the freshly caught fish sizzling in the pan wakes me up. Crayfish pot returns are less predictable but worth the wait, while fishing long-lines and my cousin’s pig and deer hunting all provide us with wild food. Diving for paua (abalone) is a tradition, but our river is now full of silt from deforestation. Washing out into the sea, the sediment is smothering kaimoana (seafood) beds, our customary food sources.

In the afternoon my cousin’s children sleep together like a pile of kittens, under the huge pohutukawa tree, out of the heat of the day. As evening comes, they compete to sight ‘first star’, a nightly ritual followed by ‘first shooting star’, ‘first satellite’, ‘most satellites in the sky at any one time’ (nine was the record this year) and other ways of acknowledging the heavens.

Our people claim descent from Maui, who hauled this land in as a fish, on one of his many trickster adventures, and we have lived here since the earliest stargazing navigators followed the Milky Way, that long white cloud of stars. From other islands in the Pacific Ocean, they arrived in this place, right here on this beach, where the Waiapu River meets the great sea, Te Moana Nui a Kiwa.