In 2022 Toi Tangata had the great privilege of being hosted at Waikarā Marae alongside Joe Mcleod for his kaupapa Ngā Kai a te Māori. To say that the whānau and the whenua of Waikarā did half of the work of the wānanga would be an understatement. Since then, our Kai Māori Kai ora team has been following along with the happenings at Waikarā.

Over the summer of 2024 as our own gardens were struggling through the drought, Kai Māori Kai Ora kairārahi, Haylee watched on over Facebook, living vicariously through the kai springing forth from the Waikarā Marae Kai Sovereignty Project. What she would learn though is that this is only the most recent iteration of Waikarā marae extensive relationship with kai.

In this interview we catch up again with Cheryl Tāne, Chairperson of the Waikarā Marae and Urupā Trust, and member of the Te Roroa pātaka committee, committed to the acquisition and preservation of Te Roroa taonga and cultural materials. On behalf of the kaupapa, Cheryl shares some of the journey from ancient taro, to generations long traditions of harvesting mullet, to the "newer" process of learning to care for and nurture, in community, the many garden beds that have been established as part of the kai sovereignty project.

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Ko wai koe, nō hea koe?

Ko Cheryl Tane toku ingoa. He uri tēnei no Te Roroa raua ko Ngāpuhi. Ko Waikara te mārae. 

What are some of the roles you play as a whānau member at Waikara, but also in the wider context of your relations with Te Roroa?

I'm chairperson for our mārae and urupa trust here at Waikara. I'm a mother, wife and nanny, and now a part-time gardener. With Te Roroa, I was on the board for almost nine years. Four of those years as chairperson for the charitable trust, and I’ve been part of activating the Te Roroa pātaka committee, which is a committee whose kaupapa is the acquisition, preservation of Te Roroa taonga and cultural materials.

Does this kai sovereignty project emerge out of that space, or does it emerge out of somewhere else?

It's emerging from hokinga mahara, so all the things we’re doing as we’re reclaiming our reo, our matauranga Māori, we’re looking back for examples from our tūpuna. This kai sovereignty project aligns with all the other wānanga we’re doing in our community or rohe, to look at researching what our tūpuna did. Seeing if those systems and processes still work for us now, and if we need to change them so that we can keep utilising them for the future. 

But our whānau and tipuna have been here for 20 generations. We were always gardeners. There were certain kai that we know our tino tipuna brought over from the islands, and Hawaikii. Those kai are still here, and as we find out more in our research about those tūpuna, about those stories, we’re like, well, we’ve gotta look after that kai. We've gotta make sure that’s around for our moko’s mokos. We’re talking about 600 years ago that kai was here. Will it still be here in 600 years? We’ve gotta do our part to protect that kai.

I’d love to hear more about the mārae kai sovereignty project. Do you want to explain the kaupapa a little bit?

We got funding from Health Research Council and that funding was to do a research project in our papakāinga, which is isolated, rural, Māori, [and] has four generations of our whānau living here. The whānau would participate in a research project around kai sovereignty and the impacts of kai sovereignty on food security for our mokopuna, for our kids. We know it's not unique to our community, but several things have gone on where we haven’t been able to get to a supermarket. One in three tamariki in the Kaipara have been affected by food insecurity since Cyclone Gabrielle. That was primarily where that started. 

We had an aspirational hui for our marae, I think it was the first time as a whānau we’d sat down, all of our generations, workshopped, wānanga, where do we want to go? What do we want for our mokos? So we could really strategise and come up with a development plan for our marae. One of the leading things was around kai sovereignty, about being more self-sustainable, self-reliant and having autonomy around kai. 

One of the excellent things was that there was some putea there for a project manager. So my husband, Jason, was the project manager, my cousin, Taria, was the lead researcher, the marae trust had the strategic oversight and the relationship with HRC, and the whānau were the participants in the project. From our kōrero with the whānau, beach safety and moana safety was super important to the tāne. They really wanted to make sure that this was going to be part of our kaupapa for the kai sovereignty project. So we came up with three themes for our project: one, we would establish a māra kai on our marae reservation; number two, we were going to develop and facilitate a series of beach safety wānanga/kaitiakitanga; and number three, we were going to embed te reo Māori and mātauranga Māori within our māra, the mahi, the wānanga, everything that we did. 

How did it all go? How was it received by the whānau? 

We’ve got a big area next to our mārae, and three years ago we had big bush fires here in Waikarā. 70 hectares of bush were burnt, a lot of beautiful native trees. And it burnt up really close to our marae, right up to the fence. We had to mitigate that threat to the mārae at the time, to cut down a whole heap of gum trees that we had bordering our marae reservation. So those were cut down and then you get on a year later, and that land is now full of gorse and pampus. 

The first thing was to develop the area, and that was going to be the area for the māra. We had the capacity, the capability in our whānau to go and do that mahi. That land was cleared, it was sloped, cut out with a digger. We were really ambitious and made a 400-square-metre taiapa, fenced māra, and then we had another 400-meter māra to grow bigger crops. A rongoā walk from the marae down to the māra, and some storage and working areas. That’s what was developed. 

What did things look like weekly?

Week to week it looked like lots of planning, having to learn how to plan gardens, studying māramataka. We really had to up our game because all of us here have a little garden. Everybody's growing something in Waikarā. Everybody’s got their garden at their whare, but now we’ve got 12 raised beds, and nine big, huge in-ground beds. It was beautiful, we planted it all out, and then we had to maintain it. So it took some working bees scheduled over those 12 months for the whānau, and man did the whānau show up for those. So amazing. We had wānanga over that time, some really cool wānanga. But mainly it was planning, keeping a record of what we were planting. 

There were different kaupapa that our whānau wanted. They didn’t want any chemical sprays, they wanted to grow heirloom or organic as much as we could. So finding those kinds of plants, growing those kinds of seeds, and building up soil. Soil health in that first year was so important, because we already live on sandstone here. So it was building some nutrients into the soil for our plants. It wasn’t easy; it was lots of mahi. 

We had a drought as well. It felt like we had a six-month-long summer. The whānau watering roster was getting a little bit tedious you know, like ‘Oh god this is hoha’, and it was, it was pretty hoha. But it just had to be done. Everyone did it for the community and the benefits of it all. The payoff at the end of the day was just so heart-warming. To be eating your own kai, and sharing your own kai, serving that kai when people come to the mārae. Storing kai for the mārae, so having stable kai stored so when there's a hui here there's something they can start with. And the flowers, we love the flowers, we have flowers everywhere. Dressing your table with flowers and then the kai that you grew, yeah we loved that. It was a real sense of pride for us. 

You’ve already talked about how central whanaungatanga is to your whānau, and how that’s such an important thing that you remember about Waikarā. Have you noticed changes that the project has brought about for the whānau at large, just in the way they think, or, think about kai, think about each other. 

It's just another layer of mahitahi, whanaungatanga, coming in to do mahi together. Which is what we do well here. Whānau are hardworking. There are lots of times when we have these hui and there’s wānanga, but this was a chance to get together outside, in the elements, with our hands in the dirt so the people showed up for that. Some of the whānau that might not necessarily turn up for wānanga or hui, they were there in the māra helping. 

There was a real shift in the focus that I could see within the whānau, applying a lens on what we put into our bodies, and where that kai comes from, the whakapapa of that kai. People were thinking about their health and well-being. So having that māra together, being gardeners together, means that we were producing rongoa for our whānau. It was just a really healthy exercise of exercising by default, by pulling weeds or planting out, digging, then there was the eating of the kai, the sharing of the kai. People started thinking more about their health and well-being, and about what we have been eating. People talked about decolonising our kai. Those patterns that we’ve had over time that haven’t served us.

Do you have a sense of what you hope the kaupapa might look like 40 years from now, or how it might have grown or shifted?

We already had aspirations, of course, past the 12-month research project. We were just going to use that to kickstart us to living and harnessing our rangatiratanga. Returning to and creating, if we needed to, our own systems and processes around kai. Where we’re getting our kai from, what we’re eating, and our relationship with kai. 

We want to move into livestock as well. We know that we are able to produce just off this whenua, eight sources of protein but we still like a steak now and then. The whānau have gone as far and aspirational as, having our own butchery, selling kai, being economically sustainable and being like a leader enough to host other communities or mārae or tauira. They could come out to Waikara and they could walk through our journey, see where our aspirations came from, what seeds we planted, and where we are now in terms of our being able to work towards being sustainable. 

If I think about our vision and our mission for our mārae, our mission is, 'Kia mārae tātou', and our vision is, 'collective well-being is maintained through mana motuhake'. So in 40 years we should still be finding ways to hono, connect to each other our tūpuna and our whenua.