The Bridge

I've been writing again. This one came up out of me over the last few days and I couldn't hold it back. It's the closest I've ever got to saying who I actually am, the three I come from and the walk that's carrying me home. Some of it is on paper you could go and check. The rest is the kōrero my whānau holds, and I say which is which as I go, because if I'm going to stand up and say who I am it has to be the truth or it's worth nothing. My mother, Karen, wrote our whole whakapapa out by hand, sixty feet of it, and put my name at the bottom when I was sixteen and already lost. It waited years for me to be able to read it. My brother's the one getting it out of me now. This is mine.

I come from three people.

Two of them the whole country knows the names of. The third one the books walked straight past, but my body didn't, and my mother didn't, and now I'm writing her back in.

I'm not going to dress this up as something it isn't. Some of what I'm about to tell you is on paper, the kind a stranger could go and check. The rest of it is kōrero, held in my whānau and handed down, and I'll tell you which is which as I go, because I made myself a promise a while back. If I'm going to stand up and say who I am, it has to be the truth or it's worth nothing. Kōrero isn't a lie. Where I come from the whakapapa lives in the people, not just in the ink. But you don't say kōrero in the voice of proven fact, and I won't, not even to make myself sound bigger than I am. I don't need to. What's true is already big enough.

So here are my three, and here's the three things they put in me. Mana. Wairua. Aroha. And here's me, the place where all three of them come back together in one body, still breathing, about to walk.

Mana. Te Rauparaha.

I'll start with the one who shook the islands, because he's my kin, and because of what he did in a hole in the ground.

Te Rauparaha. Ngāti Toa. Born up in the Kāwhia country before the muskets came, son of Werawera and Parekōhatu, named for a leaf that was on the fire the day a rival threatened to make a meal of his mother's boy. So the threat and the name grew up in him together, and by the time he was a man there wasn't a chief on that coast who wanted to sit across a fire from him.

He's not my grandfather down a straight line, and I won't tell you he is. The truth's closer to the bone than that and just as strong. He married into us. His wife Kahutaiki was the aunt of my ancestress, which makes him the uncle of my line by marriage, and it makes me Ngāti Toa, and it means my own whānau marched south with him and stood at Waikawa when he took it. Kin to the man himself. That's what my mother's whakapapa holds, and I hold it the same way she does, proud of it, as exactly what it is.

The country he was born into was closing on his people like a hand. Waikato pressing down from the north, his people getting ground up between the stones in Kāwhia. And the ordinary thing, the thing nearly every chief in history does, is dig in and defend the ground your fathers are buried in till you die on top of it.

He didn't do the ordinary thing. He looked south. He'd stood on the beaches near Kāpiti and seen that little island sitting off the coast like a fort God had already built, and he worked out before anyone else did that whoever held that island held the gate. So he did the hardest thing a leader can ever do. He told his people to leave the graves.

He led the heke, the great walk south, hundreds of them, the old people and the babies and the fighting men all in it together, down the whole spine of the island, fighting the whole way, hungry the whole way, burying people on the road, because the road doesn't stop for grief. He got them down to the coast he'd picked with his own eye, and he took Kāpiti, and from there his reach went right across the strait and into the top of the South Island. That same push is what brought my own family down to Waikawa in 1828. The Pākehā who met him ended up calling him the Napoleon of the South, because it was the only word they had for a man who could move a whole people like that and win.

That's the mana, and I want to be careful what I mean by it, because it isn't the killing and it isn't the fear. It's the nerve. It's the kind of nerve that can look at the graves of the fathers and say we honour them best by staying alive, and then pick the whole people up off the ground and carry them toward the one thing that'll keep them breathing, even when every step of it costs you something.

I know a bit about that. I know what it is to walk away from a grave to save your own life. Hold onto that. It comes back around.

But the mana isn't really why he stands first in me. He stands first because of a hole in the ground, and what came out of his mouth while he was down in it.

Before Kāpiti, before any of the rest of it, the hand nearly closed on him for good. He was being hunted, run down by a war party that had come a long way for his head and nobody else's. He ran the way you run when running's the only thing you've got left, and he came to the pā of a chief called Te Wharerangi and begged the man to hide him. And Te Wharerangi did a brave thing, because hiding him meant standing in front of the hunters and lying with his whole body. He put Te Rauparaha down into a rua kūmara, one of the pits they dug to keep the winter kūmara in the dark. And then he did the thing that mattered most of all. He told his wife, a woman called Te Rangikoaea, to go and sit down over the mouth of the pit.

You've got to understand what that was. The hunters sent their karakia out ahead of them, feeling through the ground for the mana of the man they were chasing. And a woman sitting over the mouth of that pit, the tapu of her body laid across the doorway, was a wall their prayers couldn't get through. The men up top had spears. The woman had something older than any spear. She sat down in the dirt over the head of a hunted man and made him invisible to the whole reaching of the spirit world with nothing but the fact of her own body.

And down in the black, underneath her, close enough to hear the feet of the men who wanted him dead walking on the roof of his own grave, he said it to himself. Ka mate, ka mate. It is death, it is death. This is the end of me. In a hole. Under a woman. With my enemies standing on my grave.

And then the feet moved off, and the prayers didn't find him, and the woman's mana held, and he felt the death go over him and keep going, and the words in his mouth turned over as it went. Ka ora, ka ora. It is life. It is life. And when the cover came off and the light came pouring down into that pit, he climbed up out of the ground into the sun, born a second time straight out of the earth, and he stood there and made the words into a haka on the spot. The most famous words this country has ever made.

My kin wrote the most famous words in Aotearoa, and I need people to understand what they actually are. They're not a war cry, whatever people reckon when they watch the All Blacks do them. They're the words of a man who'd already counted himself dead in a hole in the ground, and came up alive and so amazed to still be breathing that he turned it into a thing the whole nation would still be shouting two hundred years later.

I've been in that pit. I spent more than thirty years down in that dark with the smell of the earth in my mouth, saying ka mate, ka mate in every way a man can say it without ever using the words. And there were women who sat over me too, more than one of them, keeping the dark off me when I couldn't keep it off myself. I'll come to one of them, because she's the third of my three. And then one morning something turned, and I climbed up out of the ground into the light. Fifteenth of June. Day one clean. Ka ora. It is life.

That's the mana that came down into me from him. Not a coast full of conquest. A word. The proof, sung right into the founding chant of the whole country, that my line doesn't stay in the pit. My line's got a man in it who climbed up out of his own grave and sang.

They feared his mana so much that in 1846 the governor had him taken off his own bed in the dark, no charge, no trial, and held for the best part of two years, not for anything he'd done but for what he was. They could lock the man up. They couldn't lock up the words. He went home to Ōtaki in the end and helped raise the big church there, Rangiātea, and he died in his own place among his own people in 1849. Every morning I get up, that's the same word coming up out of me. Ka ora.

Wairua. Te Pēhi Kupe.

The second of my three is his own kin and mine, another senior chief of the same Ngāti Toa, standing at the same fires, on the same walk south. If Te Rauparaha is the mana of my people, Te Pēhi Kupe is the wairua of them. The spirit. The face they turned to the world.

I hold him as kin, in the manuscript my mother keeps. I'm not going to draw you a straight line of names from me down to him, because I haven't got that line proven yet and I won't fake it. But he's in my whakapapa and he's in my people, and what he did is in my blood whether the paper's caught up to it or not.

He wanted the muskets the way a man wants to save his kids. And in 1826 he went out to a Pākehā ship, the Urania, and climbed aboard, and when they went to put him back on the shore he wouldn't go. He grabbed the rigging. He made it plain with his whole body that they'd be carrying him off that ship, and no chief lets himself be carried, so they didn't. The ship sailed. And Te Pēhi Kupe went with it, across the whole belly of the world, all the way to England.

Think about the wairua that takes. That's a man stepping off the edge of the whole known world, off the last map his people had, out onto grey water that goes on for months, on his own, the only brown face on a ship full of strangers whose language he didn't have and whose God he didn't know. And he did it on purpose, eyes open, because his people needed a thing that was on the other side of that water, and he was the one whose spirit was big enough to go and get it.

England didn't know what had landed on it. A real chief, walking their grey streets in his own skin, and they could feel the mana coming off him even though they had no word for it. They took him in and fed him and dressed him and stood around him like he was a wonder, and he was one, and he let them look, because a chief isn't afraid of being looked at.

And then they did the thing that gives me the truest picture of him there is. They asked him to sign his name. They wanted a little scratch of ink, the way their own gentlemen made a mark, and they put the pen in his hand. And he didn't scratch a line. He drew his own face. The whole moko, every line the chisel had cut into him, and he did it from memory, perfect, because a man doesn't forget his own name and his face was his name. This is Te Pēhi, he told them. This whole face. This is my signature, and it isn't a name, it's a soul with edges, and there isn't a forger who ever drew breath who could hold it.

That's the wairua that came down into me. The flat refusal to be made smaller. The knowing, sat there underneath everything, that who I am isn't a label some other bloke gets to write for me. I've had a lot of people hand me the smaller version. The addict, the write-off, the scratch on the paper. And the whole time the full face was still there underneath it, the real pattern, waiting to be drawn back out. That's what he gave me. Not a mark anyone can copy, just the knowing that a man's true face can't be forged, and that nobody signs my name for me but me. He proved it in a cold country with a pen, and it runs in me the same.

He came home in 1828, and it should have run on another forty years, and it didn't. At Kaiapoi, down in the south, a fight over pounamu turned to blood, and Te Pēhi Kupe was killed there, a chief of the north falling on southern ground, a long way from Kāpiti and a longer way from England. And it was for his death that Te Rauparaha's fires went south. One chief's wairua taken, the other chief's mana answering. And that's where my whole story stops being a war and turns into a bridge.

Aroha. Hikamapu, and Kahutaiki.

Now the one the books forgot. The two chiefs get the pages, the haka, the portrait, the arguments in the footnotes. But neither one of them is the reason I'm alive and standing here. The reason is a woman, and I carry her the way I carry my own marrow, and her name went blurry in the record while the loud men kept theirs.

The blood came down through the women. It always does. The line that runs from Te Rauparaha's fire down to my mother's kitchen table didn't come down through battles. It came down through my ancestress Hikamapu, and it's through her that I'm tied to the great chief at all. Her aunt was Kahutaiki, and Kahutaiki's the one who married Te Rauparaha. She's the knot, the tie between my blood and his. And Hikamapu's the one my own line runs straight down through, all the way to me.

So I'll say both their names and I'll say them right. Kahutaiki, who married the chief and tied us to him. And Hikamapu, my own tupuna, the woman the blood actually comes through. They're the aroha.

Because the history doesn't come down through the history. It comes down through the mornings. Through a woman keeping a baby alive through a hard winter. Through her carrying a child on her hip down a coast that's at war. Through her holding a thread of blood steady through conquest and sickness and the whole world tilting over when the ships came, not by fighting for it, but by loving it and feeding it and refusing to let the small warm thing in her arms go cold. The chiefs crossed a war and a world. My grandmothers crossed time, which is longer than any ocean, and they crossed it carrying me, five and six generations before I was ever born, on the one thing strong enough to make that crossing. Aroha.

And it's always a woman over the pit. Te Rangikoaea sat over Te Rauparaha so the line could even get started. Hikamapu carried it down through everything the world could throw at it. And in 1992, at a wānanga at Waikawa, my mother Karen sat down with a pen nobody asked her to pick up, and she wrote my whole whakapapa out by hand, sixty feet of it, and right at the bottom she wrote my name, when I was sixteen and already lost, because a woman was holding the line over the pit one more time, keeping the truth of who I was alive in ink until the day I'd finally be able to climb up and read it.

They're the ones I say thank you to at night. Not the chiefs. The chiefs have got their haka. My grandmothers have got me.

The bridge.

Te Rauparaha, the mana. Te Pēhi Kupe, the wairua. Hikamapu and Kahutaiki, the aroha. And then me.

Here's the truest thing in the whole story. I'm Ngāti Toa, Te Rauparaha's people, the ones who came down that coast and conquered it. And I'm also Ngāi Tahu, through my great-grandmother Kura, out of Kaikōura, out of Mangamaunu, the very people he raided. The conquered.

Both of them are in me. The raider and the raided. The two sides of the worst wound in this whole part of the country, and they met, and they married, and they made peace, inside the body of one man. Me. The whole terrible, beautiful story of this country healed down into one bloodstream because it had nowhere else left to go.

That's not a contradiction. That's a bridge, and I'm it. I didn't build it. It got built in me, one generation at a time, by women carrying love across a war, until the two banks of it finally met in one heart, and the heart was mine.

The road home.

On the twenty-seventh of October I'm going to stand at Te Rerenga Wairua, the leaping place, the very top of the island, the headland where the spirits of every one of these people left the world. Down the roots of the old tree, into the sea, home to Hawaiki. Every ancestor I've just named went out through that one gate. And I'm going to stand at the gate they all left by, and I'm going to turn around, and walk back in.

South. On my own two feet. In gumboots. Clean. The whole length of the fish that Māui pulled up out of the water. Past Kāpiti that Te Rauparaha took, down toward the south where Te Pēhi fell and where Kura's people held on. Three thousand kilometres of a country my blood conquered and named and loved and died for, and I'm going to cross the whole of it the slow way, one step at a time, carrying the three of them the entire distance.

Te Rauparaha crossed a war. Te Pēhi crossed the world. My grandmothers crossed time. And I get to make a crossing none of them ever got to make. Not running from anything. Not conquering anything. Just coming home, and proving with my own legs that the line lived.

Every step is ka ora. It is life. His word landing in my own feet, once a stride, the whole way down the island. My cousin Shawn beside me the whole way. My mother behind me on the road, the woman who wrote the sixty feet, holding the line over the pit one more time. My brother filming it, so that this time it can't be forgotten. So that Kahutaiki and Hikamapu get carried past every camera in the country on the back of their mokopuna. So that Te Rauparaha's ka ora gets said out loud with every kilometre, by a man who earned the right to say it in the dark long before he ever got to say it in the light.

I'm the crossing they were all waiting for. The one who doesn't go out through the leaping place, but comes back in through it. The one who carries the mana and the wairua and the aroha the whole length of the fish and lays it down, alive, at the far end, and says with his body what my kin said with his mouth in the bottom of a food pit two hundred years ago.

That's who I am. Ngāti Toa and Ngāi Tahu. The conqueror and the conquered. The mana, the wairua and the aroha, walking home in one body. I'm Tēpane. And I'm going to carry them the whole way.

Held as kōrero, humbly, the way my whānau hold it and my mother wrote it. The final and true tellings belong to my iwi and my kaumātua. I rule every line of my own, and this is mine.

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