Tūhoe Tuawhenua Trust: The Māori organisation dedicated to connecting youth and whenua
Nestled deep in Ruatāhuna, Te Urewera is where Tūhoe Tuawhenua Trust can be found. A land trust primarily, the organisation has expanded to create a uniquely tailored space for mātauranga to be passed down to the next generation, by inspiring a passion for the outdoors in youth.
The Whenua
Their story begins at the centre of Ngāi Tūhoe history, stretches right through Aotearoa Crown land purchase activities, all the way to today where the Trust is responsible for administering 25 blocks of land in Te Manawa o te Ika , the Tuawhenua region about Ruatāhuna. These blocks of land are the last remaining lands of the Ruatāhuna people, who never sold it to the Crown. Given the sacred nature of this land, the Trust takes its responsibilities to both the whenua and the people extremely seriously.
Stretching across beautiful mountainous valleys, and ancient native forests, the Trust is home to a range of activities. Much of the land is used for beekeeping and honey production, which the Trust administers.
The Ruatāhuna valley – deep in the heart of Te Urewera, where the Tuawhenua Trust is based.
The Trust
Despite being a land trust primarily, Executive Trustee Brenda Tahi says that a growing loss of mātauranga caught the attention of the Tuawhenua trustees, especially the Chair Jim Doherty.
“There was a real issue in the loss of mātauranga and knowledge of our forest and the way our people have lived in it, with generations of whānau moving away from the community or becoming disengaged with it,” says Tahi. “Our young people weren’t as connected to the whenua as they used to be, which was a serious cause for concern.”
From there, the Trust set about establishing Te Whare o Rehua: Connecting Youth with Te Mauri o Ngahere, a programme which aims to create bespoke experiences to foster connection between youth and the natural world around them.
Puke Timoti, leader of our inaugural programme for Te Whare o Rehua, takes his group of young people through some aspects of mātauranga during one of the programme outings.
He Tangata
Tahi says that the programme has been developed on the basis that to reconnect youth with the whenua, they first need to introduce youth to a passion for the whenua and the ngahere which drives their own individual connection with the outdoors.
“To protect and preserve the mātauranga being lost, we needed to introduce it to youth by introducing them to their own relationships with the land,” says Tahi. “What works for one child won’t necessarily be what works for another, so we set about creating a variety of experiences that could speak to the individual interests of our young people.”
Tahi says that the programme is open to any young person from the Tuawhenua lands wherever they may now live.
The Programme
These young women joined Te Oranga o Te Ngahere programme in July 2019. From left: Irihapeti Tamahou (lives in Tauranga), Evelyn Ripia (Rotorua); Puawai Taaheke (Ruatāhuna).
These experiences include a variety of outdoors-focused activities, including working with horses, hunting excursions, biodiversity-learning trips, kaitiakitanga and pest control, history and storytelling-focused trips to the forest amongst others. These activities are led by tutors who share their personal mātauranga and expertise on the subject, and often take form as fully immersed forest-based excursions over the course of a few days.
The focus of each trip is to pass on the knowledge and expertise of that trip's specific tutor to the individual youths that connect with that particular experience.
The Trust is working to develop materials to support each of these streams, including posters and workbooks to support the ongoing learning of the youth involved in the programmes.
Tahi says that it’s one thing to introduce someone to the knowledge, but the key lies within sparking a passion for the outdoors in youth.
“We try different things to engage the kids in a way that gets them excited, and then begin instilling the mātauranga in them from there,” says Tahi. “Once we took a group into the forest by helicopter, and another group got really excited about the prospect of building their own shelter to sleep in for the night, deep in the bush.”
“It helps when they can really connect with their tutor. Some of the kids develop long-lasting connections with their tutors that extend beyond the programme, keeping their love for the whenua alive long after their trips have finished.”
Chair of the Tuawhenua Trust Jim Doherty played a big part in the inspiration of Te Whare o Rehua. Here he explains to the young people the different plants within our ngahere in the inaugural programme in July 2018
The Future
In the future, the Trust hopes to expand its mātauranga-based offerings to youth to a variety of other activities and cultural traditions, such as rongoā, waiata in ngahere, eeling and fishing as well as completing a business model to support the sustainability of the mahi going forward.
Tahi says that the Trust is working towards building a future which fosters the symbiotic relationship between the people and the land, by educating a new generation about the traditions which have supported their people for years.
“For now, we have our honey business and Te Whare o Rehua as one avenue, but we’re going to continue building up our people to take care of our land, which in turn then takes care of our people. It’s about whenua and tangata existing in harmony.”
The nature of most of the Tuawhenua land means that it will never be used for common land-uses, such as pasture-based farming. Rather, the Trust will continue to seek out ways to sustain both land and people sustainably – starting with rangatahi.
“By teaching our youth the importance of the whenua and the ngahere, we’re investing in our future. Our land and our people will always be interconnected,” says Tahi. “This land is special – it holds great significance for the Ruatāhuna people and for Ngai Tūhoe as a whole, so it requires special forms of use and long-term goals to preserve and protect it, whilst at the same time sustaining the people of these lands.”