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  • This paper explores how the Indigenous-led, community-supported campaign #ProtectIhumātao became a site for decolonisation work that nourished productive bicultural relations. For six years, we worked together, alongside others, to stop a transnational corporation building houses on culturally significant, but contested, whenua (land) at Ihumātao, Auckland. Pania draws strength from her Indigenous Māori whakapapa (ancestral relations), and Frances from being a New Zealander of Irish descent. Committing ourselves to the campaign kaupapa (values, principles and plans), we embraced different roles: Pania as a kaitiaki or land protector and Frances as a hoa tū tata or close friend, standing by, ready to assist. Along the way, we became our own whānau (extended family); a kaupapa-based whānau (people mobilised for a shared purpose). Here, we share knowledge from our campaign experiences to explore what becoming whānau means to us in relation to Ihumātao. Thinking and writing at the interface of Māori and Pākehā ways of knowing, we interact with ideas from Māori philosophy and Indigenous–Settler relations. Through telling our stories, we illuminate relational qualities that made our different roles and evolving relationship possible, and glean insights to inform ongoing Indigenous-led, decolonising practices at Ihumātao, and elsewhere.

  • This article theorises the question—what is the role and nature of Indigenous environmental defenders in Aotearoa New Zealand? We explore Māori—the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand—who act as environmental defenders of their lands and waters despite the perpetual insecurity of their constitutional rights and imbalances in power and resources compared with state and corporate actors. The environmental defence of Aotearoa New Zealand by Māori began with the arrival of European explorers’ intent on overturning Indigenous institutions of environmental management that has sustained their peoples for a thousand years. Stemming from case study analysis of Māori environmental defenders at Ihumātao in Māngere and Ōroua River in Manawatū, we propose whenua (land) resilience theory to explain the concomitance of environmental defence and development from an Indigenous perspective.

Last update from database: 10/23/26, 4:11 AM (UTC)