Te tuna

If you want to understand the wetlands, understand the tuna (eel).

The longfin eel — tuna kūwharuwharu — is found nowhere else on earth. It can live for sixty years, eighty, even longer. It grows to two metres. It climbs waterfalls as an elver, wriggling up wet rock in the dark to get inland, and it will cross wet grass at night to get from one water body to another.

And then, once in its life, it goes to sea. Every longfin in Aotearoa swims thousands of kilometres north into the Pacific, somewhere near Tonga, spawns once in deep water, and dies. The larvae drift back on the currents for a year or more, arrive as glass eels, turn into elvers and climb the rivers of this country all over again.

One reproduction, at the end of a lifetime that can be longer than a human career. Which means every big eel taken is one that has not yet bred.

Our tūpuna (ancestors) managed this. Not with a stock model — with tikanga.

The heke, the great migration downstream, happens on specific dark nights, in autumn, usually with rain and a particular wind. People knew the nights. Pā tuna — weirs — were built into the channels, permanent structures owned by particular whānau, with hīnaki (eel trap) set in the gaps. Enormous quantities of eel were taken at once, and then preserved: split, dried on racks, smoked, hung in the wharau, and traded inland.

And there were rules. Eel weirs and eel grounds were owned and inherited, so there was always somebody responsible for a particular stretch of water. You did not fish someone else's pā tuna. Rāhui (temporary prohibition on gathering) closed grounds when they needed to rest. Certain waters were tapu. The first catch was returned. And there were species and sizes left alone — the big old ones in particular were often known individually, fed, and never taken. There are places where a single tuna was recognised over decades.

Compare that with what happened next. Wetlands drained, so nursery habitat gone. Dams and culverts put in with no way for elvers to climb, so hundreds of kilometres of river closed off to a fish that has to go inland to grow and out to sea to breed. Commercial harvest with no allowance for the sixty-year life cycle. The longfin is now in serious trouble, and Māori who have fished the same water for generations have been telling anyone who will listen for a long time.

That is why the Waitangi Tribunal claims about freshwater are not really about ownership in the way they get reported. They are about kaitiakitanga (guardianship) — about who is responsible for a body of water and its whakapapa, and about the fact that the people who managed it sustainably for six hundred years were removed from the decision-making.

Hine-tīterepo's country is where all of this happens. The eel is a creature of the in-between — of the muddy margin, the drain, the estuary, the wet paddock at night.

So here is the step, and I would like you to actually do it.

Find out whether there are tuna in the nearest waterway to your house. Ask someone local, or go and look at dusk. If there are, go and watch them once. If there are not, find out why not — and that answer will teach you more about this country than most things you could read.