Te oranga

There is an old way of saying it: he wahine, he whenua, e ngaro ai te tangata. By women and by land, people are sustained — and without them, people are lost. The same word, whenua, means land and it means placenta. That is not a coincidence or a pun. It is a claim about how life works.

When a pēpi (baby) is born, the whenua — the placenta — is buried in the whenua — the land. Often at the papakāinga (home base / ancestral home), at the marae, on the whānau block. That child is now literally planted somewhere. It is why, when a person is asked ko wai koe, nō hea koe (where you are from) — who are you, where are you from — the answer is a mountain and a river before it is ever a street address. You are from a place because part of you is in it.

So let me walk you through an ordinary day and show you where Papatūānuku is in it.

You wake up and drink water. That water fell as Ranginui's rain, ran through her body, filtered through rock and root, and came to your tap. Tangaroa holds the sea, but the fresh water moving through the land is her circulation.

You eat. Whatever it is — bread, kūmara, meat, an apple — it grew out of her or it grew out of something that ate something that grew out of her. There is no meal that has not passed through her body first. Karakia before kai is not superstition and it is not table manners. It is acknowledging that something died or was taken, and naming where it came from.

You get sick, and in the old world you went to her for that too. Rongoā (traditional medicine) — kawakawa for the gut and for cuts, kūmarahou for the chest, harakeke (flax) for binding, mānuka for almost everything. Those are not folk remedies bolted onto a spiritual system. They are the pharmacy of a mother who is also a healer. And the tohunga (expert / priest) who gathered them took only what was needed, from plants that could spare it, with a karakia first, because you do not raid your own grandmother's cupboard.

You die, and you go back into her. Not as an ending — as a return. The tangihanga (funeral rites) takes three days because there is a lot to say, and at the end of it a person is placed into the earth and Papatūānuku takes them. Hine-nui-te-pō receives the wairua (spirit); Papatūānuku receives the body. Nothing is discarded.

That is the loop. Born out of her, fed by her, healed by her, returned to her.

Now — the honest part. That loop is under strain, and Māori environmental thinking is not sentimental about it. Rivers that were swimmable are not. Wetlands that fed whole communities were drained on purpose. Soil is going into the sea. In te ao Māori that is not an environmental problem in the abstract. It is an injury to a relative, and there is a word for the wrongness of it: it is a breach of the relationship, and the mana of everyone involved goes down with it.

Which is also why the response is not despair. You do not walk away from a relative because she is unwell. You turn up.

So here is the first step, and keep it small enough that you will actually do it. Learn the name of the awa — the river or stream — nearest to where you live. Not the road it runs under. Its name. Then go and stand at it once. That is a visit. Everything else — the planting, the picking up, the giving back — gets easier once she stops being scenery and becomes someone you know the name of.