Uprising: Walking the Southern Alps of New Zealand by Low Nic

Author:Low, Nic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2021-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

PART II: AROAROKAEHE RANGE, CANTERBURY ALPS. LATE AUTUMN.

The landscape all around us was sacred and storied for Ngāi Tahu, and the key to unlocking it lay in whakapapa. The three rūnaka (councils) who hold mana whenua (authority and guardianship over the land) in this area on the eastern side, Moeraki, Waihao and Arowhenua, have a genealogy describing much of this view. It shows lines of descent from Aoraki and his brothers to the other major mountains in the area, south to the sacred lakes Pūkaki and Takapō, to the ancestor mountains in Te Manahuna (the Mackenzie Basin), down the generations to the Waitaki Valley to Korotuaheka, an ancient village on the east coast.

The chant links Ngāi Tahu to the landscape through genealogy, and is another oral map listing the key landmarks needed to navigate between high country and coast. Like all whakapapa, it’s also a compendium of history: you could write a book about the story behind each line.

Take ‘Ki te taha wahine a Aroarokaehe’ (And to the female side and the Hooker Valley). Aroarokaehe, the mountain range we’d just climbed, was a crew member of the Araiteuru waka, which reached New Zealand only to run aground on a reef at Matakaea (Shag Point), off the far-south Ōtākou coast. She and the other crew swam ashore, then went exploring inland. They had to be back at the canoe by daylight. But some were still out at dawn, and when the sun struck them they turned to stone, and are now important landmarks spread across Te Waipounamu (including the Christchurch Cathedral). Aroarokaehe became a mountain in the foothills twenty kilometres south of here, until Kirikirikatata (Mt Cook Range) convinced her to leave her lowly station and move up into the high Alps at his side. In this tradition, Kirikirikatata carries his grandson, Aoraki, on his shoulders: the highest mountain is a child, supported by the generations who came before.

You sometimes hear the idea that Araiteuru is a mythical waka, and that when people said ‘our tīpuna came here on the Araiteuru’, they were talking in vague, mystical terms. But Araiteuru was the waka (conveyance) by which people arrived here: it’s the name of a navigational star path used by early Polynesian voyagers to reach Aotearoa. A star path is the memorised sequence of stars that rise or set throughout the night at the point on the horizon where you wish to go. When the first arrivals made landfall, they went exploring, and gave those navigational stars’ names to the mountains of their new home, including Aroarokaehe. Recalling the stars as people who crossed the sea, then became mountains when the sun rose (stars not being much use by day), is a damn good way of ensuring that the celestial knowledge was passed on.

All of these ideas unfold from a single line in the chant. And while the chant takes the form of whakapapa, this is not just a metaphorical device. We descend from these mountains because life begins here. As David

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