History of Māori gardens could hold seeds for future

Today, Māori and Pacific people experience more food insecurity than other ethnicities in Aotearoa, because they are likely to have less income.

The places they live are often food deserts – surrounded by fast food outlets and where access to affordable, healthy foods is limited.

My PhD research has revealed a starkly different food history for Māori. Between the 1820s and 1860s, there were more than 8000 hectares of māra kai - food gardens - in Auckland. Without Māori growing food, the city could not have developed as it did, and the settlers might have starved.
 

Māori had a food system that encompassed the whole of the North Island. After early European settlers arrived from the 1840s, Māori grew large volumes of potatoes, cabbages, pumpkins, and peaches, as well as traditional crops, such as kumara and yams.

They shipped wheat from around the coasts to Tāmaki Makaurau and owned more than 50 flour mills around Aotearoa in the middle of the nineteenth century.

An early Tāmaki settler, attorney general William Swainson, wrote in his book, Auckland and its neighbourhood: “The people of Auckland and its neighbourhood were for several years almost entirely supplied by the natives with animal food, fish, potatoes, corn, and firewood; and, to a considerable extent, with labour.”

Producing food on a huge scale to sell to the settlers supported entrepreneurial Māori and their communities. They weren’t just enriching themselves, but providing for communal wellbeing.

While Māori initially engaged with European settlers in ways that benefitted Māori , during the New Zealand Wars, the settlers confiscated massive areas of Māori land, burnt villages, and destroyed gardens and flour mills.

Large-scale food production by Māori ended after the 1860s. Around that time, Europeans started large-scale farms producing their own food and profits.

Today, Māori organisations are tending māra kai in Tāmaki Makaurau to reclaim kai te rangatiratanga - food sovereignty - and to pass on traditional Māori gardening methods. These include maramataka, which involves planting and harvesting according to moon phases, and nurturing the soil.

The Pourewa māra run by Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei is a great example, where they grow traditional kai such as kūmara and taro, along with developing a māra rongoā, healing garden

These māra kai organisations in the 21st century point to the endurance and perseverance of Māori to grow food in Tāmaki Makaurau - and can inspire the future development of the city.

Māra kai is a way to engage with te ao Māori and reconnect with the whenua. Learning to garden is an emotional and spiritual journey that involves listening to the body, the climate, and the environmental signs all around us.

Māra kai are a way to de-colonise food production. Growing kai allows people to put what they want into their bodies. It builds self-sufficiency and offers choices – and for a long time Māori and Pacific people have not had fair food choices.

As well as people growing food, policy changes will be needed to address food inequality and to make healthy food more affordable for all. Regulatory powers could be introduced to increase competition in the supermarket sector and ensure fairer grocery prices.

In Aotearoa, we grow enough food to feed everyone. Yet we have high levels of deprivation and food inequality because of inequalities built into the system, where food is a commodity. Māra kai doesn’t treat food as a commodity, but as a living piece of the earth that’s connected to our collective wellbeing and identity.

My research draws on contemporary māra kai practices and a rich range of materials from the 1800s, including land court records containing Māori narratives about land use, early paintings and drawings of Aotearoa, parliamentary records, the diaries of settlers, and newspapers of the period.

These show that in the 1800s, Māori passed knowledge down through the generations about places to fish, forage in the forest for berries, hunt birds, and catch eels with their bare hands. The entire landscape of Tāmaki Makaurau was managed by Māori as a food garden for the community.

Europeans subsumed Māori food spaces to make their own agriculture. They might say they came across an empty paradise and made it their own, but that meant taking over the most popular māra kai spaces.

I discovered the city of Auckland we know today was built off the back of Māori growing and selling food. Settlements grew around bays where laden waka came ashore and where food markets were held.

My aim is to shine light on this abundant past, in the hope it might help grow a fairer, healthier future for Tamaki.