Māori customary land stewardship

Māori customary land stewardship describes a system in which tribes and clans hold the land and care for its forests, preserving them for birds and cutting trees judiciously. The novel contrasts this understanding of land as a living, collectively governed inheritance with colonial approaches that convert forests into resources for settlement and sale.

Land, authority, and care

During a forest excursion, Arana and Kahu explain that Māori land belongs to tribes and clans, which maintain forests for birds and limit tree cutting. Their account makes stewardship both a practice of restraint and an expression of collective authority: decisions about trees belong within relationships among communities, land, and wildlife. The forest is not simply timber awaiting extraction; its continued integrity matters in its own right.

The explanation is inseparable from place. Kahu points out sacred pōhutukawa trees and springs, while the group enters the forest of Tāne, where the layered canopy shelters the ground from rain. These details present the forest as a connected landscape with cultural and ecological significance, rather than as an undifferentiated stock of usable trees.

Pressure on customary tenure

The narrative also makes clear that customary stewardship does not guarantee control over land. Aihe interrupts to say that some tribal chiefs, acting greedily, sell relatives’ land to white settlers associated with the New Zealand Company. The contrast reveals an internal dispute over land sales as well as an external pressure: customary authority is vulnerable when land is transferred into a settler economy, and the consequences fall on the wider kin group, not only on the seller.

This conflict echoes the book’s treatment of other Indigenous land relations. In New France, Mari’s knowledge of eels and their traps is practical expertise rooted in the river, while Père Crème recognizes that the Mi’kmaq love the country being taken from them. Later, Sosep warns that settlers, their animals, boats, and nets increasingly diminish Mi’kmaw access to food and land. These episodes are not Māori customs, but they sharpen the novel’s broader contrast between Indigenous relationships to place and colonial expansion.

Narrative significance

The stewardship described by Arana and Kahu offers a direct alternative to the logic of clearing and commercial exploitation that recurs across the book. Their account joins land tenure, ecological care, and collective responsibility: forests are maintained for other life, and tree cutting is measured rather than unlimited. Aihe’s intervention prevents that account from becoming idealized, showing how customary practices can be undermined by contested decisions and settler demand.

The episode’s form matters as well. Arana and Kahu insist that their country cannot be fully explained apart from living in it; the group’s walk supplies the places and relationships their words describe. Stewardship therefore appears not as an abstract rule alone, but as situated knowledge carried through observation, cultural meaning, and decisions about what may be taken from the forest.