Through My Feet I Come to Know Her: (Re)Storying and Restoring Our Embodied Relationships to Whakapapa and Whenua through Hīkoi (Walking)

Abstract

Walking in the footsteps of our ancestors can provide important ancestral precedents that can support Indigenous wāhine (women) in Aotearoa in working through the challenges we might face today and into the future. At the end of 2020, a group of seven Raukawa wāhine re-walked the journey of their ancestress Māhinaarangi. She walked, whilst heavily pregnant, from the lands of her people on the East Coast of Aotearoa to those of her husband, Tūrongo, in the central North Island. Her hīkoi (walk) offers significant conceptual and physical maps that speak to mātauranga (knowledge) and traditions about childbirth and mothering; the relationships between tribes and between people and the land; intimate knowledge of diverse environments; and endurance and courage to move through space to new lands, all done with a newborn baby. Māhinaarangi was a cartographer in her own right—mapping her story, history, language, tradition, ceremony, knowledge, and therefore herself and her descendants into the land upon which her footsteps fell. Through re-walking her journey, we both take something of that place with us and leave something of ourselves there and thus are involved in (re)storying and (re)storing ancestral places with our own footsteps. Retracing the journeys of our ancestors does more than memorialise their feats; rather, in placing our footprints along their pathways, we reclaim and remake place in uniquely Indigenous and Māori ways.