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— While I'm working on you,

if there are some places where I'm going too deeply,

you just let me know.

If it's bringing things up for you, you let me know.

— Yeah.

You're actually in control,

although I'd like to think I am.

I believe healing was always around us,

no matter what age we were.

I don't know how we understand it,

but we lived it.

Feel that one?

— That one's okay. — Yeah?

Even though it's holding?

— That's fine. — Yeah. Cool.

I don't know how we knew,

but we just followed the examples.

Breathe.

As a young child, I can remember being told

to put my hand on certain people

and leave it in a certain space,

and then they would say, "Oh, I can feel it coming through."

Whatever guidance that was,

it was just knowing.

You alright? — Mhm.

Au I tunei. My name is Atarangi.

My first trauma, if you like,

was in the womb.

When my mother was trying to birth me,

it was a very difficult birth for her.

And it was my grandmother,

who helped me come through into this world.

Through her,

that is the reason why I do what I do.

No, no. Come, come, come.

You are so beautiful pregnant.

— Hi! Yes, I'm still pregnant.

— So beautifully!

— Kia ora.

— Kia ora.

Oh!

— I don't know, everything just-

I'm just like something happened.

— Um, I need, Manuka,

can I have a roll up, please?

I already know, prior to who's coming to the house,

why they're coming.

If they're coming with their ancestors,

whether they have trauma in the womb,

that all comes to me prior

to people arriving.

Just gonna give a bit of a nudge.

Right there! That's...shoulder.

— Yeah, I can feel the head moving when you do that.

— Yeah.

I knew at 3 o'clock this morning,

this baby was out of alignment,

and my tummy was very painful on the left.

That's how it comes to me.

They come in my body.

I get body-pain, severely.

It's this side, eh?

Patient: Yeah, it's, that's the sore side.

Awhitia: Okay.

Breathe.

Kia ora.

Ko Awhitia Mihaere toku ingoa,

he uri ahau no Ngati Porou, Ngati Kahungunu,

Rongowhakaata,

Ngai Taamanuhiriite

taha toku mama.

I te taha toku papa no Maniapoto, Rangitaane ahau.

No reiratena koutou katoa.

Our ancestral, traditional way

is that we are not separate from the environment.

Because of colonization, we have separated ourselves

from that ideology,

from that way of being.

It's shown itself to have

huge impact on Mother Earth,

and Father Sky,

and all the environmental children in between.

Nature is suffering because of the behaviors of

the youngest born in that line.

When we disengage from the environment,

people get lost in their own darkness.

Take your Christian or religion glasses off,

because I'm not talking about

a religious thing.

My God is that cloud drifting past,

the grass is my God, the sea is my God.

Feel more connected,

not just to your human genealogy,

but to your environmental genealogy.

I grew up in this place,

raised by my ancestors,

by my grandparents,

speaking my native tongue.

Learning about all the genealogies

and the histories of the Tairawhiti,

which equipped me in my life-journey as an artist

and historian of matauranga Māori, Māori knowledge.

Tena Koutou, tokuingoa ko Mark Kopua. Kia ora.

When we talk about healing, it is Rongoā.

Rongoā is about listening.

Te reo has its own vibration and frequency.

The island was a place where

those healers that we hear, those tohunga,

that's where they were taught.

That was where my grandmother

was taught the art of Rongoā.

You can hear the cicadas...

But before we go in, I'm just going to do a karakia for us,

to give us permission to go in.

That's who we are.

Our job is to protect the nature.

If we don't protect Te Taiao,

Te Taiao won't protect us.

It's in our genes because

our great grandmother Te Horo,

she was the healer of this whole area,

and she was a blind queen.

And she had a parrot that talked to her.

And she was very powerful.

During the epidemic flu that we had here

that killed thousands of our people,

most of them went to her and she healed them.

And then she taught my other great grandmother then,

so they started up teaching,

those who wanted to learn.

My grandmother inherited that work of healing,

and I was what they call,

"the person that had to go out and get the plants."

So she taught me as I was growing up

Ko taku ingoa ko Tohe Ahipi.

— Growing up here, I realized,

that I wanted to be involved in

healing from our Indigenous perspective.

And when I went home and spoke to my elders about that,

one of the aunties turned around to me and said,

"What do you want to do that for?

Don't do that. Go be a real doctor.

That's where your future is."

Ko Dona Kerridge ahau.

I am of Māori and English descent,

and I hail from a small community

on the west coast of the North Island,

Te Puaha o Waikato. Kia ora.

All my aunts and uncles

grew up in a time when it really wasn't

the thing to be Māori.

You know, they weren't allowed to speak it at school.

And worse than that,

they were actually chastised for speaking it.

They suffered indignities that

I don't really feel comfortable talking about,

because I don't think I can do justice.

I can, I can feel

the pain.

And they didn't talk about it much.

They didn't talk about it to us,

but somehow we knew.

— Notice how the Māori people greet each other

when they meet by pressing noses.

This greeting is called the Hongi.

Of course, they don't live in this fashion nowadays.

— For centuries, the Māori of New Zealand,

developed a distinctive culture.

— When the British came, everything changed.

— This Māori boy is eating sunshine.

He belongs to one of the proudest races on Earth.

— For the first time in history,

a reigning British monarch visits her Māori subjects.

— There's a lot of trauma

that has happened to our people.

The timeline is always here

of the promises that they gave,

and they switched it against us.

— In 1840, the British made a deal

with over 500 Māori chiefs,

The Treaty of Waitangi.

— My ancestor, Te Ruki Kawiti,

said No, he would not sign the treaty.

He said, "We can look after ourselves.

Go away! Go back to wherever you come from."

He did, however, sign it in the end

to save his people, his tribe.

Or else they'd be wiped out.

— Two versions of the treaty,

were written, one in Māori,

and one in English.

The Māori copy promised our chiefs

absolute authority

over our own land and resources,

while the English copy,

gave all the rights and power

of sovereignty to the Crown.

And we're still seeing those effects to date.

And the main pillars of those effects,

are the loss of language, the loss of culture,

and the loss of identity.

— What I think

colonialism and the intergenerational trauma

that has come as a result of radical change

imposed upon different populations,

is a symptom of disconnection.

Disconnecting from your own ways of

knowing, doing, and being.

That was the point,

was to disconnect people

from their power,

so that they are more amenable

to another way of knowing.

— The children are growing up to be

good citizens, managers of their own homes.

Theirs is not a specialist training,

but training for living.

The Māori school children will be the educators

of the new generations,

in hygiene and home crafts.

— The first schools that started here

were called the Native Schools.

We were the natives.

Our grandparents were the natives.

And you were not to speak Māori

at the Native School.

They brought religion in.

And they were the worst land confiscators,

the missionaries.

So what they did was they said,

"Come over, we'll teach you how to pray,

close your eyes and bow your head."

So we closed our eyes and bowed our head.

By the time we opened our eyes, our land was gone.

— Through schools, they were able to

wipe out

the language, the culture,

within one generation.

— And then we are the next generation after,

from natives they turned into Māori.

So we became the Māori.

— I don't know whether

so much that I thought that I was Māori,

but I knew that I was from these tribes.

Māori, the word Māori, in its understanding,

didn't come out as what I was.

In my youth, the word Māori

was used to mean "natural."

Later on I learned

that it was a colonized tool,

to put us into a little category and collective.

— Māori people, and I think, Indigenous people

all over the world were assimilated,

because what we call "the white man"

wanted to phase out the

tangata o te whenua, or "the people of the land".

— You weren't allowed to pick herbs.

You weren't allowed to pick any of our Rongoā.

— They banned

what they called the Tohunga Suppression Act.

1907.

So if you were caught,

practicing Rongoā,

you would go to jail, you would be fined.

Awhitia: So all of that got lost.

Our knowledge was lost over centuries.

— A lot of our healers decided

to close off all the portals.

And a lot of them went underground,

and took their knowledge with them.

Some died with their knowledge,

some continued to practice underground.

— The government of the day, were chopping our trees

to help overseas to build houses.

And so we ended up suffering.

Māori have got the highest rate of health problems,

but that's because they took all our Rongoā trees away.

Like literal medicine, herbal trees.

We weren't born with asthma.

It had to come from the environment,

from Te Taiao.

And so to have all your trees and your Rongoā gone,

was traumatic, especially for our people.

— I don't feel it like an expert

in the space of trauma,

other than my own trauma.

What happened?

What worries me,

it's as a Māori people,

We're so disconnected,

and we're trying really hard to reconnect,

that sometimes we're doing more damage.

When we're trying to understand the trauma,

that our people have been through,

the very word 'trauma'

is building empires

that I don't think we want.

When we find...

terms, concepts,

in the language that

was the very reason for disconnecting

my philosophical understanding of who I am,

and the very impact of

our people being raped,

our land being taken...

Because I can't narrate that

in my Indigenous language,

I feel like what trauma does,

is builds an empire,

that promotes yet again,

a neo-liberalistic way

of commodifying

our hurts,

and using Western knowledge,

to offer

a therapeutic way to engage you,

in overcoming your trauma.

— A big part of it

again comes back to disconnection.

It feels like...

somebody's...

severing the umbilical cords of us all

and we're starting to float...

all over the place.

— The historical injustices,

the process of colonization,

has favored a Western knowledge system,

so that we can help you

almost with a sense of amnesia

about what caused the pain

in the first place.

When you take a land away from my ancestors,

and then you would heal us with your ways of knowing,

not realizing that you took from us

our ability

to be able to thrive off our land,

whom is our mother.

You took us from our mother,

you took our mother from us,

and we struggled to survive.

Money was not our

economic source

of wealth and growth.

It was the ability to have a relationship,

with our land and our sky and our sea,

and we lost that.

— You then saw children

in the early 1900's,

you know, turning to drugs,

becoming homeless,

because they weren't nurtured

the way they were meant to.

— I've been a drug and alcohol counselor for,

for many years.

I started up two rehab centers,

one for women and one for men.

But I said, before you even go into rehab,

you've got to come and spend two weeks with me,

in the bush.

I'm sweating and detoxing your body,

using all different types of medicine.

And by the time the two weeks are up,

they don't want to leave.

But the reason I told them that

they needed to go to rehab

was now that their mind is clear,

to actually start the work to repair,

what they have lost.

Goes back to the way they were brought up.

They will use alcohol,

to get rid of the pain.

But I said, you'll never get rid of the pain,

it will come back a hundred times worse!

This is the way you have to do it.

I had a young gentleman,

who just got his custody of his boy,

so he went to Auckland,

he saw one of his friends across the street,

he stopped his car and said to his boy,

"Wait here for a minute. I won't be a minute.

Just going to talk to this friend."

So he went across and he talked to his friend.

And then all he heard was, "Dad!"

He turned around to see a truck go...

He ran to his child, his child was in... had passed.

So that guy

spent close on seven years

of that same memory,

seeing that accident,

seeing his boy.

He'd go to the cemetery and he'd sleep in the cemetery,

with this boy.

And so...

The rehab rang me and said to me

he had run away, he had taken off.

I said, "Wait there, I'll find him."

I caught him walking the road.

So I took him to another healer.

Me and the healer to work on him.

And so we worked on him.

And I said to him, "You need to let him go.

You've held on to him

for over seven years.

And you've been having the same dreams.

No matter what medicine

the doctors have given you to try and knock you out,

you can't, because that dream keeps coming back,

coming back and seeing that accident.

I said, "You need to let the boy go."

So working with him all day and finally, he let it go.

Hopped in my car and he said to me, "Can I sleep?"

He slept for three days, in my car.

I just let him sleep.

He got up and he said to me,

"I had this dream.

My boy was playing in the park."

Big smile!

And I said to him, "You're healed.

You don't need to be here."

And he said, "No, I want to be here.

I want to help others."

So he stayed in rehab.

— The goal for me in Rongoā Māori,

is to lift the mana, the esteem, the power

and the Mauri, the lifeforce

of people in place.

So not one in isolation,

not people separate from the world,

but the world, including people.

— Take a deep breath.

And let it go.

— When we look at

the way that animals use their senses,

this way that our healers use their senses

is actually no different to our siblings

in the animal world.

— You write everything.

— Dominant? — Yeah.

— We just lost them,

and so they seem weird now,

in a modern world, but they're not weird.

— That's where you're sticking.

— Mhm.

— That just some of us have grown up with those around us,

those senses highly attuned.

Not all of them at once,

but maybe one more than the other.

And we use that as a gift.

We use that as a gift to help us in our work.

— I hear the word "trauma,"

I don't understand it.

I don't see it in the body

in the way that it's described.

There's a smell that comes off a body.

If we know how to smell the body,

—and when I talk about smelling,

I'm not talking about the physical odor of the body,

I'm talking about the spiritual odor of the body—

when we can smell that,

you can...

almost smell which organ it's coming from.

If I know it's the liver,

then there's work to be done behind the knees

and at the back for the liver

to... placate it,

to make it peaceful.

The liver is connected to the anger we hold in the body.

So if that's a smell I get, then I know what to do.

If it's the kidneys,

then I'm looking at a different part of the body.

We aren’t taught as children how to smell.

We know it instinctively.

I know no other way.

It's not even a picture,

it's not a judgment or a sense,

I just know,

and actually, we all do.

You know how to smell someone who is ill.

Someone who has cancer in the chest or the breast,

their body exudes a smell.

Everything has to do with the physicalness of here.

Emotion never plays a part for me in the work,

but it gets in the way.

— I'm gonna hold this,

until the lung lets go.

— I don't see emotion.

I know where it is

and I know what they're doing.

But my job is to align this, this and this

and keep it strong

and intact for them.

When those are aligned,

the emotion won't have any way

to interrupt them.

— You're good? You can get up

when you're ready, take your time.

As soon as the egg, egg and the seed,

as soon as they come together,

that's when we, as the human being we're going to be,

start to feel everything.

We have a memory,

—and everybody thinks that's up here,

the memory's here—

of everything we've experienced in life.

And for those who are lucky enough or unlucky enough

to remember past lives and future lives,

that in itself can also be

either a bonus,

or a drain on them.

— As soon as you started

my jaw started quivering.

— I saw that, yeah. — And it still kind of is.

— But that's your emotional release.

Not everybody does it through the eyes and crying.

We all have our own way.

You're a stalwart,

you have... truth, you know.

Because you're a power

and that's why you have to pass your knowledge on,

and you have to do it fast.

— There's so much in one human being,

to stop trauma from continuing in us and continuing,

because it goes down lineal,

back and ancestral and forward.

We believe that's why we do a lot of our practices,

that are always done on the womb,

because it's where the source is.

— I'm just gonna go down. I'm just gonna go down.

Yeah.

— Deep breath.

— Keep going.

— Good! — Ah!

— How many pregnancies did you have?

Atarangi: So you had—yeah,

that's what I was asking. Okay. Cool.

Before or after her?

— Before. Was she directly after that?

— So you're the daughter that

was conceived after the,

the one you lost, is she here? — Yeah.

— I need to do her. — Yeah?

— Because she's always thinking

she's missing something.

— What is in the organ is a cellular memory.

That's the memory of the cells

that have been connected to trauma,

any kind of trauma.

— Breathe it in with me.

And breathe it up.

Breathe it up.

— And so my practice for looking after and healing the womb,

is for those women who have lost their babies in the womb,

who passed away in the womb.

We realigned the kopu,

take all of the cellular memory out of their trauma,

that they've have just had,

by losing baby in the womb.

So, that the new baby can come in

and not feel the trauma of the baby that was just passed.

— The child doesn't understand,

there's been something else in there before them,

and they're always seeking

that other energy, because it was there with them.

All right. You feel that beat? Yeah.

Okay.

So, that's all right, just breathe.

I'm going to just check.

Don't try and control it.

So the heartbeat that I'm picking up here,

is different to the beat I'm picking here,

I'm picking up here.

This one does not belong here.

You know that don't you?

You know why?

All right. Your mom will tell you later.

— As children, we were told by our teachers

to lie on our backs with our eyes closed

and to concentrate on our breathing.

And for 20 minutes, every day,

we would recite lines from Mōteatea .

In its most basic form,

a Mōteatea is a chant,

and probably the most

archaic form of music to Māori culture,

and was commonly used by our ancestors

as a way of expressing their emotions and feelings,

to events that may have just taken place.

— A Mōteatea is a form of therapy,

and was a form of therapy for our ancestors,

where they were able to

spell out those emotions, rather than harbor them.

Now, when we think of colonization,

a lot of our Mōteatea weren't

passed down to the next generation,

because the language was beaten,

literally beaten out of our ancestors.

— We were beaten at school for

speaking my language in the '70s,

literally beaten.

And...um...

and then I was determined to make sure that

my children would have

the language given back to them.

And so, we fought.

— And it was our parents generation that

finally discovered that that way of

educating Māori children was not working.

— My children were one of the first

pioneers to be able to speak our language,

to return our language back to our land.

— A young person who is lost

because of colonization, because of urbanization,

I think it's a great way

to introduce them to their ancestry.

And to know that that ancestry right down to the Creation,

right back to the Creation of the world,

is as it is,

is fabulous!

— My mother, who was, who is Doctor Cathy Dewes,

one of the handful of leaders from the '80s,

opened a school here on the shores of Rotorua,

and she named the school

Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Ruamata,

which is where I spent the first

18 years of my life.

And it was only the second school of its type

at the time.

— Te Kura Kaupapa Māori,

or total immersion Māori schooling,

has to be done totally in Māori.

The school encourages

parents to speak Māori at home,

as well as school.

We have a saying here,

"Where a school should be as a home,

and a home should be as a school."

We combine the two worlds of our students,

the home and the school,

and basically, the whole environment

growing up becomes one.

— Everything that that young person is experiencing,

our ancestors have experienced.

In the stories is a blueprint

about how to deal

with just certain types of distress,

that they are also experiencing.

And so, you expose these young people,

who are lost, in a sense,

to that, and that allows them to find

the path that suits them.

— You know what, we're gonna start from the start!

— It's all about Mauri too.

You can't just go "phsshh" harmony.

— I didn't do well in school.

I was a teenage mum,

and it was at a time

where to be Māori, and to be a young mum

had purpose, had meaning.

I could offer them something.

Yeah, it's, yes.

Beautiful phrasing!

— See, Māori clinical psychologists can't sing.

I don't think I wanted to go down a pathway of psychiatry.

I wanted to protest

against racism.

I wanted to fight for my right

to exist as a Māori.

I wanted distress to be seen,

without being diagnosed.

I wanted to do away with criteria

for people to access

authentic, meaningful help.

And I wanted to be proud

of our culture as Māori.

And I did a Māori course

and learned my language,

and it was the year that I learned about

our Creation stories, and I was a baby in them,

like I knew about five or seven of them,

but I was gonna try!

— I'm hoping, if we secure funding...

— So when I met Mark...

Oh my gosh, he knew like a thousand of them.

And I remember asking him on a Facebook text like,

"Do you know much about our Creation stories?"

I didn't know he was a Tohunga.

I didn't know

that he was a walking encyclopedia.

All I knew was that there was this man interested in me.

— There are many, many Pūrākau

or stories that we can use

depending on whatever circumstance

in the now we are experiencing.

We use those stories to help people

familiarize themselves

with not just their genealogy,

but they feel huge compassion towards their ancestor

who went through this emotional injury.

But not only that, they—

it resonates with them because

they're going through the same thing.

— Nice...

It was pretty good!

— Find a room! — You'll find a room.

— The tears of their ancestors became the stars,

the moon and the sun,

that provided light for everybody else.

— What Mahi a Atua is about,

is thinking about Māori knowledge.

The way that we understand and experience

the Universe from a Māori perspective.

How do we operationalize

all of that knowledge?

— All of those three Atua,

(speaking Māori language)

worked as a collective.

— How do we make sense of a Māori story,

a Creation story

in a healing space?

And we term that Mahi a Atua

and it's really ancestral healing.

— The daughter had said,

I've already got four kids,

it was like having a fifth child!

We train people to practice

this way of thinking

and this way of understanding your existence in this world.

And in order for them to maintain

that way of being,

we have three principles.

So, the first one

in our language is

Tēnei te Pō Nau mai te Ao,

which translates to "indigenize your spaces,"

not just your environment around you,

but also internally.

Rather than decolonizing yourself,

indigenize yourself.

The second one in our language is

Ka mate ariki ka mate tauira.

And that means to forever being

inquisitive and be a learner.

Whenever you go into a situation,

go with empty baskets,

so that you can get those people that you're with,

to fill your basket up.

Seek balance.

The last principle is the hardest one.

In our language it is

Hongi Hongi te wheiwheia,

which translated means

to "inhale the unusual."

What we're talking about is a culture of feedback.

And predominantly negative feedback.

Not feedback to destroy somebody.

It is a feedback to create collective growth.

— Just knowing who we are,

where we come from,

knowing the stories of our ancestors,

and trying to reclaim those stories as our own,

and I think that can

bind a lot of the trauma,

that has been passed down from generation to generation.

— And I think, we're at a time now, as Māori people,

we are happy to

embrace what happened to our ancestors.

We know that Māori were a strong people,

and we were wrong-done by

the government of New Zealand.

And we have the tools, I think,

I think we have the tools now to heal ourselves.

Each Mōteatea holds an energy,

a vibration, our story

that can benefit

us as their descendants.

I was at university in 2009,

and I came across, just by chance,

the lament that my ancestors, Hinemoa wrote

at the passing of her beloved husband Tutanekai.

— And I couldn't believe my eyes because

I had grown up on

the love story of Hinemoa Tutanekai,

however, the lament that she wrote captures

a different side to the story, that it wasn't quite

a fairy tale as we thought.

The anguish and the sadness that is expressed

in the words of Hinemoa.

I brought them back to my elders and asked them,

"Do you know the tune to this Mōteatea?"

And nobody knew,

because it had been lost for so long.

I firmly believe that Mōteatea are the window

to the world of our ancestors,

the way of living their language,

customs and the people of the time,

and the raw emotion at the time of composition.

Kapa Haka itself is now an important part

of the revitalization of

our language and our culture,

because so many Māori

participate in Kapa Haka.

I mean, there are almost 2,000 performers

attending, participating in the upcoming

Te Matatini competition, National competition.

So 2,000 performers and we're expecting over

50,000 audience members.

— ...change, yeah? — Yeah!

Not (speaking Māori language), again.

— I'm the head tutor of

Te Kapa Haka o Ngāti Whakaue.

Now I've been Head tutor

for seven years now,

and this will only be our second Nationals.

— We've been practicing now for

about six months for this competition.

We've put the program together.

We've taught it to our group.

We've picked our best performers,

in the hope that we make the finals,

because it's something our tribe has never done before.

But that's what we're aiming for.

Kapa Haka is modeled

from the protocols

of a welcoming ceremony.

The Mōteatea is one of the key customs

of that welcoming ceremony.

So that's where Mōteatea fits in with Kapa Haka.

I think it's a vessel,

or a vehicle

in delivering the language, the culture

and our customs to our people.

— You two gotta get off your feet.

Change!

— For me, one of the things

about Rongoā or healing

is that we can come in at it

from multiple perspectives.

We'll see people that work really proficiently

with plant medicines.

We'll see people that work really proficiently

in terms of bodywork.

We'll see people

who use things like Haka.

They have their way of bringing about healing

through that medium.

We will see through our arts.

Kia ora tatou.

When we talk about healing,

Karakia,

is a healing, is a role.

— Karakia is often translated as "prayer."

I personally don't subscribe to that because,

you know, I learned prayer in a Christian context.

— They're not called prayers.

They're called Takutaku.

It's a chant from the old, the old ways.

And that chant, in that chant, is what they call

the vibration and frequency.

We tap into that.

— You know, Karakia helps us disconnect from the things

that busy the mind and the heart.

So that when we need to hear the voices of our ancestors

and the advice and the direction of our ancestors,

Karakia can help open those channels.

— People can heal by just doing Karakia.

— There are whole different levels of teaching.

So there's the learning of Karakia,

your Whakapapa.

— Whakapapa, your genealogy,

right back to the Creator.

— Then there's another level,

the art of doing Tā moko.

— Moko, which is a Māori tattoo,

culturally restricted to Māori people

or people of Māori heritage.

— This is what we call a Mataora.

Before you can get this,

you have to do all this,

right up to your back,

before you're allowed to have this on your face.

— They're tools for us to use to connect us.

Māori people want to feel this assurance

that the ancestry is with them.

— Every person would have a different design,

which meant something that they had to do.

— And in our history,

our ancestors that did navigate across the oceans,

they had star clusters tattooed on their backs.

So that the navigator could look at some—

one of the crew's back,

and understand: "Right,

there's bad weather in the direction

that we should be going,

this chart, that's tattooed on a man's back,

tells me, we have an option to go this way."

— The world works in many different ways.

Next one is the art of medicine.

All the plants have their own medicinal purpose,

everything.

So if I have to go into the forest to get a plant,

then I must acknowledge the forest,

and ask for permission to go in.

Then when I do find the plant that I need,

I'll also ask that plant, "Can I have you?

And the reason why I need you."

Plus, the leaves tell you, what are they good for.

It's the shape of your lungs,

the shape of your—

the kawa kawa, shape of your heart.

Then you know it's for your heart.

They've already told us who they are,

and what they're good for.

— We call, I call it the language of the Ngahere,

the language of the forest.

And when you learn that language,

you can go anywhere in the world.

And you can share in their knowledge.

— The trees have their own feelings,

they have their own vibration and frequency.

They have their own souls.

Part of the work that I do,

it's about healing our Native.

So we have the kauri.

The kauri is dying,

from this bug that's in the water,

that goes up,

and it goes to the heart of the tree and kills the tree.

So we have a story, we call it a Pūrākau,

—a Pūrākau is a story, that's been handed down

through the generations—

where they talk about that the whale,

is a brother to the kauri.

— The kauri, the coat that was given to the kauri,

this is his coat.

They're exactly the same

as when you look at a whale,

look at a kauri.

— When the kauri became unwell,

the whale could hear the vibration and frequency,

and tries to come back onto land,

and dies on the land.

I decided,

that if the whale can't get to the kauri,

I will take the whale to the kauri.

And so I began.

I asked for the bones of the whale.

I crushed it up into powder.

Then I asked for the spermaceti,

which is the oil in the head, which is a healing.

And then I took it,

I cleaned the wound

and then I put it on.

And I sprayed around the tree,

with what we call Kahikātoa or tea tree.

I knew if it kills anything,

that will kill the bug.

So I sprayed around the tree,

and there was one tree that was really bad.

It was really bad, I thought it wouldn't survive.

I kept going back to check the trees

and I could see it really starting to come right,

it started to heal.

But then, people started hearing about it

and started to talk to some of the scientists

about doing some research on the Rongoā that I was—

and of course they didn't believe it.

And so one of them checked the Rongoā that I used,

which was the tea tree,

and they put it against the bug,

and when the tea tree got close to the bug,

the bug exploded,

and it could kill the bug.

They did a study on the whale,

and they finally realized there is a cure

in the whale bone.

All those trees survived.

The one that was so bad, had a new skin.

The old fell off, and the new wood grew.

The government is paying thousands

and millions of dollars for research,

where we do it for nothing.

Because our job is to look after them.

Not going around looking for money.

— Ko te whenua ko au, ko au ko te whenua.

I am the land and the land is me.

We are the land.

Because when we talk about someone who's pregnant

and the placenta,

the placenta is what we call Te Whenua,

the land.

You come from the placenta,

and then you will come onto the land,

and you'll be taught on that land,

and you will die on that land,

and you will return to that land.

— Oh, yeah, look, tightening.

Beautiful!

So part of this is also to teach the husband, you know,

you know, it's to empower them to—

to allow them to have their time

with the baby too.

Jarroa has been connecting ever since,

right from the beginning.

So comfy, eh?

And come to the back.

— You know, he didn't know how to do that.

I said, "No, you're the papa.

You know, you knew how to make the baby."

Well, you know.

So and look, he was so happy.

He said, "I can feel baba!"

I said, "Here you go!

Baby will come this weekend."

You know, it's about giving back the knowledge.

And you give it back with integrity,

so that it stays integral,

and people are standing in the mana, with dignity.

And then you can touch eternity.

— Yeah, just, yeah.

Oh, that's good muscle release, eh?

— Ooooh... — Yeah

yeah. So baby is centered.

Yeah?

— Before I kinda lost it a little.

Today was a little bit like...

just tucked away, yeah, and I couldn't, kind of,

it wasn't right.

— Healing is...

inter-generational,

but it's also multi-generational.

One of the young women

was carrying an energy

that didn't belong to her.

But it was a tribal energy and they chose her,

because she was the one that had...

the will and the way to carry it,

even though her mind had blocked

the reason why she was doing it,

— Turn to the side. Turn onto your side.

— When you look at rape

as something that is passed down,

there are times when it comes into my space,

or when I'm working with women

and I sense or I know that it's there,

my job is to stop it,

so it doesn't go down any further.

— I can't breathe.

— You can breathe.

— In terms of the inter-generational,

I see it

come in at a time frame,

maybe two or three elders past.

And if we can take people back

to just beyond that time frame,

and weave that energy and clear it,

then come back to here now,

most times it stops it going any further.

— Slowly breathing down.

— The work we're taught,

it is instantaneous, if the person allows us

and opens their mind up

to the possibility.

— Do you want to sit up?

— Yeah.

— I want to give you a big hug.

— To reconnect to their own

ancestry, their own ways of being,

their own culture, their own ceremonies,

their own chants, their songs,

all those things that they've—

a lot of our people have been denied,

that is healing.

— The crowd loved that performance

by our final finalists here,

the 12th Kapa to take to the stage

here at the Tamaki Makaurau, the finals,

of the Te Matatini 2023

Ngati Whakaue, what a fantastic performance!

And there we see their supporters, as I say,

proud, and they should be really, really proud

of their whanaunga that took to the stage.

— Many different hats,

Many different thoughts,

many different ways;

only one result,

and that is to heal.

— For me, I'm just the conduit, yeah?

I'm not the healer.

The person on the table is actually the healer.

— It's not our job to fix them.

Especially, if they're going to go in the healing realm.

All we can do is wake them up to freedom,

and the rest is theirs.

— You know, the distress is not an individual thing.

Neither is the pathway or the journey through it.

— I am the living face

of those who went before me.

I am simply, at the end of a very long line

continuing the work that they began,

generation upon generation ago.

— Healing is about existing

through the highs and lows of their stories,

and our relationships with each other,

with ourselves.

The good, the bad, the ugly,

and never being complete.

And our whole reality

is about finding ourselves,

in our journey to arrive at our final breath.

— Living is a terminal condition.

Being alive is a terminal condition.

Dying is not losing.

We will all die and we will have

all contributed along the way.

So it's not about preventing death,

it's about enabling life.