Tohetaka under the Pōhutukawa
The search for the pōhutukawa tree
I had been told since I was young that my grandmother was born on the beach under a pōhutukawa tree, and I’ve carried that image in my mind ever since. She was delivered by her great grandmother, Raihi Miraka, a midwife and the last chieftaness of Aotea.
I found a tohetaka (dandelion) under a pōhutukawa tree, the pōhutukawa tree and I made a wish.
I was visiting Aotea (Great Barrier Island, New Zealand) for this first time and I was traveling solo for the first time in my life. Aotea is my ancestral land, the land of Ngāti Rehua Ngātiwai ki Aotea who are the tangata whenua (people of the land) and mana whenua (territorial land rights holders) of Aotea. I knew this academically before I went there for the first time, having been born and raised in the United States, but I didn’t understand what it truly meant until I finally went to Aotea in my 40th trip around the sun.
My grandmother died when I was 18, so she’s been gone for quite some time but she was a very impactful person to me. She was Māori through and through, but she was also very Mormon. The Church meant everything to her. She left Aotea for mainland New Zealand when she was about 20 years old, married my Swiss grandfather and had two children, including my mother, who grew up in South Auckland in the 1960s. They all moved to Switzerland when my mom was eight, but my grandmother was ultimately bound for Salt Lake City, Utah, the epicenter of the Mormon Church. I learned on my trip to Aotea that my Māori ancestors had all converted to Mormonism en masse in the 1880s when the missionaries came, and that’s how I ended up with a Māori, Mormon grandmother and I came to spend my formative years in Salt Lake City, Utah.
My grandmother worked for the Church and my grandfather, a barber, cut the hair of all the Church’s general authorities. They received Christmas cards from the Quorum of the Twelve and the prophet himself attended my grandmother’s funeral. She made a life there in Salt Lake City, and so my understanding of being Māori was always presented through this lens of being Mormon in Salt Lake City, Utah. I had lots of Māori cousins in Salt Lake City, offspring from a couple of my grandmother’s many siblings, the ones who also left New Zealand and ended up in Utah.
When I landed on Aotea and my Airbnb host picked me up, I told him that my grandmother was born in Katherine Bay and he immediately knew that this was my family’s island. He connected me to a woman with a moko (chin tattoo) who ended up being a cousin, which led me to my grandmother’s first cousin in Kawa. From there I learned that each family lived in different coves within greater Katherine Bay and that the specific cove my grandmother lived in with her family was called Nimaru and Onewhero.
I had been told since I was young that my grandmother was born on the beach under a pōhutukawa tree, and I’ve carried that image in my mind ever since. She was delivered by her great grandmother, Raihi Miraka, a midwife and the last chieftaness of Aotea.
After visiting a couple coves within Katherine Bay, Kawa and Oruawharo, I realized that these were not the specific coves where my grandmother was born, and so, the search for the pōhutukawa tree of my dreams was still on. Mom told me it was only accessible by boat and suggested I ask Auntie Elaine if she could take me, so I did and while she was unable to take me there by boat, she was fairly certain I could get there by walking trial from Orama lodge near Port Fitzroy. So I went to Orama and asked the woman at the front desk if there was a trail from there to Nimaru Bay. She printed me a simple map and pointed me in the right direction, and I was off on an overgrown trail traversing a peninsula all alone for about 90 minutes before I saw the ocean again, and as I came down the hill towards the bay, I saw the pōhutukawa tree and it was more glorious and massive and powerful than I ever imagined.
As I walked beneath its gigantic, twisting boughs that swooped up and down and around like the track of a rollercoaster, and watched the quiet waves lapping on the beach beyond, I saw a tohetaka right there under the pōhutukawa tree, and I thought, what a beautiful sign that I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. I stooped down and plucked its puff and made a wish, under the pōhutukawa tree where my grandmother was born.