Protecting Tangaroa: indigenous coastal connections

Pauline Tangiora is frail. Seated in her living room, she sucks air in urgently before speaking, the words tumbling out in a rasp.

And yet, surrounded by the photos and mementos of an incredible life – shaking hands with the Dalai Lama, riding a motorbike from Northland to Bluff, speaking at the United Nations – it is not Pauline’s frailty you notice, but her strength. Her eyes, deep brown with flecks of amber, are steely and determined, flickering with fights still to be fought.

I’m here to talk to Pauline about the sea. What does it mean to her? It must seem a foolish question: there’s a hint of a wry smile.

“When the world was in darkness, Rangi and Papa came together and brought light to the world. Tangaroa (God of the Sea) was the centre of those two,” she pauses.

Although born in Ahuriri in Hawke's Bay, Pauline’s home has always been Māhia, and in Māhia, it has always been the sea. Home of their Rongomaiwahine iwi, her family would travel to Māhia every weekend for meetings, where she and the other children would run to the rocks and spend hours hunting for crayfish and pipi.

Before the last whale was caught in 1966, whaling was a major industry in Māhia, something Pauline looks back on with sadness. “My father could never understand why they wanted to kill the whales. The stories told in our family were that the whales were part of the living soul of the people.”

Pauline has led a long career as a warrior. It began in Taumarunui, when she rallied with local women against the use of Monsanto herbicides, and then in the 1960s against the Vietnam War, fuelled by a desire to advocate for the environment: “I could see the damage that war was doing to the land. I’d seen it in our own country.”

However, no cause has been closer to her heart than that of protecting our water and kaimoana, culminating in her five years as Chairperson of the World Forum of Fisher Peoples.

“We started the (World Forum) because the ocean people couldn’t find their fish. Most indigenous people live on coasts, rivers or lakes, particularly in New Zealand. For many, it’s where they get their food. If we destroy those, we’re going to have no kaimoana. Not just for the local people, but for the world.”

“As grandmothers and great-grandmothers, we’re trying to bring up our mokopuna to realise that you have to be responsible. We have to teach our children to take just enough – not for the freezer, just for your table – and the old people down the road. Look around and see who hasn’t got kai and take it to them.”

In addition to chairing the World Forum of Fisher Peoples, Pauline has also served as a representative for the World Council for Indigenous Peoples, a member of the Earth Council and an Earth Charter commissioner, a Patron of the Peace Foundation, and a lifetime member of the Māori Women's Welfare League. In 2005, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize as part of the 1,000 Women for Peace project, and she has appeared on a number of UN billboards around the world, alongside being a māmā to eight children and grandmother to an untold number of mokopuna.

But despite her many accolades, humility and togetherness come first.

“To serve the people, you need to be humble. What you believe in, what you’ve learned, that you are true to yourself, that is important. It’s not a case of where you go, it’s that you must take the people with you. The awards that you get are the rewards for the people.”

At the heart of Pauline’s tireless championing of our oceans and waterways is a strong belief system: that our natural world cannot be sectioned off into disparate areas, but rather should be seen and preserved as one global, interconnected system.

“The ocean moves north, south, west, east. The moves of the tide, the whitebait coming out to spawn, the eels in schools, the riverbanks; every little understanding of the water, is all connected.”

And there’s nowhere Pauline feels this connectedness more than Māhia.

“Māhia Peninsula is spiritual. It’s the wairua of the old people still in that land. As you grow older, you’ll feel it. All the coastal lands have that old wairua. Because the seas are ever cleansing the land, cleansing the damage that is done.”