Tūhoe Rising

For 10 years, Tatsiana Chypsanava has been documenting Tūhoe life in Te Urewera, with an intimacy and understanding that comes from feeling like family.

Connection is everything. Connection to family, connection to community, connection to place. Connection was what Tūhoe lost when successive governments from the 1800s onwards sought to render the iwi landless, force them to assimilate to Pākehā ways, and extinguish their fires of inhabitation of Te Urewera, one of the most magnificent rainforests in the country. Disconnection and dispossession were a government agenda for more than 100 years, culminating in the master stroke of declaring Tūhoe’s homeland a national park, leaving Tūhoe with no stake and no say.

All that changed in 2014, when Tūhoe reached a settlement with the Crown over its long history of injustice. Te Urewera’s national park status was revoked, the land was designated a legal person and a living ancestor, and a pathway to self-determination—mana motuhake—agreed.

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In the 11 years since the deed of settlement was signed, reconnection to the iwi and to the land has been dominant in Tūhoe decision-making.

Documenting this process has been a photographer for whom connections are at the heart of her work.

“I see connections everywhere,” says Tatsiana Chypsanava, 44, a native of Belarus who has lived in New Zealand since 2008.

She is descended from an indigenous people, the Komi of north-western Russia, and was drawn to document Tūhoe partly because of that indigenous connection. She had previously documented the indigenous Tupinamba of Brazil.

A shared heritage of indigeneity is a good foundation for a photographer’s work of building relationships, she says. “I can talk with indigenous people about a connection to the natural world because my father demonstrated that connection. He was a communist and an atheist but he believed in spirits in the forest.”

When making a portrait, she treats the experience as a collaboration. “A good photographic portrait is one in which the portrait sitter and the photographer have equal participation in the creative process,” she says. “It’s a conversation, and the photographer can channel that conversation in their work.”

Tatsiana’s connection to Tūhoe began serendipitously soon after she arrived in New Zealand. She found work with Archives New Zealand as part of the digitisation team, and it happened that a contingent of Tūhoe was in the process of digitising documents held in the archive that detailed the iwi’s dealings with government over the past century. During coffee and lunch breaks, Tatsiana gravitated to the Tūhoe group and made friends.

It was only a few years after the 2007 Te Urewera police raids; they were still fresh and raw in Tūhoe memory. Tatsiana had never personally experienced a raid, but state violence, and violence against indigenous people, was something all her ancestors endured. Her grandfather had been imprisoned in a gulag.

Six years later, a friend mentioned to Tatsiana that another botched Tūhoe raid had happened. “Police followed the wrong car to the wrong address, and raided the house by mistake,” Tatsiana says. “There were kids at home. I was invited to photograph the family.”

So began 10 years of documenting the lives of Tūhoe, focusing in particular on the Teepa family of Ruatoki, a settlement a few kilometres upriver from Tūhoe’s administrative centre in Tāneatua. Ruatoki families had been badly treated during the 2007 raids. (Some of this work has featured in New Zealand Geographic).

Much of her early reporting in Te Urewera featured the Teepa children. The Teepas have raised more than 20 whāngai, or foster, children in addition to five of their own.

“Children are easy to photograph,” says Tatsiana. “They follow you and embrace you straight away. Kids would show me special places, such as a high waterfall at the back of the Teepa property. They took me possum trapping and eel fishing. They took care of me.”

Bonding with Tūhoe children was all the easier for Tatsiana because her own eight-year-old daughter accompanied her. Both mother and daughter now feel part of the family. Whenever she visits, says Tatsiana, Carol sends her home with jars of pickled fruit.

One of the Teepa whānau, Ruiha, now lives in Porirua, but returns to Ruatoki for holidays. Tatsiana photographed Ruiha lying on a sofa, surrounded by the framed portraits of dozens of family members—a human wallpaper.

The image underscores the centrality of whakapapa in Tūhoe thinking, and invites the question: What is wealth and what is poverty? “We may not have much, but we are rich because of our children and mokos,” Teepa matriarch Carol says.

Over time, Tatsiana’s range of subjects steadily expanded. Contact was sometimes made in unusual ways. On one occasion a bull showed too keen an interest in Tatsiana as she walked in Ruatāhuna. She ducked down a nearby driveway and ended up meeting a young couple who had recently returned to Te Urewera to begin raising a family. Each day, the father and others from Ruatāhuna take the Tūhoe shuttle to Rotorua for work. The drive is two hours each way. But it’s worth it to be back on the land.

Returning to the land is a “burning kaupapa” for Tūhoe, says Hinewai McManus, director of Te Urewera Treks and Retreats, which offers a range of guided forest and wellbeing experiences.

The company was started in 2006 by Hinewai’s “uncle Joe” Doherty. When Joe died eight years later, Hinewai, who has a degree in sport, recreation and health, was asked to take over the business. She says the emphasis has shifted “from ecotourism to inner tourism, the journey within, focusing on people’s wellbeing and their connection to te taiao, nature.” She says that as well as serving international visitors, the company is meeting the needs of many Tūhoe who want to return home.

Returnees, she says, include not just Tūhoe who know their whakapapa and family connections and who want to come back to connect more regularly with whānau and community, but also iwi members who have been away from Te Urewera for generations.

"Some of these people have no idea what their whakapapa is."

“They might be third or fourth generation removed from Te Urewera. Or they have become so assimilated to the Pākehā world that they have become disconnected from te ao Māori itself. They don’t know the language or the tikanga. These people are often highly motivated to discover their roots. ‘Where am I from? Who are my people?’

“COVID also brought people’s mortality to the forefront of their minds. Some who had been hesitant about returning to Te Urewera, because they had been away so long, started thinking, ‘What have I got to lose?’ Their hesitation was swept away with COVID.”

Hinewai believes that, just as people seek healing for themselves as individuals, Tūhoe as a collective are on a healing journey. “Up til now, the main focus for Tūhoe as a people has been to reclaim mana motuhake [care and connection] to Te Urewera,” she says.

The Tūhoe homeland was “chipped away” during colonisation, Hinewai says, to the point that even Tūhoe who lived on the land became disconnected from it. “What we call Te Urewera has shrunk dramatically from what it was… As a people you know that it used to be your home. You used to be the tiaki and ahi kā of that place. The rules you used to abide by were nature’s rules, not those imposed by a foreign people.”

For many Tūhoe, living in their homeland wasn’t a possibility when Te Urewera was a national park. Even thinking about returning “was like poking a wound that wouldn’t heal,” says Hinewai. “Once Te Urewera was reclaimed, the thinking began to shift.”

Even so, the grief of loss across multiple generations will take time to heal, she says.

“Although we’re almost 11 years down the track since Te Urewera was returned, the healing journey has only just begun.”

Tatsiana wants to continue to walk that road with Tūhoe, her adopted people. “There are multitudes of ways of knowing Tūhoe people,” she says. “I’ve only just begun.”