I attended the tangi (funeral) of the 86 year-old matriarch of a family I have known for over 40 years, at the kuia’s marae near Nelson. Over the course of three days the tangi was attended by several hundred people - there were children, grandchildren, great-grand children, adopted children - a category that more or less included me, friends, associates, and innumerable cousins - a term with such breadth that it flouts Pakeha genealogical thinking. This gathering came and went, shed tears and told stories, often very amusing, about the ways they had known this fine old lady. After each person had spoken they sung a song to the deceased whose open, cloak-covered casket was in the meetinghouse where all this activity took place. On the third day the service was held, for which one son wore a piupiu (flax kilt) over his clothes, and the large immediate family wore wreaths of kawakawa around their heads (Macropiper excelsum). The kuia was carried out of the meetinghouse to repeated haka, karanga and chants, and she was then taken to the urupa (cemetery) to be laid to rest in the family plot. Her many grandchildren buried her, taking it in turns to wield the shovels, and while they shovelled the rest sung an almost endless medley of waiata after waiata after waiata.

We then returned to the marae, where we were welcomed on in a process intended to lead the bereaved back from the darkness of death into the light of day. There was more singing and then a sit down meal for at least two hundred with mussels, paua, raw fish, oysters, hangi, rewana bread, trifle and copious cups of tea. While we ate the cooks sung to us.

I could tell you more. Talk of this matriarch’s home where four generations aged four weeks to 90 years live, talk of the seven women and two men at the tangi who had facial moko, discuss the amount of te reo that was spoken, talk about the left over food that was given out over the next two days. But the point is made. And that is the point of difference. Living our ‘normal’ lives it is easy to imagine such things as belonging to an almost forgotten past and to forget that there is a parallel cultural world out there - te Ao Māori (the Māori world). Our challenge as Landscape Architects is not to forget, but to make sure that our work speaks of this world as well as the others and makes living the Māori culture normal, easy and possible.

Haere e kui, haere ki au tipuna, haere, haere, haere.

Neil Challenger (Secretary Te Tau-a-Nuku-a-Nuku)