A shared silence in the trenches of Rangiriri

<strong>Totorewa</strong>, a Waikato-Tainui elder, welcomes a delegation from the <strong>Xwémalhkwu First Nation</strong> to ancestral earthworks to forge a cross-Pacific bond of cultural recovery. The meeting brings together two Indigenous peoples to share the quiet work of land stewardship and the reclamation of history.

The Xwémalhkwu, known in their own tongue as the "people of fast running water," had traveled from the rugged Bute Inlet to this site of memory. Here, in November 1863, some 500 Māori defenders had faced an onslaught of 1,400 British troops. The aftermath of that day saw the confiscation of 1.2 million acres of territory, a wound that remained open for over a century. Standing amidst the ramparts, Totorewa did not offer his guests a lecture on grievance; he offered a challenge. He urged the visitors to use their own stories and narratives to restore their people for the generations that have yet to arrive.

For decades, the physical memory of this land was bisected by a highway, with traffic rushing heedlessly over the site of the old defenses. It was only recently, in 2017, that the road was moved, allowing the earthworks to be rebuilt and the dignity of the site to be restored. This physical reconstruction of the land served as a backdrop for the exchange, as the two nations compared the ways they have guarded their languages and their connection to the earth across vast distances.

The delegation later moved to Hopuhopu, a site that once served as a colonial army base on confiscated land. Since its return to the iwi in 1993, it has been transformed into a tribal headquarters and a center for leadership. There, young people like Tiare Iti, a participant in the Te Pito Whakatupu programme, presented their own initiatives to the Canadian visitors. In the transition from a military outpost to a garden of Indigenous leadership, the Xwémalhkwu found a mirror for their own efforts to manage their 10,000 square kilometers of traditional territory.

The exchange, facilitated by The Nature Conservancy, concluded not with grand declarations, but with the quiet recognition of a shared task. Two peoples from opposite sides of the Pacific, separated by geography but united by the experience of loss and the labor of return, found that the most resilient structures are not built of wood or stone, but of the stories passed from an elder to a young woman in the silence of an old trench.