The Living Forest
The awa (river)
The van driven by Hayden Potaka, Unique Whanganui River Experience director, picks me up outside the Whanganui War Memorial Centre on a breezy Saturday morning. It’s just after 6.30am. The streets of the river city are empty. Behind the van is a trailer carrying a single red canoe, a Canadian Discovery 169 named Rimu.
A young man in a woolly cloak jumps out of the passenger seat so I can ride upfront with Potaka. “Mōrena, I’m Hone,” he says with a smile, before curling up on the back seat and closing his eyes. I learn later that Hone Turu, my cultural navigator, has just finished a three-day stint guiding a group of Whanganui rangatira (leaders) down the middle reaches of the Whanganui River. I’m the next guest on his list.
As we head north on State Highway 4, towards Tongariro National Park and a brightening blue sky, we rattle past farmland and twist around sandstone hills. Soon, the white flanks of Mt Ruapehu and Mt Tongariro come into view. We are heading for Whakahoro, an entry point on the Whanganui River. Over three days, Turu and I will paddle 88km south to Pipiriki, overnighting at John Coull Hut and Tīeke kāinga (village), where Turu lived with his nanny and koro (grandparents) speaking only te reo Māori until his mid-teens.
Potaka bought Unique Whanganui River Experience in 2017 with the goal of giving manuhiri (visitors) a cultural experience of the river and river iwi a way to reconnect to the awa (river) through guiding. That year, the ink on the new law recognising Whanganui iwi’s ancestral relationship with the river was barely dry and the world was abuzz with questions about what it meant to legally recognise a body of water as a person.
Nearly five years on, Te Awa Tupua (the Whanganui River) has
