The Nelson Tenths have been with Donna McLeod since she was a child, carrying her nanny’s kete along to hui where the ongoing loss of land was being discussed.
Now, the Motueka writer, who is creating a theatre piece on the intergenerational history surrounding the Tenths, says she refuses to pass on the trauma that she and her ancestors have carried.
“I have been made and trained to carry this. But there is no way I want my grandchildren to carry this. It’s too hard and too heavy,” she told Stuff.
“Do we need to talk about the pain? Do they need to inherit that pain, those stories? There comes a time when ‘no’.”
The Nelson Tenths reserves refer to the 10% of land, some 15,100 acres, that the New Zealand Company agreed to reserve in the Nelson region for the Māori customary landowners in the 1840s, an agreement that was never upheld.
In 2017, the Supreme Court ruled that the Crown had a legal duty to reserve the customary Tenths, and the case is being heard at the High Court.
McLeod (Te Ātiawa) discovered several years ago, that her grandmother who couldn’t read or write, had somehow signed her name to land that had disappeared. At hui as a child, there was suddenly an awareness that the iwi were losing more land, she said.
“There was certainly an awareness ... what were the answers, what could we do? And within that, there was this sense of something greater, that you needed to start having a faith in something.”
Tense, which McLeod is still writing as history continues to unfold, is about “remembering the stories, of course, but not the grievance, and not the hurt”.
“How do you take the hurt away? You need to balance everything with the positive and the stories.
“We do do the intergenerational trauma, but we need to always have hope. We need to be able to say yes, but how have we got through that, to make it easier for our kids?”
The theatre piece combines pūrākau (stories), taonga pūoro (musical instruments), waiata (songs), and poetry to an intergenerational story, including McLeod’s personal connection to the Nelson Tenths, highlighting the cultural and historical significance of this event.
McLeod said what she wants to do is awaken a curiosity in New Zealanders about their own place to stand.
“What I would like people to walk away with [from] the Tenths is, ‘Oh, wow, I live in The Brook, what happened in The Brook, and what is the history of the land that my house is built on?’”
The Tenths case would likely be continuing as the piece debuted in Motueka on October 25. Did that make it difficult to pen, with an as yet unforeseen future on the horizon?
“I thought I would get some nice little tidy ending or something. I knew it was going to take them until at least until next year to come [up] with a decision.
“But I could at least write, ‘my cousins came home, we celebrated, we felt good’,” she laughed.
- Tense, written by Donna McLeod, is part of the Nelson Arts Festival. It will be performed at Te Noninga Kumu Motueka Public Library on October 25, and the Theatre Royal on October 26. A schools show will be performed on October 27 at the same venue.