Teri Puketapu had every reason to be rankled

Friday, 12 May 2023

Te Āti Awa kaumātua Teri Puketapu spent his entire adult life advocating for his people and nurturing the marae he built.

Nicholas Boyack pays tribute to Te Āti Awa elder Teri Puketapu – Lower Hutt’s first Māori deputy mayor and unofficial iwi historian for more than 50 years.

To understand Te Rira Puketapu you have to understand the way Te Āti Awa have been treated by the Crown.

Born in April 1939, Puketapu died last week, aged 84, and is survived by his wife, Potiki Amoe (Patsy).

Known universally as Teri, he grew up in the Lower Hutt suburb of Waiwhetū, on a small farm near the Awamutu Stream.

In 1943, the Government decided it wanted his family land, along with land belonging to 17 other Māori families, for a housing development.

Puketapu inspects the state of the Waiwhetū Stream in 2009.

A memo written by an official at the Ministry of Housing in 1940 stated an alternative site had been secured nearby, but the sections owned by Te Āti Awa members were “more favourably situated”.

The real motive was made clear when that same official wrote “the segregating of the natives in one locality is not desirable, as it is considered that a better standard of living and upkeep of the security would be obtained if the residences to be occupied by the natives were scattered over the whole block.”

In other words, he did not want Māori living together in their traditional tribal mode. It was racism at its worst.

Te Āti Awa landowners were understandably grumpy, but were eventually forced to accept compensation of £47,000. To add injury to insult, much of the money was then taken by the council to cover outstanding rates.

Although the government seized the land in 1943, life continued as normal for Puketapu until his whānau moved from their house five years later to a state-owned rental in Puketapu Grove, near the marae.

Puketapu in front of the house he proudly lived in, after the Crown confiscated his family land in Lower Hutt. As a young carpenter, he built the letterbox.

Like many of their neighbours, the family eventually bought their state house under a tribal trust, covering 23 homes in the street under one mortgage, for which an interest rate of 17% was charged. The mortgage was finally paid off in 2005.

Half of the forcibly taken land has never been used for housing. Instead, it was used to store military vehicles in World War II. It was then leased to the council and then transferred to council ownership in 1979. The council turned it into Te Whiti Park, which is now used for community sport. Two large sections were sold to churches.

The seizure of the land is comparable to the confiscation of land from Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei at Bastion Point in Auckland. In both cases the land was used for a purpose other than what the Crown stated as the reason for its seizure.

I first got to know Teri in the early 1990s covering the civic round. His areas of interest included housing, the continued pollution of the Waiwhetū Stream and funding for the marae.

Although I always respected Teri, I treated his arrival at council meetings with some trepidation. A man of many words, he would lay out the history of whatever he was speaking on and then ask for redress. It could be a long process.

His pleas just about always feel on deaf ears, but he was always polite.

As a journalist with an interest in history, I quickly realised he was a knowledgeable source of information and someone who could be relied on for informed comment.

Teri Puketapu lived across the road from his marae, he worked so hard to create.

Looking back at my stories I have some regrets. Although I sometimes hinted at the reasons Puketapu took such a passionate interest in the area, I never spelt out the size of the injustice that had been done to mana whenua and his family in particular.

In 2021, a colleague, Brittany Keogh, put the story together as part of Stuff’s Pou Tiaki project. Whenever I spoke to him subsequently, he would politely ask about Keogh and express gratitude for what she had done.

The truth is that Puketapu had every reason to be pissed off. The city council only returned a small section of the land to Te Āti Awa. Eventually a Treaty of Waitangi claim would be successful, but it did not directly involve the return of land wrongly confiscated.

As Te Āti Awa kaumātua, Puketapu never stopped advocating for his people and keeping the memory of the disgraceful behaviour of the Crown and council alive.

The name Puketapu has long had prominence in the Hutt Valley. In 1935 his father, Ihaia was a founding member of the first Labour Government’s Māori advisory committee. His brother Ihakara Puketapu, known as Kara, was Secretary of Māori Affairs and a sister, Erenora Puketapu-Hetet, was a noted weaver and author.

In the 1950s, Teri qualified as a carpenter putting his skills to use. The marae was his first building job, and he took it seriously.

Teri Puketapu was frustrated that street names around the Waiwhetū Marae did not acknowledge Māori links to the area.

The wharenui was his first building job and he took it on with pride and honor. It was his first act of service to his iwi, Te Ati Awa nō Runga-i-te-Rangi.

Building the wharenui Arohanui ki te Tangata was like entering into a lifelong relationship with a human where he lovingly took care of and nurtured the building as its kaitiaki, providing his commitment of manaakitanga.

Later he became a city councillor and, incredibly, the first Māori elected in Lower Hutt. In 1992, when he lost his council seat, the then Lower Hutt mayor, Glen Evans, paid him a fitting tribute.

Teri Puketapu did much of the work to build an artesian bore near the Waiwhetu Marae.

“He is a man of great mana in the community, a man of wisdom, a man of strength and a man who has the respect of all who worked with him. His contributions to council meetings were always well considered and presented with dignity and a great amount of gentle wisdom.”

Over the next 30 years he would continue to lobby the council, especially on the issue of the Waiwhetū Stream.

For decades the council turned a blind eye to the pollution in the stream. Industrial areas in Naenae and Gracefield poured all manner of pollutants into the stream, which as a youngster had been a source of food for the Puketapu clan.

'When I was 10, we relied on the stream. Coming from a family of 10 we needed the watercress and eels to put food on the table,' he said in 2016.

The council continues to treat the stream as an overflow for treated effluent from the Seaview wastewater treatment plant.

He fronted the council numerous times, challenging the overflow, politely telling them how offensive it was to Māori and calling for action. Whenever Puketapu asked the council to stop the overflow, cost was always used as the justification to do nothing.

In April 2022, he spoke about the unusual cluster of military street names near the marae.

After the confiscation of his land, the government had tried to give all the streets in the subdivision English names.

Puketapu’s family had had to fight to get a handful of Māori names near the marae.

“Why have all these military names in and around the land they took from us? It does rankle a bit with me.”

Despite all the provocation from the Crown, rankle was about as angry as Teri ever got. Speaking at his funeral on Monday, Lower Hutt mayor Campbell Barry summed up his life well.

“Every day throughout his life, he strived for better – for Māori, better for our environment, and better for all our people here in Te Awakairangi … he was relentless in this pursuit.”