Mana moana, mana tangata Testimonies on depletion and ...

our mokopuna, they have nothing to see. They only have stories that they hear from us about the
certain types of food and the abundance of the food that was available to us. Without protecting some
of these areas there’s nowhere for our kids to go and learn about the <strong>moana</strong> and Tangaroa and the food
basket of Ahuriri, – Interviewee #22
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I work with the Department of Conservation, and they found spawning grounds in there that, left
untouched, the spawning has increased the number of whitebait in the area ...if we protected for a little
while then nature will take its course. – Interviewee #22
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what we’re finding today in there is that the plankton and food life is there but we haven’t got the fish in
there. – Interviewee #22
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...why doesn’t Moremore come?’ And the meeting house was silent. This is how my uncle answered, he
said, ‘Well he doesn’t need to. There are signs up all over the place. ‘Don’t take the food, it’s poison.’’ –
Interviewee #22
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One of the things here is that we can’t eel in some of our AGMs because of the accumulating heavy
metals, arsenic and mercury. … it’s in the plants and it’s in the fish and our people need to and would
like to be eating those regularly, but we can’t, we wouldn’t, here because of the high cancer risk. –
Interviewee #24
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Rotorua with the flow of all the dirty water that’s going straight down there now and thank God they
put that wall in because it’s helping Rotoiti to recover... So there must be effect on our Kai<strong>moana</strong>
because it goes out the cut. Very little of it goes out the Maketu estuary. I mean it’s controlled by a
control gate and but the people are asking for the river to be returned to the estuary because it’s
affected the way it is now, it’s affected the growth of our kai<strong>moana</strong> in there and because I remember
back in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s, that when the river was flowing straight through the estuary before they
put the cut in and man, it was just full of life of fish. You had sharks coming up, you had sting rays
coming up, you had snapper coming through. You don’t see any of those now. - Interviewee #26
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Interviewer #1 – Okay, brilliant. So what are some of the big changes you’ve seen over the last 20, 30
years in your time of going out to Maketu?
Interviewee #26– Oh, it’s like what I’ve said earlier, when the Kaituna was running through the Maketu
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