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

when we ... let MeF know we were picking the seaweed up off the beach ... they stopped us and they
said, ‘No,’ we had to get a licence to do that and then we had to get the seaweed we picked off the
beach and take it over to Whitianga to their premises and have it weighed to see how much we were
taking from the sea. ... It was 1 hour 20 minutes to get the seaweed from our house to MFish and then 1
hour 20 minutes back. We felt that that was another obstacle that was put in our way to advance our
farm. ... each species that we intended, or we were researching, we had to get a special licence. Each
licence were costing $1000 or more. – Interviewee #9
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if you go back and look at the pre-Settlement documents about what Rauru was all about, it was about
revitalisation of a number of areas which have been lost over time ... honouring our tūpuna and
providing a future for our tamariki mokopuna became the overall goal of why we would A) enter into
settlement, and because we had fought so hard in the negotiations in settlement, we did a lot of reading
about where we thought various government departments were going in terms of meeting their
statutory obligations. We felt by having a good relationship with MFish in the early days we could read
into the future about where we thought the whole regulatory body was going in terms of our kai<strong>moana</strong>,
our taonga species that we felt as if this plan or a plan of sorts, would be an intergenerational plan and if
we were to give proper (credies?) to our kaitiakitanga, this was one way in which we could support that
kaupapa of sustainability, not only for us, this generation but going forward. – Interviewee #11
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Interviewee #12 - I guess the ironic thing about it all is that we now have to farm watercress and kākahi
and even koura. They’re not naturally, they don’t naturally grow anymore.
Interviewee #14– So in other words, we’re having to perform our own interventions to try and reclaim
back ... not just our traditional resources, but our heritage.
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traditionally, our old people would just stand outside their backdoor basically and fish, but now you
actually have to have a licence to fish and I understand that the licences cost $90 for a child or a 140 for
a family. ... some of our guys that go to collect the kai for tangi and stuff, nine times out of ten don’t
hold licences, have always (mahi’ed?) kai for the marae and for their families and politically they’re
called ‘poachers,’ ... but for us, they’re actually part of our pātaka kai because they’re not just get the
fish, they get the wild pork. They’re the guys that are there boning the meat, if we need it, you know?
There’s that whole tikanga aspect that we’re now trying to be in (wanahau?) about that because our
boys are saying, ‘I got a $2000 fine for poaching off your river.’ And we know that that’s our river, ...
that’s $2000 that’s not going to our families, that’s having to go to a whole other court system and stuff
– Interviewee #13
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Could be better for a number of reasons. We believe and it’s being proved that there’s less water
coming out of [the Awahou] due to some of the improvements to the lake. We’ve been told they were
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