Huhana Smith in her olive grow at Kuku, Horowhenua Photo: RNZ/Sally Round
A wedge of land between the mountains and the sea north of Wellington will come full circle if Huhana Smith realises her vision.
Twenty years from now, the university professor, artist, and small farmer hopes her six hectares in Kuku, Horowhenua, will still be a thriving olive grove and orchard, but also a pā harakeke producing fibre for a sustainable fashion industry.
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Plantings of harakeke, the wet-loving long-leaved plant indigenous to Aotearoa, are spreading around the stream running through the property, which produces a range of preserves and olive oil under Smith's Waikōkupu Grove and Orchard label.
She and partner Richard Anderson bought the land in 2006.
Smith is at the production end of a collaborative effort that is working on technology to enable the production of fine thread from the fibre of the harakeke plant.
"We are very close to determining the thread through long-thread technology that exists not in Aotearoa, but in Europe."
Harakeke Photo: Flickr / Petra Gloyn
Following the research work of Māori textile specialist Rangi Te Kaniwa and working with colleagues Faith Kane and Angela Kilford, she is keen to ensure the intellectual property around the use of harakeke is protected.
"We will be having conversations with major sustainable fashion labels - that's coming up - because then we can be all wearing kind of "styley" harakeke linen, if you want to call it linen.
"The knowledge promulgators are the Te Kanawa whānau, and so I've always been really like, we must protect the Māori intellectual property in terms of this thread."
Smith is also a problem-solver, trying to address climate change and other environmental issues by fusing traditional Māori knowledge and scientific methods.
Harakeke is a case in point for her.
"It's also a climate mitigation water cleanser. Harakeke lies down in a flood, pops back up again, so you could be using it for, you know, remediating.
Huhana Smith holds one of her preserved products bearing her Waikōkuku label Photo: RNZ/Sally Round
Smith heads Whiti o Rehua School of Art at Massey University by day and fits in farming and fruit preserving when she can.
Her olives were plentiful this year, she told Country Life, looking out over the 600-plus leccino and frantoio olive trees, adjoining the revegetating wetland area.
"It's not about being an olive oil magnate, because that's not going to happen.
"It's about the best organically grown food and the best quality food that should feed communities, because I think that's what our people did in the 1830s."
Smith's great-great-great-grandfather was one of the original Māori farmers in the area, and she has been involved in Treaty of Waitangi research.
"We fed Wellington in the late 1830s, 1840s, pre-signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, our hapū of Ngāti Tukorehe.
"We had clipper ships, we had barley, wheat fields, we grew melons, we raised pigs, and we sold those products in Wellington, and we fed the burgeoning city of Wellington."
Eventually, though, they were alienated from the land.
"I've done so much treaty research now, unfortunately, it wasn't about caring and sharing, it was more about power and control. So unfortunately [...] our people were beset by that.
"I think my ancestors were very enterprising to start off with. So I feel like I just work upon that legacy that they established."
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