Graduate tells story of whenua loss on Aotea

For Kelly Klink (Ngāti Rehua), getting a PhD in Māori Studies was never about letters after her name.

She felt compelled to tell the story of her island iwi, the tangata whenua of Aotea (Great Barrier Island), Te Hauturu-o-Toi (Little Barrier Island) and the surrounding islands, including the Mokohinau Islands (Pokohinu) in the Hauraki Gulf.

Today they live off only around five percent of the land.

Kelly, who will graduate with a PhD from the University of Auckland at the Spring ceremony on 24 September, grew up with whakapapa, as many Māori did, and with the oral histories of Ngāti Rehua.

She says it was her maternal grandmother’s lifetime of writing whakapapa that first drew her interest at an early age, and she still lives in a family home at Katherine Bay (Motairehe) on Aotea.

“I don’t think I came to the PhD decision out of the blue,” she says. “I’ve always been in this world and done this work. My life had always been whakapapa and history of Aotea, and history of anything really, that’s always been my passion.”

However her interest in university study was put on hold by the needs of her youngest son, who was diagnosed with ADHD and struggling in the school system.

“My mum, who passed away last year, told me, ‘You have two choices: you either be a mum, or you go to school, get your degrees, but be stressed,’ so I chose to be a mum,” she says.

She got up two hours early each day to read with her son, then went to school with him three days a week to support his learning.

Ten years passed and she finally saw her own chance to study.

While working full time and raising her son and a niece as a single parent, she completed a double major in history and anthropology at the University of Waikato in two years, fitting in summer school courses to finish sooner.

When she started university she was also attending night school, where she gained a diploma in te reo Māori. She then completed a masters with first-class honours at Waikato, followed almost immediately by her PhD at Auckland.

Kelly’s research centres on the histories of her whānau, their relationships to Aotea, Te Hauturu-o-Toi and other islands in the Hauraki Gulf, and their connections across the Pacific through 32 generations of voyaging and kinship.

It involved poring through Native Land Court records and documents held in places like the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, as well as endless kōrero over many years with older whānau; and learning from the land and sea itself.

“Learning happens on the whenua (land) and the moana (ocean),” she says. “Mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) has not been lost and remains embedded in whakapapa and the whenua for those who want to listen.”

Kelly wrote a lot of her thesis in her tupuna tāne tuarua’s (great-grandfather) house on the Ngāti Rehua reservation in the far north of Aotea at Katherine Bay (Motairehe); an old kauri home accessible only by boat.

“You can fish from my lawn with a handline,” she says.” It’s hard to live there, but beautiful.”

Kelly’s PhD documents the systematic loss of Māori land on Aotea, where around 95 percent is now Department of Conservation estate or is in private hands, with only 1,420 hectares reserved for iwi at Motairehe.

Before Te Tiriti o Waitangi was signed, she says, a massive land transaction took place on Aotea.

“On 20 March 1838, Horeta Te Taniwha of Ngāti Whanaunga, a Hauraki iwi, handed over the entire island to his son-in-law, the American-born William Webster. However, Ngāti Rehua, the tangata whenua, did not sell.”

They had granted Webster a right of occupation and use, not ownership.

“Te Tiriti’s pre-emption clause would have shut Webster out as an American, so the claim also named the British-born Jeremiah Nagle and William Abercrombie, who wanted the island for timber milling and mining.”

However, she says, in 1844, the Lands Claims Commissioner, Edward Godfrey, recommended no grant beyond the legal limit of 2,560 acres. But the former Governor of New Zealand, Robert FitzRoy and his executive council, overruled him, unlawfully granting 24,269 acres to Webster, Nagle and Abercrombie so their mining operations could go ahead.

Kelly’s commitment to Ngāti Rehua’s rights over their environment was tested in 2018 when she was a central figure opposing private operator Coastal Resources Ltd’s application to increase its annual marine sludge dumping five-fold at a site 25 km east of Aotea.

Despite the fierce local backlash over threats to marine life and customary fishing grounds, the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) initially granted the permit in 2019.

However, Kelly, representing Ngāti Rehua, spearheaded the resistance alongside the community coalition ‘Protect Aotea’, launching a high-profile High Court appeal. In 2019, Justice Helen Cull quashed the dumping permit, ruling that the EPA had fundamentally failed to consult with local iwi, which successfully halted the massive sludge expansion plans.

“For me, it just didn’t sound right because we’re on the whenua,” she says. “How could we be doing that to our ocean?”

Kelly, who is a research fellow across two faculties at Auckland, also has articles in the works for various journals, including the Journal of the Polynesian Society, having spent time recently with colleagues in Tahiti, looking at early Māori migration patterns.

Ngāti Rehua and Ngātiwai ki Aotea trace their descent back 32 generations to the explorer Toi Te Huatahi and claim complete tino rangatiratanga (sovereignty) over Aotea.

And it’s for this iwi that she wrote her PhD, which she believes is an entirely collective effort.

“I gave a whakapapa in my PhD of how this knowledge was passed on,” she says. “It’s not mine. It’s our people’s. I’m just collecting it as a caregiver. I was the last one to be trained in the history of holding it and I’m tired of seeing Western historians writing our stories. They’re our stories, for us, with our voice.”

But it’s to her mother, who died before she could see her daughter graduate, that she dedicates the work.

“We tried to get my PhD marked in time before she died, but it wasn’t to be. I don’t need the tohu (recognition), but this was her dream.”

Kelly Klink’s supervisors are Professor Margaret Mutu and Associate Professor Dan Hikuroa. Her thesis: Ngāti Rehua o Te Moananui o Toi: Cobwebs of Colonisation can be found in ResearchSpace.