Reforesting Pikirangi, Reckoning with Colonial Histories in Aotearoa/New Zealand

A light rain falls over the hills. Treetops catch its sunset golden flicker. Every evening, a new light casts itself over the forest, so that each tree has something different to tell you. All together, they are like an orchestra of tones, shapes, and shades, playing light and wind.

Welcome to Pikirangi, the forest Mark Austin planted. On the northern tip of Te Waipounamu, the South Island of Aotearoa/New Zealand, it climbs 52 hectares up a steep hill from a snaking river valley. Thirty years ago, it was a farm for sheep and beef, its soil denuded and degraded. But before that, it was a native forest.

Mark can’t count how many trees he’s planted. He stopped keeping track after 10,000, well over twenty years ago. There were also contributions from volunteers, family, friends, neighbors, and the seedlings dropped by birds, splayed by wind, as the forest began to regenerate itself.

Mark named the project Pikirangi, the Māori word for New Zealand mistletoe. I ask him how it all started, Pikirangi, this lifetime of regeneration that has resulted in a forest. His eyes glaze over the largeness of the question.

“That depends how far back you want to go,” he says.

“To the beginning?” I suggest.

“Yeah, but that depends where you think the beginning is.”

Mark first chooses “a beginning” in his twenties. Burnt out from juggling activism with medical school, he left Aotearoa to travel the world. Eventually he hitchhiked from Turkey all the way to London, where his parents had emigrated from to make him a first-generation pakeha (white) New Zealander. 

“After two years of traveling,” Mark says, “the only thing that I was absolutely sure about was that I wanted to plant trees.” Encouraging biodiversity, maintaining water quality, holding topsoil, and providing habitats for birds and insects, Mark decided, “There couldn’t be any purpose for my life that was bigger than that.”

Mark had always loved forests. He’d grown up on a forested property, and bullied as a child, he’d escape to it for refuge. It was the only place where he felt fully himself, safe and whole.

“Is there something special about the forests here, though, specifically?” I ask Mark, whose travels around the world after all led him back to New Zealand to plant trees. Mark nods, uncertain. “There’s wilderness all over the world,” he says, “But there’s something about native trees that just resonates. Their colors, their form. It’s impossible to describe.”

The Bigger Beginning

Ecologically, New Zealand is utterly unique. Eighty million years ago, it split off from the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana. Humans only arrived less than a thousand years ago, which means that for 80 million years, geographic isolation made for a kind of nature reserve in what we now call New Zealand. Forests reigned.

The temperate mingles with the tropical. Nikau palms sit low on sandy beaches while mountain beeches twist high in alpine cold. The rimu, miro, matai, tōtara, and kahikatea are all giant podocarps, New Zealand conifers. Kauri trees are massive and used to cover more than a million hectares in the north. Big as cathedrals, each lived for over 2,000 years. Today, 80 percent of the plants in New Zealand remain endemic.

Polynesian voyagers, the Māori first arrived in Aotearoa around 1250 AD, traveling over the Pacific in wakas, or canoes. They brought their worldviews with them, but “encounters with the new land, its weather patterns, and new flora and fauna all challenged that knowledge,” write Māori scholars Suzanne Duncan and Poia Rewi. As they “responded to the new land,” their knowledge “grew and morphed,” leading to the development of a “uniquely Māori, Indigenous knowledge base, intrinsically connected” to the environment both physically and spiritually.

The Māori beginning of being has forests and humanity intertwined. A version, as recounted by twentieth-century philosopher and theologian Māori Marsden, goes like this:

Ranginui, sky father, and Papatūānuku, earth mother, gave birth to many children, called atua, Gods. The firstborn was Tāne. In love, Ranginui held onto Papatūānuku instead of completing the heavens, dooming these atua children to live in darkness. Unable to move or breathe, they decided to separate their parents, earth and sky, so as to bring light to the world. It was Tāne, the firstborn, who stood up and did it, thrusting Ranginui away. The atua were then delegated different realms and tasks on this newly lit earth. Tāne took on two such departments: forests, and humans.

Thus, in Māori cosmology, the forests are amongst our first siblings. As Duncan and Rewi explain, this whakapapa—a genealogical descent from Gods—is a “guiding concept,” emphasizing the “interrelatedness of all things.” The atua implant all of creation with mauri (which can be translated to “life force and divine potential”). As the atua of trees, Tāne gives them an inherent tapu—sacred forbiddenness—that must be ritually removed and neutralized by prayer and rites if a tree is to be felled for human use. Pre-colonial Māori thanked Tāne for every tree felled, burning its first chips as an offering back to the atua.

Colonial Commodification

Of course, when the Europeans arrived and promptly set about tearing down these unique and sacred forests, they did not offer rites. Renowned British explorer Captain Cook arrived in 1769, and fatalities of cultural misunderstanding began as soon as he hit the beach. Within 100 years, the Treaty of Waitangi was signed to establish New Zealand as a British Crown colony. And within 100 years of that, less than half of native forests remained.

In the eyes of the colonizers, the trees were not siblings, but resources. Colonialists approached New Zealand as a “terra nullius,” or blank slate, on which to inscribe Western ideologies. The land was seen as available for monetization, farming, and logging. Native forests were clearcut and replaced with farms and pulp mills. As “Aotearoa” became “New Zealand,” so too was it transformed from a land of deep bush to Britain’s pastoral replica. 

In turn, Aotearoa’s felled trees were exported to England, home of this worldview, as butter boxes. Kahikatea, a white pine endemic to Aotearoa that thrives in lowland marshes and climbs up to 200 feet, had an “odorless” and “easily worked timber,” unmatched for shipping the now pastoral New Zealand’s new wealth of dairy products.

Missionaries compelled the tangata whenua, the Māori “people of the land,” towards “enterprise,” preaching that “the path to Christ for Māori was paved with hard work in the practical pursuit of British-style agriculture, mechanics, and commerce.” New Zealand mission records are riddled with the phrase, “Christianity: the religion of civilization.” David Haberman, a scholar of religion who studies trees, writes that the prevailing biblical understanding of “the wilderness” amongst European settlers was that it was a “cursed, desolate wasteland” where “God’s blessing was absent,” opposing “civilization.” Where Māori whakapapa connects humans with trees, colonial missionaries attempted the opposite. 

Māori warriors marched into battle chanting “the warrior’s death is to die for the land”—with “land” emerging as a powerful focus in wars against the colonists. The Treaty of Waitangi allowed the colonial government the sole right to buy land from the Māori; they bought cheaply and sold to incoming settlers at a profit, using the surplus to finance their administration. The buying and selling process was a confused frenzy, complicated by obscure notions of which chiefs had rights to which land. How, after all, could the “spirit” of the land be bought or sold? Private ownership is not a universal or Indigenous concept.

Māori chiefs sold for a number of reasons, many of them coming down to cultural differences and misunderstandings. Some wanted to demonstrate friendship, others to gain prosperity or security against rivals; many fundamentally couldn’t fathom “selling” land, believing instead that they allowed settlers use of the land in goodwill. But as settlers kept coming, and buying, chiefs grew increasingly concerned. Many went to war. From 1845 to 1872, a series of violent conflicts are remembered as the “land wars.” But perhaps they aren’t remembered enough.

Reckoning and Reforesting

Aotearoa/New Zealand still reckons with how these stories should be told, and what should be inscribed on the land accordingly. Even today, some local farmers look up at Mark’s fledgling forest and snarl, “That used to be good pasture.”

Mark “bought” the pasture thirty years ago. In his first winter on the land, he planted 4,500 trees. For perspective, it takes me about an hour to plant four trees. Mark planted one hundred a day. 

I tried to ask Mark what motivated him. That’s the great mystery of Mark, to everyone who knows him. How does he have all that drive, all that energy? Nowadays, he works in three-hour bursts, with quick breaks for a slow cup of tea in between. Thirty years on, he continues to rapidly plant trees, and gradually grow a forest.

Like Mark, I too landed in New Zealand after traveling the world, following an early burnout, knowing only that I wanted to plant trees. That’s how I found Pikirangi. I arrived first as a volunteer, helping in the forest in exchange for room and board. Mark hosts several volunteers at a time, relishing the opportunity to share Pikirangi. I was immediately enchanted. 

My partner and I spent our first week as volunteers doing what we called “old man’s bearding.” Plucking on our hands and knees, like supplicants bent down in prayer, we joined the never-ending battle against the bane of the forest. An invasive species from Europe, “old man’s beard” doesn’t allow anything else to breathe or exist. They climb up trees and suffocate with their thick, woody vines. They’re here to dominate, not co-exist, and if left to their own devices they’d take over this forest completely, recasting it in their monotone image. So, much of our work—reforesting, weeding away at an invasive, colonizing harm—was just the slow, unglamorous task of old man’s bearding. Plucking so that biodiversity can flourish again.

Māori Marsden writes that if one “has faced the ultimate questions posed by life,” their “center no longer remains a vacuum which continues to ingest any new idea that seeps into it.” For Marsden, that “ultimate question,” the “goal of human endeavor,” is to achieve atuatanga, divinity.

“This is our meaning and purpose of life,” he writes. In Māori knowledge, sacrality is inherent in everything, through ancestral atua that connect humans with Papatūānuku, earth mother, Ranginui, sky father, and ultimately to Io the omniscient, everything. When we live symbiotically to support the biological functioning of the earth, we are loving and respecting our mother, and we are mutually strengthening the mauri life force and divinity inherent in all things.

Perhaps this is the source of Mark’s impressive energy. One hundred trees a day. An entire forest.

Tree planting can and has been deployed in corporate and colonial greenwashing, creating “carbon credits,” and obfuscating Indigenous histories. But Mark’s project is a humble and deeply personal act of devotion, reckoning, and survival. It’s a personal reaction to a horror wrought by his people—British environmental legacies in New Zealand, and Western deforestation and commodification more broadly—a small response to what he has described as  corresponding “impending ecological disaster,” and what he has needed personally, too.  

For Mark, Pikirangi comes down to a journey of healing. Healing from a childhood of bullying, where the forest was and remains his most trusted refuge; healing from an unbalanced and non-nurturing society that overworks both humans and forests; healing from the distance separating us from ourselves, from nature, from connection; and healing an earth scarred by colonial legacies, its monocultural invasiveness.

Needing a name for the project, Mark came upon “Pikirangi” early on. He was flipping through a calendar one day when he came across a picture of New Zealand mistletoe, Pikirangi, and knew “that’s it.” 

While Tāne was the oldest atua child of Papatūānuku and Ranginui, Pikirangi was the youngest. As the youngest he was Ranginui’s special favorite, so when Tāne separated Papatūānuku and Ranginui, he gave Pikirangi a special place, climbing the trees so that father and son could stay connected, could stay in touch. Pikirangi therefore connects father and mother, heaven and earth. And now that they’re apart, maybe it’s our purpose to connect the two, by healing from our histories and reforesting the Earth.

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Featured image: Treetops in Pikirangi. Photo by Mark Austin, 2024.

Sadie Rittman’s work engages myth and mysticism of climate crisis; resacralization and re-enchantment of regeneration; and ontological politics of healing. She holds an MA in sociocultural anthropology from the University of British Columbia, and studied religion at Swarthmore College. Her work has been published and presented in venues such as the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, and the American Academy of Religion. Contact. Substack.