Tongariro

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To say who one is, in the formal manner of the central North Island, one does not begin with one’s name. One begins with the mountain. Before the lake that lies below it, before the river that runs from it, before the canoe that carried the ancestors and the people who descend from them, comes the line that fixes a person in the order of things: ko Tongariro te maunga — Tongariro is the mountain. The peak stands at the head of the recital because it stands at the head of the genealogy. It is not scenery and not a possession. It is the senior member of the family, the one to whom the living trace themselves, and what is owed to it is what is owed to an elder of immense rank.

The thing named is a knot of fire in the bare upland of the island’s middle: three andesite volcanoes that share a single weather and a single story. Tongariro itself is the northernmost and the lowest of the three, 1,978 meters, a broad complex of at least a dozen vents and craters rather than a single summit, steaming where the heat reaches the surface. Beside it rises Ngauruhoe (pronounced nga-roo-ho-eh), a near-perfect cone whose symmetry makes it the picture most people carry of the place — though to the geologist Ngauruhoe is not a separate mountain at all but the youngest and most active cone of Tongariro, its highest and most insistent mouth. South of these stands Ruapehu (roo-a-peh-hoo), broad and high and snow-capped, the tallest peak of the whole North Island at 2,797 meters, holding a hot acid crater lake in its heights that turns from green to grey as the volcano breathes beneath it. Together they are the country of the Ngati Tuwharetoa (nga-tee too-far-eh-toa), one of the great iwi, or peoples, of the interior, and they are the reason that people exists where it does.

The fire called from Hawaiki

The land was claimed for the Tuwharetoa by an ancestor who walked it before there were any. Ngatoroirangi (nga-toh-roh-ee-rang-ee) was a tohunga — a priest, an expert in the sacred, and a navigator of the deep ocean — who came on the voyaging canoe Te Arawa from Hawaiki, the homeland from which the Polynesian ancestors set out and to which the spirits of the dead return. Coming ashore in the new land, he did not stay on the coast. He went inland to the high center to take possession of it, naming the places as he went, for to name a place in the proper way is to bind it to oneself and to those who will come after. The names he set on the rivers and ridges of the plateau are the title-deed of the Maori people who would gather there.

He climbed the mountain to see the country he was claiming. But the height turned on him. A killing cold came down — snow, the freezing wind out of the south, the kind of weather a man from the warm islands of the voyaging world had never met — and on the summit Ngatoroirangi began to die. With the last of his strength he called across the whole width of the ocean to the two sisters he had left behind, Kuiwai and Haungaroa, the keepers of sacred fire in the homeland: Ka riro au i te tonga, tukuna mai te ahi! — I am seized by the south wind, send me fire! The cry carried back to Hawaiki. The sisters answered it. They sent fire, and the fire came not over the sea but beneath it, traveling underground the whole way, carried by two beings of the deep — the taniwha Te Pupu and Te Hoata — who surfaced again and again on the long road, leaving a track of heat that still marks the land.

That track is the geothermal spine of the North Island. Where the fire-bearers broke the surface, the ground still steams and boils: at Whakaari, the island that smokes off the coast, and at the springs and craters strung inland, and at last on Tongariro itself, where the warmth reached the freezing priest in time to save him. The volcanoes burn because the fire of Hawaiki arrived there and never went out. This is not a tale told about the mountain from a distance. It is the account of why the mountain is hot, why the springs steam, why the people belong to the place, and why the place belongs, through Ngatoroirangi, to the homeland across the sea. The geology and the genealogy are one description.

This account survives because it was kept the way all such knowledge was kept — not in writing but in the trained memory of the people. The whakapapa, the genealogies that thread a person back through the ancestors to the canoe and the homeland, and the karakia, the chants and invocations that carry the sacred words, were held and recited by those whose office it was to hold them, and passed down by mouth across the generations. The fire-calling of Ngatoroirangi belongs to that oral inheritance. When it began to be written, it was written largely by outsiders — the explorers, the missionaries, and the nineteenth-century collectors of Maori tradition, who set down what they were told and often colored it with their own assumptions. A name spelled one way in one collector’s notebook, a detail emphasized in one telling and absent in another: the written versions are a partial and secondhand record of a knowledge that lived, and lives still, in the recitation of the people themselves. The mountain’s own account of itself is the one the Tuwharetoa give, and it is older than any page.

The near-perfect cone of Ngauruhoe, geologically the youngest and most active vent of the Tongariro complex. Photograph by Krzysztof Golik, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The heads of the ancestors

What follows from the story is a way of treating the mountains that has nothing casual in it. The peaks are tapu — set apart, charged, dangerous to handle wrongly, the same quality that hedges a chief of the highest blood and the bones of the dead. In the most direct telling the summits are the heads of the ancestors themselves, and the head is the most tapu part of a person, the seat of the sacred potency that runs in a chiefly line. To stand on the very top of such a mountain is to stand on an ancestor’s head. To cook or eat food up there, to let the smoke and steam of a meal rise over the summit, is to bring the most ordinary and life-giving of acts — eating, which by its nature dispels the sacred — into contact with the most sacred thing there is. The two cannot meet without violence to the order that holds the world together.

So the high places were not for trampling. The peaks were approached, when approached at all, by those with the standing and the knowledge to do it rightly, and the topmost points were left to the ancestors whose heads they were. This is not a prohibition imposed from outside but the plain consequence of what the mountains are. If the peak is one’s forebear, one does not climb over its face for sport, any more than one would use a grandparent’s grave as a footstool. The same logic that makes the genealogy begin with the mountain makes the mountain something a person stands beneath, not upon.

That sacredness gives the Tuwharetoa their standing in the world. A people’s mana — their inherited and accumulated authority, the weight that makes their word carry — is bound up with the land they hold and the ancestors they descend from. To hold Tongariro, the seat of Ngatoroirangi’s fire and the head of the line, is to hold something no other people can claim. The mountain is the source of identity in the strict sense: it is the answer to the question of who one is, given before the name, because the name means nothing until the mountain has placed it. This is a structure shared across the wider Polynesian world, where a great peak can be the firstborn of the land and the marker of a people’s descent — the firstborn mountain of the Hawaiians works the same way — but at Tongariro it carries the particular charge of the fire that came underground from across the sea.

The tapu of the heights also reaches into the order of the world set out in the older cosmology, the one in which the sky-father and the earth-mother were prised apart by their children so that light and living space could come into being — the work, in the Maori telling, of Tane, who forced the two embracing parents asunder and propped the sky above. The mountains stand in the space that separation opened, reaching from the body of the earth toward the sky, and a high peak is among the nearest things in the visible world to the realm of the heavens. To treat such a place as ordinary ground is to confuse the registers the whole cosmology depends on: the sacred and the common, the realm above and the realm of food and the body, the ancestors and the living. The prohibitions on the summit are the maintenance of that order at the one point where the earth comes closest to the sky. The same care that the people give to genealogy and to chant — keeping each thing in its proper place and rank — they give to the mountain, because the mountain is where rank is highest and the danger of disorder greatest.

A gift to keep the mountains whole

In the nineteenth century the order around the mountains came under a pressure it had never faced. British settlement spread up the island; the Crown and private buyers pressed for land; the Native Land Court began breaking the old collective holdings into individual titles that could be sold off piece by piece. The paramount chief of Ngati Tuwharetoa in those years was Te Heuheu Tukino IV, also called Horonuku (ho-roh-noo-koo), who had lived through the wars of the 1860s and watched the machinery of purchase and confiscation work its way across the country. He could see what was coming for the sacred peaks. Surveyed, titled, divided among heirs, they would be sold like any other ground — the heads of the ancestors parceled out and fenced.

His answer was as radical as it was conservative. Rather than let the mountains be divided, he would give the summits away whole, to a holder powerful enough to keep them whole and bound by an agreement to leave them inviolate. On 23 September 1887 the deed was signed: Horonuku and the Native Minister, John Ballance, conveying the tapu peaks of Tongariro, Ngauruhoe, and Ruapehu to the Crown to be held as a reserve, a protected place, for all the people of the land. The idea had been shaped with his son-in-law Lawrence Grace, a member of Parliament who saw that the only way to save the mountains from sale was to make them a public reserve on the model just then emerging in the wider world. The area first given was small — a core of some twenty-six square kilometers around the summits — and it took years and further land to build it into a usable park, with the Tongariro National Park Act passing in 1894.

The result was the first national park in Aotearoa New Zealand and one of the earliest anywhere on earth — the founding gift coming not from a government carving out wilderness but from an indigenous chief protecting his ancestors. The act has been read in two ways, and both are true. It was a chief exercising the highest authority over his own sacred land, choosing the one course that would keep it from being broken up. And it was a cession to the colonizing power, made under the shadow of a land system that left few other ways to hold anything at all. The gift saved the mountains and also handed their keeping to the Crown — a transfer whose terms and meaning the Tuwharetoa have continued to press and renegotiate ever since. Protection and dispossession ran in the same deed.

Te Heuheu Tukino IV (Horonuku), paramount chief of Ngati Tuwharetoa, who made the 1887 gift of the peaks. From James Cowan, The New Zealand Wars (1922); public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The first cultural landscape

The mountains went on doing what mountains do. Ngauruhoe erupted more than seventy times in the century and a half after 1839, throwing ash and pyroclastic flows down its flanks as late as the 1970s. Ruapehu’s crater lake has spilled and exploded repeatedly, and Tongariro’s craters still vent. The park grew around them into one of the country’s great walking grounds. And in the late twentieth century the place became the site of an argument about what a sacred mountain is, conducted on the largest stage there is.

In 1990 Tongariro National Park was inscribed on the World Heritage List — but only for its natural values, its volcanoes and ecosystems, with no formal recognition of what the mountains mean to the people whose ancestors they are. The omission was glaring, and the Tuwharetoa and others pressed to correct it. In 1992 the World Heritage Committee revised its criteria to admit “cultural landscapes,” including the category of the associative landscape: a place valued not for monuments built upon it but for the religious and ancestral associations that a living people hold with the land itself. In 1993 Tongariro was re-inscribed under those revised criteria — the first property anywhere in the world to be listed as a cultural landscape, the first admitted to the heritage roll for what a place means to a living people as much as for what it physically is.

That precedent reframed the whole enterprise. It conceded, in the most official language available, that a mountain can be heritage because it is an ancestor — that the worth of a place can lie in a genealogy and a tapu rather than in stones and ruins. For the Tuwharetoa it was recognition on the world’s terms of what their own recital had always said first: that Tongariro is the mountain, the head of the line, the seat of the fire from Hawaiki. The summits the chief gave away to keep whole had become the case that changed how the world counts sacred ground.

The contest is not closed. The relationship between the iwi and the Crown over the mountains’ management has been reopened in the era of Treaty settlements, with the Tuwharetoa pressing for a stake in the keeping of what their ancestor gave; the question of who truly holds the heads of the ancestors did not end with a deed in 1887. The volcanoes, indifferent to all of it, go on burning with the fire that came underground from the homeland — the same fire, in the only account the mountain gives of itself, that a freezing priest called for and received, and that has never since gone out.

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