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Pitches for interview and article ideas, draft pieces, poetry, photo essays, artwork collections and short stories are open until midnight on Friday, 16 February.

The theme for Rima is houtupu, genuine and authentic. More information to come!

Submit your writings for the next pukapuka in the atua wāhine collection, focussing on Papatūānuku. Any writing form is welcome, from short stories and personal essays to poetry.

Submissions are open until midnight on Friday, 1 March.

You don’t need to be knowledgeable about Papatūānuku; write from your own experiences of learning about, being inspired by or connecting with them. For an example, check out the Atua Wāhine Collection.

Writers selected for inclusion will be paid the following fees.

Poetry: $100.00

Writing under 1000 words: $100-$200

Writing over 1000 words: $150-$250.00

Priority will be given to writers of Māori and Pacific descent.

An excerpt on Papatūānuku from Mana Wahine and the Atua Wāhine:

2.2 Papatūānuku

The whenua is the placenta of women and the land. The land is the whenua of Papatūānuku. Papatūānuku is personified as female and earth: a force which the mauri of every living thing interacts with (Pere 1993:277). In most creation narratives, Papatūānuku is the one from which all the other female gods begin – the Earth Mother (Awatere 1995). The birth right of the individual is described as kaihau-waiū or the ‘attributes gained through the mother’s milk’ (Moko Mead 2003:35). Awatere translates the proverb, ‘Ko te whenua te wai-ū mō ngā uri whakatipu,’ to, ‘The land provides the sustenance for the coming generation,’ with the meaning of wai-ū as breast milk (Awatere 1995:36). Wai are the water-based fluids of fertilisation and the medium by which all things live (T.Smith 2012:6), and ū, a women’s breasts (Te Aka 2019).

Like the placenta of the pregnant woman and the breast milk of the mother, Papatūānuku provides nourishment to her descendants just as she nurtured her own children, the atua (Gabel 2013:58) with her own wai-ū. After the birth of the Māori child, ‘The whenua (placenta) is returned to the whenua (land), thereby earthing the child’s mana tangata, or personal dignity, where it is sustained throughout life until, at death, the body is returned to Papatūānuku’ (Kupenga et al. 1993:304). Pere shares how her whenua was returned to Papatūānuku.

My ‘whenua’ was buried in a special place three days after I was born. This special place is a little hillock with an underground cavern. The area is marked by a post and carved bird. The whenua of the first-born in each generation is ceremoniously linked up to Papatūānuku in this ancestral place. As a result I identify very positively with the earth mother. (1990:3)

The Western hospital system made the traditional practice of returning the whenua to Papatūānuku impossible for Marie, one of the research interviewees. In the same way that Māori women have been denied the ability to ground the whenua of their children into Papatūānuku, Queenie Oneroa laments the suffering of Māori women as ‘they can’t teach their daughters about papatuanuku, mother earth because maoris [sic] own 3% of Aotearoa. We are landless’ (n.d: 86). In both ways, Māori women have had the whenua taken from them.

Papatūānuku is connected to kōrero whakapapa narratives relating to fertility and wai. In one atua narrative, Uepoto (a child of Rangi and Papa) escapes from the parental embrace of Ranginui and Papatūānuku through the urine of Papatūānuku. Upon escaping through the waters of Papatūānuku and seeing the world, Uepoto returns to the entrance of Papatūānuku to inform the other children of the light outside of their mother’s body (T.Smith 2012:6). In this narrative we can see that even the urine of Papatūānuku is sacred, suggesting that the waters of Māori women are also sacred, whether sexual, menstrual, childbirth related, urine or breastmilk.

Papatūānuku’s pubis Kurawaka is where Tāne finds the ‘elusive material capable of materialising his procreative longing, ushering in humanity’ (Murphy 2011:72). The elusive material in sexual reproduction must be the egg, fertilised by the male element. It is elusive because it is only available for fertilisation for 12-24 hours after being released from the ovaries (Brusie 2016). However, the pubis or kurawaka of Papatūānuku as the creative centre of all human life is ‘consistently downplayed across the colonial ethnographic literature’ (Murphy 2011:72). Instead, ‘Tāne is singularly celebrated for his act of procreation denying the raw, and very female sexual potency imbued in the ‘red soil’ (Murphy 2011:72).

The dual meaning of whare tangata as the womb and the house of humanity illustrates the connection between Hineahuone and her crafting from the red soil of Papatūānuku. The fertile red soil of Māori women could be the menstruation, the red bleeding that signifies the potentiality of a new life.

Hineahuone is the representation of the female element and the mother of Hinetītama. Similarly, the spiritual homeland of Hawaiiki is also a womb metaphor in its translation ‘to the living waters which overflow’ (T.Smith 2012:8). Hawaiiki was not just the long-past homeland of Māori, but may also be a metaphorical reference to the mother’s womb, the living waters which overflow. In other words, the spiritual homeland Hawaiiki could very well be representative of the place of creation – Te Kore – enclosed in the living waters of the amniotic sac of the whare tangata. Today, living waters flow across Papatūānuku as rivers, streams, swampland and lakes.

Papatūānuku is symbolised in the fifth leaf of Pere’s Tāku Taha Māori model.

The fifth leaf symbolises Papatūānuku, the earth, and the way I relate to her. The land for me has the same significance as the placenta that surrounds the embryo and the womb – the Māori word ‘whenua’ is the term used for both the land and the placenta. Papatūānuku is personified as female, and it does not matter where I travel, I feel a strong affinity towards her. (1979:25)

The inclusion of Papatūānuku demonstrates her centrality to Pere’s Māoritanga. The dual-translation of whenua is also introduced. It is clear that Pere feels a strong sense of connectedness to Papatūānuku, no matter where in the world she finds herself.

Further references:

Papatūānuku Te Ara

Te Awa Atua, Te Awa Tapu, Te Awa Wahine: An examination of stories, ceremonies and practices regarding menstruation in the pre-colonial Māori world