“Ōtaki is a small town on the southern side of Te Ika-a-Māui, the North Island of Aotearoa. Like many small towns in New Zealand, Ōtaki centres on a quiet main street of family-owned cafes, takeaway restaurants and two pubs, with the Ōtaki Civic Theatre on one end and Te Wānanga o Raukawa Māori University on the other. Drive in one direction and you will hit State Highway 1 to Wellington; drive in the other and you will reach Ōtaki Beach, a thin strip of sand facing out onto the Cook Strait and the Tasman Sea beyond. Over recent decades, Ōtaki has become a hub for Māori cultural identity and language, sixteen percent of its residents and half of the Māori population speak Te Reo Māori—well above the national average of three and 20 percent, respectively.1 In 1921, an Australian production company established a film studio in Ōtaki to make the most of the region’s varied scenery and form ‘Maoriland Films’ as a subsidiary of The New Zealand Moving Picture Co Ltd to shoot short actualities and Charlie Chaplain impersonations.2 Māoriland Film Festival, the largest Indigenous-run film festival in Aotearoa, now in its eleventh year, draws its title from this remnant of early film history.”

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Listen to this episode of the “Returning the Land” podcast to hear from two of the women (Esther Anne and Pentha Burns) who had a monumental role in creating the Maine Wabanaki State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission answer one of the most frequently-asked questions we hear from Dawnland viewers: What is happening now with REACH? This episode of the Returning the Land podcast is filled with insights about the impact of their work, the power of protest to make change, how they feel now about centering reconciliation, the truths that Maine’s marketing campaigns conceals, and the ongoing ripples in the pond from Dawnland.

“Shortly before dawn on a June day in 2021, I stood in the middle of a field in Acadia National Park in Maine. Beside me were my hosts: elders, storytellers, and musicians from the Wabanaki peoples who have lived in this place — which they call Moneskatik — for thousands of years. We were gathered to celebrate a centuries-old tradition of music and story. Roger Paul began by sharing the legend, first in Wabanaki then in English, of Koluskap, the first man, who had placed their Wabanaki ancestors on the eastern edge of the American continent for a purpose: to welcome the sun each morning. We listened to Lauren Stevens sing against a background of the softly breaking waves of the Atlantic. And as the sun rose through the pines, I was invited to take out my cello. I played a Mongolian tune, a piece that tells of the grasslands that my ancestors may have wandered, long before they came to the concrete of Hong Kong and Paris and New York.”