Healthy Families Rotorua is part of a mātauranga Māori revitalisation kaupapa to celebrate Matariki.
In 2022, the team helped Kai Rotorua plant and harvest kūmara at Te Puea Orchard for Matariki ceremonies. This year, the team participated in the revival of an ana kūmara to store our produce, including two ancient varieties.
At this month’s hautapu at Maketū, lead systems innovator, Pirihira Whata, shared with staff and the local community how we decided to do things a little differently this year.
“Kai Rotorua usually grows ōwairaka red, which is the purple kūmara people buy from the supermarket. It’s a cultivar of a kūmara designed to withstand the elements of pests and disease, and we’ve been growing it for a number of years.
“However, this year we decided to feed our stars some tūturu (authentic) Māori kai, so we sourced hutihuti and taputini varieties. These kūmara are white and much different to those we’re used to seeing. They’re long and can get quite big,” she says.
Healthy Families Rotorua and Te Arawa Whānau Ora staff, along with Kai Rotorua volunteers and local schools, planted 30 of these traditional varieties amongst hundreds of ōwairaka red at Te Puea Orchard.
“Due to heavy rain this year, we had to harvest the kūmara in April, which is a little later than normal. We got about 600kgs of kūmara in total, and around 100kg were taputapu and hutihuti.
“Because we had so much kūmara and were using it for hautapu around Te Arawa, we had to find somewhere appropriate to store it,” she says.
Pirihira and Toi Tangata pouārahi mātauranga Māori, Ranginui Rikirangi-Thomas, spoke with whānau from Ngāti Pikiao to discuss storing the kūmara in one of the iwi’s ana kūmara. Fortunately, they agreed and local matanga, Tihini Grant, helped lead the revitalisation kaupapa.
“Ana kūmara have been around since we walked this earth, and interestingly, there are lots in Rotorua, which we unknowingly drive past all the time,” says Pirihira.
“We stored about 120kg of kumara in that ana for about three months, before distributing it across Te Arawa to be used for the various hautapu. Of the 120kgs that we stored, around 40 of the red kūmara rotted, while only five of the white ones perished, as they’re designed to be stored for long periods.
“Overall, it has been an amazing journey and the start of something quite cool. We’re going to use the tipu from some of that kumara to start a whole new maara (garden) for next year’s hautapu, with the intention of normalising this kai for our people,” she says.
The revival of the ancient ana kūmara attracted the attention of national media, with this year’s kūmara planting and harvest, and ana kūmara revival being filmed for the Home, Land & Sea television series, and the Healthy Families Rotorua team has also been interviewed by Māori news channels.