Potiki

Roimata Kararaina, a Māori woman, grows up in a small town near an isolated stretch of the New Zealand coast, raised by her single father. They spend a lot of time with the Tamihana clan, and Roimata attends the local Catholic school with two of the Tamihana children, Hemi and his disabled sister Mary. When Roimata’s father dies, she goes away to finish her schooling in accordance with his wishes. She becomes a Western-style teacher. But in her mid-20s she comes home, marries Hemi, and settles down to raise their three children, James, Tangimoana, and Manu.

When Manu is still a preschooler, Mary unexpectedly gives birth to a baby boy with significant physical differences. No one knows who impregnated her, although the family suspects Joe-billy, a White man who camps on the beach most summers. Granny Tamihana names the baby Tokowaru-i-te-Marama, or “Toko,” after a brother who died when he was still a child, and Hemi and Roimata adopt him.

The Tamihanas live between two worlds for a while. James and Tangimoana go to the local primary school, but Roimata homeschools Manu (who’s too timid and shy to attend regular school) and Toko (who is frail and prefers to stay home) in a more traditional way, through hands-on activities and storytelling. As he grows older, it becomes clear that Toko has a prophetic gift. Once, he has a premonition about catching a big fish. When he goes out on the boat with his father and siblings, he pulls in a giant conger eel, which provides food for the whole community. As he gets older, Toko begins to speak of an impending conflict with faceless, nameless outsiders.

When Hemi loses his job at a local meatpacking plant, he takes the opportunity to return to working the land and living in a more traditional way. He’s inspired in part by his own history and by the efforts of his friend Reuben and other Māori people to reclaim their ancestral lands of the Te Ope community. After a few years of hard work, Hemi and his community have established gardens productive enough to feed their families and to sell produce at the local markets.

But then Mr. Dolman, a property developer, begins pressuring the community to sell him their beachfront property for a massive tourist resort. The Tamihanas and their community refuse. But they can’t stop Mr. Dolman entirely, because he already owns the hills behind their little community. While he begins construction there, he continues to pressure them to sell him access to the beach.

When the community continues to refuse, Mr. Dolman embarks on a campaign of sabotage and violence designed to force them to capitulate. He and his henchmen dam a creek so that when it rains, the creek overruns its banks and floods the community, destroying the gardens and threatening to wash away the urupa (cemetery). They set fire to the wharenui (the communal meeting house), destroying it almost completely. With the help of relatives and friends from Te Ope, the community rebuilds the gardens and the wharenui and reconsecrates the cemetery. But when the developers firebomb the new wharenui, Toko is killed. In retribution, Tangimoana and some of the others blow up the roads and buildings that are going up for the new resort and destroy the developers’ equipment, putting a stop—at least temporarily—to Mr. Dolman’s plans. The community survives, but at great cost.