Tagata Tangata 4 - Tangata Whenua / People of the Land (Episode Four)

Māori are descendant from the gods, the ancestors, right down to the present day; and that connection connects them to the natural world, and the connection is held together and mediated by the forces of tapu and pono, the sanctity of the ancestors who won the land, who sanctified it with their blood, with their bones that were buried in the urupā.

– Māori academic and writer Ranginui Walker

Because we've been caught up in a particular interpretation of the world which is exploitive and it ties in very well with some people's greed, it’s really the greedy that keep this process moving, keep the exploitation of land and the desecration of the sacred nature of land ... They're the ones that continue to insist that we are mystic idiots who really don’t know reality; on the contrary we understand reality so much better. Leave us our land. We think we can take care of it. We don't want any more of our land to be given to other people.

– Yvette Maono

Land as mother is a belief common to us all in Polynesia. In our struggle to maintain that relationship we have suffered many setbacks, but we continue because tangata whenua never forget that link.

– Tagata Tangata narrator and co-writer Ramona Papili'i

From the beginning all the military ate at that time in one restaurant, and they ate everything there: fish and vegetables. One day there was an explosion in the air, and from that moment on they never ate fish or vegetables from that island. But they didn't tell the people to stop eating food from the island.

– Wilfred Tetuanui, who was a gendarme (soldier) on an island close to Mururoa Atoll, when the French were testing nuclear weapons