THIS IS HOME Desma Feakins has made a life living and working on the whenua. As a wahine of Ngāti Mutunga descent, she now stands on Tūhoe land and cares for it like her own. Based in the Ruatoki Valley, 20 minutes’ drive south of Whakatāne, Desma has run a dairy farm owned by the Tataiwhetu Trust alongside her partner, Whareauahi Teepa, for more than a decade. From 2014 to 2019, Desma and Whareauahi’s beautiful whānau of 11 were photographed by Tatsiana Chypsanava as part of a research project, and from this they formed a close friendship. Here, those images and the story of this family and their life on the land are brought together.
14 | THE FARMLANDER
Desma steals a moment of quiet stillness. Holding her Milo, she puts her feet on one of the empty dining chairs. Her tāne, Whareauahi – who is of Ngāi Tūhoe and Ngāti Hine and Ngāpuhi descent – has just walked in off the farm and they take a moment to pause and chat. It’s been a week of calving, training farming students and ferrying her tamariki around.
Life is slow in the valley. So I decided
“I was born and bred in New Plymouth and my grandfather was a farmer but my father was a commercial fisherman,” Desma says. “Whare and I met in Hamilton 22 years ago and we came here because the rent was getting so high. It definitely was a bit of a culture shock for me when we first got here.
The couple live with their five youngest
to approach the sharemilker who was running the farm at the time and he taught me all he could over a year and I helped him out for free in exchange. Eventually, he offered to employ me as his farmhand. I’ll always be grateful to that old fulla. He took a chance on me and gave me the start to get to where I am today.” kids in a large whare wistfully dubbed “The Palace”. It’s easy to hear the deep love this wahine has for the life she has carved out here. “Even though this is the land of Whare’s ancestors, I call this my land,” she says. “I see myself as Tūhoe too now and I live in reciprocity
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