Becoming kaitiaki: Hone McGregor

In 2013, Forest & Bird welcomed its first Māori chief executive, Hone McGregor (Te Whānau-āApanui, Te Ātiawa, Te Atihaunui-a-Pāpārangi, Ngāti Kahungunu/Ngāti Kere, Ngāti Raukawa ki te Tonga, Rārua, Rangitāne, and Ngāti Kuia). Hone had been a member of Forest & Bird since he was a child, and he had a long family history connected to the Society. Sanderson was his great-grandmother’s cousin, and his mother and grandparents were active members of Forest & Bird for six decades, with his grandparents establishing the Society’s Warkworth Branch.

Hone McGregor in 2015. Credit Caroline Wood

With his family’s history of kaitiakitanga in mind, he took the chance to imbue Forest & Bird with a te ao Māori world view and establish new links with iwi and hapū. He served as kaiwhakahaere matua for three years. Hone gave Forest & Bird its official te reo Māori name, Te Reo o te Taiao, having travelled around the motu and heard many different variants and transliterations of ‘Forest & Bird’. Hone says Val Sanderson saw the Society as a natural ally of Māori in its early days. Forest & Bird’s founder published posters in te reo, encouraged Māori organisations to join the fledgling nature preservation organisation and shared Māori beliefs on conservation matters with his members through articles in the Society’s Birds magazine. Māori still have much to teach Pākehā conservationists today.

'Māori are living with and from nature, so we want to live in a way that is sustainable,’ he says.¹ ‘We are trying to avoid the situation where we look at nature or te taiao as a thing that you put into a museum; you create this beautiful thing and then you lock the door, and you stand on the outside and look at it. We wanted to change that focus, and be: “We are living with nature, we are of nature.” So that’s part of our role as kaitiaki. These values are so strong and so aligned to what Forest & Bird says about bringing back nature to our landscapes and to our cities – but mostly to the people’s minds so that they really do love, appreciate, and nurture that taonga.’ Those two Māori and Pākehā views ‘supercharge’ each other, he says. He asks what people today want to leave behind for those yet to be born: ‘How can each of us be really good ancestors?’

Hone remembers visiting Forest & Bird’s Bushy Park Tarapuruhi, near Whanganui, a predator-free sanctuary created from land left to the Society by local farmer Frank Moore, in the 1960s. He saw 20 or so kererū sitting together in one tree. ‘It looked nuts. It looked like one of those Christmas tree cartoons,’ he says. ‘But of course, this is traditionally what it would have looked like – a tree would have been laden with that many birds. We’re used to seeing one little kererū flying past us but they’re actually a flock bird. We’ve decimated the manu of the forest so much that we don’t even realise when we see a kererū today what we are missing.’

Kererū pigeon

Footnotes

1. Hone McGregor, interview, November 2023.