The land around Waiwhetu Marae was wrongly taken by the Government in 1939 and never properly returned.
Te Āti Awa received very little compensation when the Crown confiscated land belonging to mana whenua in Lower Hutt. Now properties in the area sell for more than $700,000. Brittany Keogh reports. Teri Puketapu spent much of the first decade of his life growing up on a farm. He and his nine siblings would look after piglets their father caught on hunting trips in the Wainuiomata bush, and help plant corn and potatoes on whānau land, in Lower Hutt’s Waiwhetu. “We had our house cow, a couple of hundred chooks, 20 ducks in the Awamutu stream that ran past our house and the property,” Puketapu, now aged 81, says.