Kia ora, my name is Jermayne Marie Kaipo-Ierome and I joined the May Road School mana whenua rōpū in the beginning of 2017. I’m going to tell you about a question I asked Dr Hans-Dieter Bader, who is an archaeologist. 

One day we went to a mountain named Pukewīwī (Mt Roskill/Puketapāpa) and Dr Hans told us all the things he knew about the mountain and what happened on the mountain. He told us things about how old the mountain was, how people survived, how people gathered and grew food and how they collected tree trunks to build palisades to protect them.

The next day Miss Noakes asked if we had any questions for Dr Hans. One of my questions was “Where were the bodies buried after they had died?” A few days later Dr Hans came over to our school. When I read out my question, Dr Hans said that it was a good question because it was specific. After that he said he didn’t know the answer to the question, so he had to go home and do a lot of research to find an answer to the question I had asked.

Dr Hans emailed Miss Noakes and told her all about the information he found in his research. He said that the chief would’ve been buried near the top of the mountain and the others would be buried on the lower part of the mountain. He also found out that there was a burial at May Road School, which to me was pretty interesting because I like to discover new things and do research as well.

After getting the information from Dr Hans, the mana whenua group decided to make a model of what the area around the school may have looked like a few hundred years ago, when Waihohua lived around Pukewīwī. Waihohua was the iwi that protected and guarded Pukewīwī from 1450 to 1750.

Written by Jermayne Marie Kaipo-Ierome

You can read more about what is happening in Roskill in the latest issue of Roskulture here.