Tāmaki Makaurau is often described as a meeting place — Tāmaki of a hundred lovers — a site of convergence and desire. It  is also highly contested land, a site of seizure, and of control. The city’s history is not only one of movement and exchange, but one of stolen land and enforced belonging. The cords that bind Tāmaki Makaurau together have also been used to dispossess or shackle the people here.

Colonial occupation in the 1840s violently disrupted existing Māori systems of authority, land tenure, and kinship. Through land confiscation, legislation, and the steady erosion of tino rangatiratanga, mana whenua were displaced from ancestral lands and waterways, which were reshaped to serve a settler city. Urbanisation in the mid-twentieth century (framed as opportunity) was a strategy of forced assimilation, drawing Māori into industrial labour while severing intergenerational relationships to whenua. The promise of participation in modern city life came with conditions: to adapt, to relocate, to conform.