The Whakapapa of a Wound series traced a wound from childhood through to the next generation — from the child at the washing basket to the Tamariki asking why they cannot go home. But there is a place the series did not reach. A place before the washing basket. Before the child draws her first breath. Before the question is even possible.
This piece goes there.
It is not a prescription. I do not offer it as the right way or the only way. I offer it as a reflection of what our tūpuna understood, of what colonisation took from us when it severed that understanding, and of what one whānau found when they tried, imperfectly and deliberately, to live by a different set of values. Take what fits. Leave what doesn’t. But know that what is described here is possible — because it was lived.
Te Tapu o te Whare Tangata
In te ao Māori, the whare tangata — the womb, literally the house of the person — is among the most Tapu spaces in existence.
Not Tapu as a rule to follow.
Tapu as a statement of reality: this space is sacred because of what it is and what it does. It is the threshold between the spiritual world and this one.
It is where a person crosses from te Pō — the realm of potential — into te Ao Mārama, the world of light.
Everything that our tūpuna built around pregnancy was built to protect that threshold. The karakia. The rāhui on certain foods and activities. The role of the kuia in accompanying the hapū wāhine. The expectations placed on the tāne. The community’s responsibility is to hold the space around the mother.
None of this was superstition.
It was a complete system of understanding that said: what happens in and around this space matters enormously, because a person is being formed here, and that person will carry whatever they are formed in.
Our tūpuna understood, long before science had language for it, that the pēpi is not passive.
The child forming in the whare tangata is absorbing. Learning. Being calibrated by the quality of the field they are developing in. The spiritual, emotional, relational, and physical environment of the mother and the father is the first curriculum the child ever receives.
“The womb is not a waiting room. It is the first classroom. And what is taught there is taught before the child has any choice in the matter.”
Two Worlds
Let me show you two versions of the same moment. The arrival of new life. One held as it was meant to be held. One adrift from that knowing.
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The First World — What Was When a young wāhine in the traditional world discovered she was hapū, the community moved around her before she had to ask. The kuia came. Not to congratulate her in the modern sense, but to begin the work of preparation — because preparation was understood as protection.
She was told what her body now was. She was told what the tāne’s role was — that his spiritual state was not separate from the child’s formation, that how he carried himself in this season mattered. She was given karakia. She was guided away from certain foods, certain places, certain people — not arbitrarily, but because the knowledge of generations said: these things interfere with what is happening in that Tapu space.
There was no alcohol. There were no substances that opened spiritual portals without the protection of a tohunga and a held container. The understanding was clear: the veil between worlds is already thin when life is forming. You do not open it further without knowing how to close it. And you do not expose the pēpī — who has no defences, no whakapapa knowledge, no spiritual protection of their own yet — to what comes through.
The child arrived at a community that had been preparing for them. Into a relationship that had been spiritually readied. Into a field of intention. |
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The Second World — What Is Hine is nineteen. She did not plan to become hapū. There was no kuia. There was no preparation. There was a relationship that was passionate and volatile and held together by the kind of intensity that the previous series called a trauma bond — two people drawn together by the familiar shape of each other’s wounds.
There was alcohol on the night the child was conceived. There were substances used in the weeks that followed, before she knew she was pregnant. There were raised voices and slammed doors and the silences that follow violence. Her nervous system, already calibrated toward threat from her own childhood, was running at high alert through the first trimester.
Nobody told her that her body was Tapu. Nobody told him that his spiritual state mattered. Nobody told either of them that the child forming in that field was absorbing all of it — the chemistry, the cortisol, the spiritual disruption of substances used without ceremony or protection, the ambient violence that the pēpi’s developing nervous system was already beginning to map as the shape of the world.
Hine loved her baby. That is true, and it matters. But love, without knowledge, without preparation, without the structures that used to hold this threshold, is not always enough to protect what needs protecting. |
What the Science Is Beginning to Name
Epigenetic research is now confirming what Te Ao Māori has always held. The environment of the womb — chemical, emotional, relational, spiritual — shapes the developing child in ways that persist across a lifetime and can transfer across generations.
We know that maternal stress during pregnancy alters the calibration of the infant’s stress response system — the same HPA axis dysregulation we explored in the earlier series, present before birth (Yehuda & Lehrner, 2018). We know that prenatal alcohol and substance exposure produces epigenetic changes in the developing brain, affecting gene expression in systems governing emotion regulation, impulse control, and stress reactivity (Balaraman et al., 2013). We know that exposure to family violence during pregnancy is associated with measurable changes in infant cortisol patterns, detectable in the first weeks of life (Moog et al., 2016).
And — crucially — we now know that the father’s biological state matters too. Paternal stress, substance use, and trauma history leave epigenetic marks on sperm that transfer to the child at conception (Rodgers et al., 2015). This is not a metaphor. Both parents are present in the child’s biology before the child exists.
Our tūpuna knew this without the laboratory. The Tapu placed on both the wāhine and the tāne during pregnancy was not an arbitrary restriction. It was a scientifically coherent system of protection, grounded in generations of careful observation about what children carried and why.
“The science is catching up to the whakapapa. Both are saying the same thing: what surrounds the child before birth shapes who the child becomes after it.”
What We Lost When We Forgot
Colonisation did not only take land and language. It took the knowledge systems that governed how life was brought into the world.
When kuia were removed from their communities, the transmission of pregnancy knowledge was severed. When the tohunga were marginalised and their practices criminalised, the spiritual framework that held the whare tangata as Tapu was dismantled.
When whānau were urbanised and disconnected from whenua and each other, the community structures that once wrapped around a hapū wāhine dissolved.
Into that vacuum came a different set of messages. That pregnancy is a private medical event managed by a system rather than a communal spiritual one held by whānau. That alcohol and substances are recreational choices without spiritual consequence. That the tāne’s role begins at birth, not at conception.
That children are individuals arriving into a neutral world, rather than spiritual beings crossing a threshold that requires preparation from everyone around them. The absence of the kuia or koroua means indigenous knowledge about childbearing falls to parents who are already disconnected from that whakapapa.
For some, those children become a commodity, a source of income. A career choice made by a thirteen-year-old who, after speaking with her friends at school, said she didn’t need to work at all. Had never been told what a child is, or what it costs — spiritually, relationally, physically — to bring one into the world with integrity.
That thirteen-year-old was not broken. She was uninstructed. The knowledge that should have been hers had been taken two or three generations before she was born. She was living in the vacuum that colonisation created, reaching for what the system offered in the place of what the kuia would have given.
One Model That Worked — A Lived Reflection
This story is not a prescription. I tell it because it is true, and because true things — lived from the inside rather than prescribed from above — are sometimes more useful than theory.
When our children were born, my husband and I did not have access to all the traditional knowledge that would have surrounded that threshold. Being Māori, I was not guided by kuia in the way our tūpuna would have been. I was navigating, like so many of my generation, in the space between two worlds — carrying fragments of what we knew, trying to piece together something intentional from what remained. I consumed every book about pregnancy and child parenting I could find. I turned to Western methods as the only message that was available at the time.
But we knew some things. We knew that bringing a child into the world was a life choice — that came with responsibility and must be accepted fully or not at all. I also learned from my upbringing that I didn’t want to repeat those patterns and that our children (like all parents) would have the best chance we could give them.
Alcohol abuse, substance use and violence were not in spaces during pregnancy or our children’s upbringing. It meant sometimes we didn’t have my family over, where alcohol might be consumed. It caused isolation and still does to this day.
Our children’s environment mattered — not because we were rigid about form, but because we understood that a child’s identity is built in part from the stability of what they can see around them. Two parents, working, parenting, managing daily life, and school schedules. Not perfectly — we had heated discussions, as all people do — but those discussions were worked through, not in violence, drugs or alcohol. Arguments were followed by repair so our children could see that adults can resolve issues in responsible ways.
The child’s nervous system learned: things get hard sometimes, and we come back…in a safe way…and what love looks like in practice.
We knew that violence — of any kind, for any reason, especially after alcohol — was not acceptable in the space where our children were growing. Not because we were morally superior. But because we had both seen what violence does to a child’s nervous system. I had witnessed this in my own family…and chose, deliberately, not to pass it on.
“We did not have all the knowledge our tūpuna had. But we had enough, and we were deliberate with what we had.”
Our children are, as I sometimes say with a mixture of pride and wonder, unicorns. As teenagers, they didn’t drink or take drugs and were often ridiculed by their schoolmates because of this. Today, they are both professionals, both in their younger years and looking forward to their own parenting experiences when they choose to start families.
They are unicorns because of the field they were formed in — before their first breath and in every ordinary day that followed — told them that they were worth protecting. Their lives were sacred. The choices you make about how to bring children into the world and how to raise them are among the most significant choices a person ever makes.
That message was not delivered in a single conversation. It was delivered in ten thousand small moments. Intentional teaching, responsible drinking, responsible behaviours and consequences. In the spiritual intentionality with which their arrival was received. In being told, in ways both direct and ambient, that they were taonga — persons who had crossed the threshold and deserved to be held with care on this side of it.
What We Can Begin to Restore
I am not suggesting we can simply return to a pre-colonial world. We cannot, and attempting to do so without acknowledging the complexity of where we now stand would be its own kind of dishonesty.
But I do believe we can restore the understanding. The knowledge that the whare tangata is Tapu. Both parents carry spiritual and biological responsibility for the child they are forming. That preparation — spiritual, relational, physical — is not optional but essential. Those substances do not belong in that sacred space, not because they are morally wrong in all contexts, but because they open thresholds that the pēpī cannot be protected from. That violence is not a relationship style — it is a spiritual violation of the most Tapu environment a child will ever inhabit.
That knowledge does not require a return to a specific cultural form. It requires a return to the understanding beneath the form. That understanding is available to us — through our kaumātua, through our tohunga, through the research that is finally finding language for what our tūpuna already knew, and through the lived testimony of those who tried to hold it differently and found that it worked.
The young wāhine who is hapū right now, who has never been told that her body is Tapu — she deserves to know.
The young tāne who does not understand that his spiritual state matters before his child is born — he deserves to know.
Not as a lecture. Not as a programme delivered by a system that caused the disconnection in the first place. As a story. From someone who lived it and who knows what it grew.
“The knowledge was not destroyed. It was interrupted – and what was interrupted can, in the right conditions, begin again.”
Before the First Breath
The Whakapapa of a Wound series asked: how does a wound travel through generations? This companion piece asks the earlier question: what protected us from the wound before we forgot how to protect ourselves?
The answer is not complicated, even though restoring it is.
We knew that life was sacred. We knew that the threshold between worlds required preparation and protection. We knew that the child arriving was already present in some form before they were visible, and that what surrounded that arriving mattered.
We forgot because we were made to forget.
We can remember. Not all at once, and not perfectly. But enough.
One whānau at a time. One deliberate choice at a time. One child was received into a field of intention rather than chaos, of knowledge rather than vacancy, of love that was prepared rather than accidental.
Before the first breath, there is already something forming.
Let it form in a space that knows it is sacred.
Nōu reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.