The remembered ground

The district plan’s schedule of sites and areas of significance to Ngāi Tahu, 339 mapped areas where the plan formally recognises the mana whenua cultural landscape: the waters, the sacred and treasured places, the ground of the ancestors, and the precincts whose sites are deliberately left unnamed.

Scheduled areas

339

Named areas

54,294

hectares of recognised ground

The waters

198

Ngā Wai: streams, springs, coast

From

Schedule 9.9.6

of the operative district plan

Where the plan marks significance

Teal for Ngā Wai, the waters; deep red for Wāhi Tapu and Wāhi Taonga; ochre for Ngā Tūranga Tūpuna, the ancestral landscapes; dashed grey for the silent-file precincts : areas the plan flags as sensitive while withholding the specific sites. Hover any area for its category and place. A point’s own answer is at /before, and the marae the schedule sits beside are at /maraes.

The families the plan names

Four families in one schedule, the waters are the most numerous; the silent files are precincts whose sites are withheld, not a map of nothing.

Ngā Wai

Wāhi Tapu/Wāhi Taonga

Ngā Tūranga Tūpuna

Mahaanui Iwi Management Plan 2013 Silent Files

The suburbs the schedule touches

By share of outline inside the named scheduled areas: read from a sampled join, so a sliver still counts. Coastal and harbour suburbs carry most of the schedule; the silent files are counted separately.

Clifton100% inside scheduled areas
Corsair Bay100% inside scheduled areas
Diamond Harbour100% inside scheduled areas
Moncks Bay100% inside scheduled areas
Redcliffs100% inside scheduled areas
Richmond Hill100% inside scheduled areas
Scarborough100% inside scheduled areas
Southshore100% inside scheduled areas
te-onepoto-taylors-mistake86% inside scheduled areas
Lyttelton85% inside scheduled areas

Questions, answered briefly

What is this map?

The district plan’s schedule of sites and areas of significance to Ngāi Tahu, 339 mapped areas covering 69,428 hectares. The plan recognises a cultural landscape: waters, sacred and treasured places, and the ground of the ancestors, each carrying its own rules for what happens there.

What are the categories?

Ngā Wai, the waters, is the largest family: streams, springs, wetlands and coastal margins significant as mahinga kai and taonga. Wāhi Tapu and Wāhi Taonga are sacred and treasured places, pā sites, urupā, church sites. Ngā Tūranga Tūpuna marks the ancestral landscapes, where the iwi’s tūpuna lived and worked the ground.

What are the silent files?

The Mahaanui Iwi Management Plan silent files are precincts (31 mapped) where the plan marks that culturally sensitive sites exist but deliberately withholds where they are. The drawn area is the honest boundary, a flag to ask before digging, not a map of the sites themselves.

Is unmarked ground without significance?

No. The schedule lists what the plan formally recognises, it is not a catalogue of every place that matters. Ngāi Tahu’s connection to this landscape predates and exceeds the schedule, and the plan says so itself.

The record behind this

Christchurch City Council’s open data, the DistrictPlanB service’s DPCulturalSignificance layer, the operative plan’s schedule of sites and areas of significance to Ngāi Tahu. The schedule is a formal recognition, not a catalogue: Ngāi Tahu’s connection to this landscape predates and exceeds it, and the silent files mark where sensitivity is acknowledged without being mapped in detail. The marae are at /maraes, the listed heritage at /heritage, and the longer archive at /history.

This page as markdown: /cultural.md · the record as data: /cultural.json · /cultural.geojson.