As told to Arpége Taratoa (Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Rārua), Shepherdess*
"For my mother’s generation – it was a rough road,” says Tracey. “She doesn’t have her own language, and I don’t have it, and I think that’s the part of the journey that’s going to take forever. I’m never going to have the fluency with te reo Māori that I would want to have, but I love to see it in my daughter. She speaks it so beautifully, and picks up new karakia so quickly. I was never allowed to do kapa haka, so it’s really special seeing my children involved." Photo: Shepherdess / Nancy Zhou
After being separated from her roots as a child, Tracey Perkins and her fiancé are raising their tamariki to know who they are and where they come from. She spoke to Shepherdess about her story.
First person - I'm not from a farming background. We're based in Darfield with our three children, Jack, 5, Emily, 11, and Manny, 13, but both my fiancé and I were raised in the North Island.
Jonny and I met in Darfield when I was visiting someone and he happened to be there. I remember when our eyes locked it felt like my soul shifted, like the earth moved on its axis a little bit. I remember looking at him and thinking, "that was a really weird feeling!"
We got to know each other and we found that we both came from messy but quite different backgrounds, which is potentially why we work! Jonny is Pākehā and comes from a dairy farming family. I remember sharing a quote with him when we'd first met about raising families that said, "there are two lasting things we give our children - one is roots and one is wings".
I remember saying that I have the wings, but I don't have the roots... and, because he's a dairy farmer, he said, "Oh, that's all good because I'm not going anywhere - I don't have any wings!"
When I was in my teenage years, I really struggled because I knew there was something missing. My mum had left when I was four. I didn't really feel the impacts of that so much as a child; it was more when I got older. The disruption was, in large part, to do with the separation from my culture. I went looking to try and figure out what was going to fill it, so I tried travel, I tried religion, I tried unhealthy relationships, I tried different jobs.
"Our kids have pet farm animals – Manny has calves, Emily has sheep and Jack has chickens,” says Tracey. “He loves them, so I’m using that to help foster some gentleness and learning to give when you have enough. People always ask why we don’t sell the eggs instead of giving them away, and we always say it’s because we have enough." Photo: Shepherdess / Nancy Zhou
Later in life, after I'd reconnected with my mother, there was a really impactful event that happened when I was doing the Kellogg Rural Leadership Programme. One of the cohort knew someone working at Te Papa with Māori taonga, so we were lucky enough to be taken on a tour. I remember walking up this aisle, and there was this painted piece of wood, and while everyone was walking around without me, I had this feeling of, "I know this pattern, this is something to do with me."
I had a flashback of being much shorter, looking up at something with these markings. So, I called my mother and she said I must've been remembering our marae. And then she asked me, "Are you ready to go home?"
That was the beginning of my physical journey back to my roots. My grandparents on my mother's side were very special to me, but my grandfather had passed when I was 10, and my grandmother left town soon after. Though she tried to reach out, she was stopped, and became estranged from me. Following that experience at Te Papa, we organised for me to go and visit her - though Mum didn't mention that I was coming!
It wasn't until we were on the doorstep of her cottage that Mum said, "Oh, I hope her heart's all right!"
“ What I would say about my parents,” says Tracey, “and I want to bring honour to them with everything I say and do, but they both brought their own separate intergenerational trauma into the marriage – and I think for my generation, it’s easy to look back as a mother and as a woman, and cast judgement. But when we cast judgement, we ’re overlaying what we perceive their situation to be with our own context, with our own time in history and who we are and what decision we think we would have made. But between these generations – I look back at some of the stuff my mother dealt with, and I don’t know what I would’ve done. I’ve obviously made different choices – but that comes from a place of immense privilege.” Photo: Shepherdess / Nancy Zhou
I had been concerned that she wouldn't recognise me - it had been decades since we'd seen each other. My earliest memory is of being blessed by my great-grandmother, with my mother and grandmother there. We were in Northland, so we were home, and the feeling I get from this memory is just really being loved and surrounded by the love and strength of these women.
There have been many times in my life where things have happened, and I've cast my mind back to that and thought, "Thank goodness I was blessed."
When we walked into that cottage, my grandmother looked up and saw me and I walked across the floor to her. She held me and rocked me like she used to do when I was a baby, and I stayed there for the longest time. It was when our hearts met, in that embrace, that I knew I was home. I felt that connection again to my great-grandmother, to my grandmother, to my mother - and I knew exactly who I was. I'd found my roots.
When my grandmother passed, I took the kids up for her tangi. It was the first time taking them all to the marae, and it was Jonny's first experience at a tangi. I remember waking up and the sun was coming through the doors on my left, and when I rolled over onto my right, all of the photos of the people buried in our urupā were up on the wall. There were the coloured photos, then black and white, then paintings, because that's how far back it goes. And that was the first time it hit me, how much of a privilege it is to be Māori.
Society teaches us that privilege is being a white, middle-aged man, but to me, it gives you such a solid base knowing you come from such a strong people.
“Emily’s lambs are named Tilly and Thomas – the twins – and Daffodil. Emily’s first lessons in responsibility and work ethic came from having pet lambs. Learning to care for something, without hope of any reward, other than the joy of doing the right thing, is a lesson that I hope she carries through her lifetime and allows to overflow into caring for ‘bigger’ things – water, soil, trees, her whenua.” Photo: Shepherdess / Nancy Zhou
What I've learnt since finding my roots is that those roots bring resilience. Whether we're talking in the paddock or out of it, a good root structure is what gives you strength, and I feel really privileged that, even though I was estranged, that link was such a short jump. It was connecting to my mother and my grandmother - but if this had been delayed another generation, I think it would've been a lot trickier for my children to go back.
Manny, who's year nine, started his first term learning te reo Māori, and I was super proud of him for choosing it on his own. After a term, he came home and said it was getting too hard and that he wanted to switch to something like woodwork, but I told him that he needed to do it. When he challenged me on it, I realised I was going to have to give a proper answer because I was putting a line down that I wouldn't normally put down. I told him how important it was because I didn't have it, neither did his grandmother, and that if he doesn't carry our language forward, we'd lose it.
Here in the South, we're limited for options, but the primary school is amazing. They start and finish every week with karakia and are very active in kapa haka. My daughter, Emily, got to lead in her final year and she wore her great-grandmother's pounamu that she'd given her. It seems like such a small thing, but it's huge to us.
One of the concepts I'm working on with the kids at the moment is the concept of 'enough', because if we don't know what enough is, then we'll never have excess - and if we never have excess, then how can we share? I feel like we are hugely privileged in our family, and Jonny and I definitely haven't always been in the place that we're in at the moment, so we have such a deep appreciation for these being the good years.
Everything that underpins what we do with the kids is that we both really appreciate that these are the best days of our lives. We've come a long way, and we'll often sit on the couch together after all the farming and stuff is done and the kids are in bed, and just think to ourselves how privileged we are to be in the position we are in right now. We've got three kids who are healthy, our parents are healthy and right now all the kids are at home so we know they're safe - it's just a really good time in our lives.
This story appears in the Raumati Summer 2024/25 edition of Shepherdess magazine.
