Paper Names, Broken Lines

Guest post: Maya Reweti (Ngatiwai, Ngapuhi and Ngati Whatua) A Māori adoptee’s journey from state-sanctioned disconnection to reclaiming whakapapa — and the fight for justice at the Waitangi Tribunal.

They said my story began the day I was adopted. That which came before was no longer needed. A clean slate. A new name. A family to fit into.

But my story began long before that. It began with whenua and whakapapa. With tūpuna whose names were never spoken in my home. With a line that was cut, but never broken. I was born into a lineage that the state could not erase, no matter how hard it tried.

“Adoption wasn’t just a legal act. It was a cultural dislocation. A spiritual dismembering. And it was sanctioned by the Crown.”

I grew up not knowing what I had lost. I didn’t even have the language to name the ache. It lived beneath the surface — in the confusion, the loneliness, the sense that something sacred had been taken without explanation.

They said I should be grateful, that I was loved, lucky, and chosen. But love, when built on silence, can become a cage.

The Crown’s closed adoption policy told us our pasts didn’t matter.

That whakapapa was optional.

That identity could be rewritten with the stroke of a pen.

And for decades, no one questioned it, not publicly. Not out loud.

But we are speaking now. We are standing now. We are taking our truth to the Waitangi Tribunal, where it belongs.

This is not just about personal pain. It is about systemic failure and Treaty breaches that reshaped the lives of generations.

The Crown broke Article 2 when it failed to protect our tino rangatiratanga—our right to our people, places, language, and legacy.

The Crown broke Article 1 by imposing a system of control that Māori did not consent to.

This is not ancient history. It is living memory. We walk with it every day.

I was not lost. I was taken. I was stolen.

Taken from the arms of a mother who likely had no choice. Taken from an identity that was never meant to be optional. Taken from a collective memory that still calls me back.

But in that taking, something else began: a quiet resistance, a heartbeat beneath the silence, a knowing that could not be extinguished.

We are coming home to ourselves. I am not who they told me I was. I am not a blank slate. I am not the “happy ending” of an adoption narrative that ignores the cost.

I am Māori. I am a descendant of warriors, weavers, and healers.

My story is not one of rescue—it is one of return. And I carry it now not with shame, but with power.

This is not just about me. It’s about all of us who were adopted into silence, into whiteness, into forgetting. It’s about what we’re reclaiming—together.

Ko taku ingoa tūturu, kei te hoki mai.

My true name is returning.

And with it, the strength of every ancestor who held the line.

Polihira

She who rises from the sacred night.

Born of the pō, Polihira is the whisper in darkness — keeper of hidden truths, guardian of forgotten names. Wrapped in the cloak of the spiritual realm, she holds the untold stories, the songs between stars, the strength of ancestral memory.

She reminds us: what was taken can return. In silence, whakapapa still speaks.

Polihira is more than a name.

About Our Guest Author

Maya Reweti (Ngatiwai, Ngapuhi and Ngati Whatua) is a Māori adoptee, spiritual practitioner, and adoption justice advocate. She has worked in the healing arts as a Spiritual Advisor and Medium for over two decades. A current claimant before the Waitangi Tribunal, Maya seeks redress for the Crown’s systemic harm to Māori adoptees. Her work centres on truth-telling, ancestral reconnection, and empowering others to reclaim their whakapapa, voice, and mana.

Guest posts from the international frontlines of adoption activism will become a feature of Adoption Deconstructed.

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