Papa Mike

Forgive me, ignorance is bliss.

Yeah, well, as I said, this was the first prosecution.

So it's the first time it's been under that sort of spotlight.

And I think, you know, talking to some of the kaumātua from Ngāi Tahu, I've been talking about it for a long time.

It's just that nobody's been listening.

Finally, they are.

So they have Panamu officers and they go around because there's lots of gold mines and stuff like that, mining operations on the West Coast that accidentally unearth Panamu.

And so they're making sure that that goes back to the rightful owners or the custodians of it.

rather than sold off somewhere on Facebook.

And if you go on Facebook, there's just any number of sites selling, you know, presumably or supposedly authentic Panamu that has been verified and that kind of thing.

But there are ways around it.

Absolutely.

Great question, because there's a lot of tikanga around the gifting of pounamu.

And in fact, I always understood that you couldn't buy it for yourself, that it had to be given to you.

That was part of the tikanga or the rules around pounamu.

But that's actually not the case.

It used to be.

So, you know, panamu has been a huge resource in Māori history over centuries.

And so it was traded between iwi.

It was used, obviously, because you could shape it, you could sharpen it.