Not only did the mountains seem to watch us, they stimulated a hunger to scour the forest floors and decipher codes stamped in lichen

• Guardian writers and readers describe their favourite place in New Zealand’s wilderness and why it’s special to them

Although claiming a wild place as your favourite could be a masked attempt to tame it, the land either side of State Highway 67, between Big Ditch and Jones Creek just north of Waimangaroa, is my favourite. This stretch of highway which, if you’re heading north, has a row of houses to your left and a railway and the great Papahaua mountain range to your right, is called Birchfield.

There are no off-streets or gas stations. Not a single corner, nor corner store. Just some houses, several paddocks and, as of recently, one radio astronomy observatory. Perhaps it sounds a tame place, and to an extent – on a quick drive through the settlement – that’s fair.

Such gains as Māori have made are no accident, but the result of a willingness to fight for what is rightfully theirs – a struggle that continues to this day

Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher, once wrote that “power always stands in need of numbers”. That insight, made in the context of a study into the nature of violence, is one that commentators often turn to when explaining why Māori appear to fare so much better than Indigenous peoples in other parts of the Anglosphere. Māori make up more than 15% of the New Zealand population – more than five times larger than the Aboriginal Australian or Native American share of their national populations – meaning Māori are in a better position to press for guaranteed representation in parliament and local government, for dedicated television channels and radio stations, for native language schooling, and more. Indigenous peoples in other countries, to paraphrase Arendt, stand in need of numbers.

The argument is seductively simple. Social scientists sometimes call it the 3.5% rule. In other words, if enough people engage in active struggle – from workers’ strikes to street protests – the disruption they cause is almost always enough to guarantee political change. In the 1980s socialist organisers were turning out tens of thousands of people on the streets to protest the Springbok tour, nuclear warships, and racism against Māori. It’s impossible to measure whether the 3.5% threshold was met, but it’s obvious enough that the many thousands who took part in demonstrations and advocacy were enough to cancel any further Springbok tours, to prohibit nuclear warships from New Zealand waters, and to strengthen the Treaty of Waitangi’s position in the New Zealand constitution.

In Māori legend Mount Tarawera blew her top after discovering that her lover, Mount Pūtauaki, had left her

• Guardian writers and readers describe their favourite place in New Zealand’s wilderness and why it’s special to them

One of the cruelties of New Zealand tourism is that international visitors arrive expecting to find a vast, unpeopled land – the sharp peaks, rolling grasslands and roaring rivers of Middle-earth.

But when visitors land at Auckland airport they do so on a concrete strip at the edge of a muddy tidal harbour. The airport terminal itself is under perpetual reconstruction, the roads leading to and from it are clogged at most times of the day, and as soon as you escape the city using the main highway the view is more or less the same for the next two hours: dairy farm after dairy farm, unnaturally lush and green as farm owners fertilise and irrigate the land to all hell.

While some of us are both, many of us are neither. The urge to separate us out is used to marginalise people around the world

It took me a long time to embrace my Māori identity.

On my mother’s side, I whakapapa (relate, through ancestry) to Kāi Tahu, the largest iwi (tribe) of Te Waipounamu (the South Island of New Zealand), but I grew up believing I was only Pākehā (NZ European). I spent most of my childhood living with my Pākehā father. Even though my Māori ancestry was mentioned occasionally, I resisted the suggestion that I was Māori. I didn’t grow up on a marae (Māori village), or speak te reo – and I didn’t look like the Māori kids I knew.

More parents in New Zealand are giving their babies indigenous names to foster links with their ancestry and culture

Nine-month-old Ruataupare Te Ropuhina Florence Whiley-Whaipooti will grow up speaking the names of her ancestors. She will learn she comes from a line of strong Ngāti Porou women, and that her ancestor, who was a staunch tribal leader, is her name-sake. She will grow to understand that her Māori name links her to whenua (land), her whakapapa (genealogy) and her Māoritanga (culture).

Ruataupare is one of an increasing number of babies in New Zealand to be given a Māori name. While Māori have never stopped giving their children indigenous names, there has been a marked increase over the past 10 years – a near doubling of Māori names registered since 2011.

A more truthful understanding of history is largely dependent on education. A lot is riding on the success of this new curriculum

Aotearoa New Zealand has come a long way in the past few years in its efforts to engage with its history in a more upfront and honest manner. For those of us who have campaigned for such a change, this is not before time.

This newfound willingness to move beyond a rose-tinted approach to the nation’s past in which anything uncomfortable or considered to reflect poorly on the Pākehā (European) majority is shunned and ignored has taken considerable effort and is still very much a work in progress.

Rangi Wickliffe was one of many Māori children repeatedly abused in welfare institutions including the notorious Lake Alice psychiatric hospital

Rangi Wickliffe’s body is a map and a history of New Zealand’s welfare and prison institutions, where the 60-year-old has spent about 45 years of his life.

There are the scars the length of his inner left forearm that he slashed up with a razor blade when he was 16. That was in D Block in Paremoremo prison, the harshest wing in New Zealand’s maximum security prison.