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.