This paper emerges from a Marsden project, Let the River Speak, focused on the Waimatā River in Gisborne, bringing insights from mātauranga and wānanga together with a wide range of disciplines to produce innovative and engaged understandings of ki uta ki tai‐the life of rivers from the mountains to the sea. In Te Ao Māori, waterways are relational knots/nodes/strands in a meshwork of whakapapa that arises from exchanges betwe...