What we hold back, and who decides.

The principles

• Authority before volume. A smaller set of trustworthy records is worth more than a large catalogue of unverified stories.
• Māori names and voices are foundational, not metadata or a translation layer added at the end.
• Some knowledge should not be public. The system supports withholding, approximating a location, restricting an audience, and withdrawing content after publication.
• Show provenance. A reader should be able to see where a story came from and when it was reviewed.
• No paywall around cultural guidance. Tikanga, safety and core public heritage information stay free.

What is held back today

Every Māori heritage place imported from council data arrives marked as awaiting review and is hidden from the public map, the app and this site until mana whenua have made a decision about it. That gate is enforced in the database itself, so it applies to every way the data can be read, not only to the screens we have thought of.

Pending

Imported and awaiting a decision. Hidden everywhere. As of September 2026 this is a queue of 38 places: pā, terraces, settlement sites and findspots.

Reviewed

Mana whenua have reviewed the record and any content attached to it. Visible, with attribution to the reviewing authority.

Withheld

Decided never to be shown. The record is kept, not deleted, so the decision is remembered. Middens and burial sites are withheld as a class: HeriTrail does not source or hold content about them.

Honest status: the review conversations with mana whenua have not yet happened. The walking trails, including those on the maunga of Tāmaki Makaurau, were released for testing ahead of that review and will be revisited once it takes place. Nothing on those trails includes tikanga or protocol text.

What the app will never generate

The following are only ever published as supplied by mana whenua, or as explicitly approved by them. The app does not infer them, summarise them, translate them or fill them in when they are missing.

• Tikanga and visitor protocols for a place.
• Māori names, where the source record does not carry one.
• Pronunciation guidance.
• Whakapapa, kōrero and any account of why a place is significant.
• Exact locations of sites where mana whenua ask for them to be approximated or omitted.

Open sources such as Wikipedia are never matched automatically to a Māori heritage place, because their coverage of pā, wāhi tapu and similar sites is frequently written from a colonial frame, and importing it would republish that under our own name.

What a reviewed record carries

When content about a Māori heritage place is published, the record keeps, and the reader can see:

• The authority or kaitiaki organisation, and the attribution wording they asked for.
• Where the content came from and any context notes.
• Which channels, purposes and languages it is approved for.
• Whether the location is shown exactly, approximately, as an area, or not at all.
• The review date and the next review date.
• Any embargo, amendment or withdrawal status.

On the place page, the Māori name leads where the authority asks for it, and tikanga or visitor guidance appears before the historical narrative.

Withdrawal

A reviewing authority can ask for content to be changed, hidden or removed at any time, and the answer is yes. Material changes create a new version and keep the history, so what was shown and when can always be established.

For iwi and hapū

If your rohe includes places on HeriTrail, or you would prefer that it did not, we would like to hear from you before anything else happens. See how to get in touch.