This article aims to provide an indigenous Māori perspective on the history of scientific investigations, and more recent community collaborations, at an important ancestral Māori site in Aotearoa New Zealand. The first objective is to provide a perspective on the events surrounding the archaeological excavations and repatriation of kōiwi tāngata 'human remains' at Te Pokohiwi ō Kupe, also known as the Wairau Bar or "moa hunter" camp. The second objective is to reflect on the character and reputation of Hohua Peter MacDonald, a Māori elder and the principal opponent of the initial excavations in the 1950s. We do this by contextualising Peter's protests within a longer history of Kurahaupō 1 resistance to colonisation. We argue that despite a difficult history, Rangitāne and the scholarly community have reconciled many of their differences. Here we discuss research undertaken as part of the repatriation. Our last objective is to demonstrate how an increasing knowledge of the Wairau Bar community, one of New Zealand's first settlements, has spurred a renaissance within the ahi kā roa 2 community of the Wairau. Mitochondrial DNA sequencing, for instance, has led to a shift in focus from narratives that elevate male ancestors (Māori and Pākehā 'European') to narratives that retell the stories of female ancestors.The significance of Te Pokohiwi ō Kupe has been recognised for some time; indeed, a plethora of scholarly articles, books and book chapters confirm this. The origins of the people who first settled there, when they arrived, their means of subsistence and their material culture are questions that scholars have attempted to answer. This scholarship can be traced back to 1912to , when H.D. Skinner (1912) documented the 21 km of canals in and around the Wairau Lagoons. The "whence of the Māori" has entertained the thoughts of Europeans since the time of James Cook, but it was the accidental discovery of human remains by Jim Eyles in 1939 that brought Te Pokohiwi to prominence. For three decades following Eyles's discovery, human remains and artefacts were removed from the site, often under the supervision of professional archaeologists (