A digitally manipulated image of an excavator demolishing a house. The photographer comments, "My neighbour I thought was going to be one of the first to be rebuilt in the area after being damaged in the 22 February 2011 earthquake, but the builders have knocked it down and not returned yet".
A photograph captioned, "I guess the only good thing that came out of the earthquake is that we know the residents better. It definitely bought people together, and the support was incredible. If you didn't know your neighbours before, you definitely knew them after the quake. We made friends out of this".
The 2010 and 2011 earthquakes of Canterbury have had a serious and ongoing effect on Maori in the city (Lambert, Mark-Shadbolt, Ataria, & Black, 2012). Many people had to rely on themselves, their neighbours and their whanau for an extended period in 2011, and some are still required to organise and coordinate various activities such as schooling, health care, work and community activities such as church, sports and recreation in a city beset by ongoing disruption and distress. Throughout the phases of response and recovery, issues of leadership have been implicitly and explicitly woven through both formal and informal investigations and debates. This paper presents the results of a small sample of initial interviews of Maori undertaken in the response and early recovery period of the disaster and discusses some of the implications for Maori urban communities.