A winter storm has swept through south Auckland and the protest camp at Ihumātao is shin deep in mud. Protesters ditch their shoes to move across the squelchy ground and huddle round camp fires. It’s cold, windy and dirty, but the atmosphere at Ihumātoa remains buoyant. Hundreds of Māori have travelled from across New Zealand to join the occupation and protect what they consider to be sacred land from a private developer. They describe themselves as kaitiaki – guardians.

“I just feel so alive, bro,” says one young Māori man, wrapped in the indigenous flag. “Me too, bro,” says his friend, barefoot and alert. “Me too.”

Over the gentle green and golden curves of Ihumātao, colourful tents have spawned. To the west, glimpses of blue water flicker in the winter sun, and to the south, jumbo jets land at New Zealand’s largest airport, three miles down the road. But the jet engines fail to drown out the singing voices, the shouts of excited te reo (the Māori language) and the clatter of cooking pots heaving with food.

Vegetable gardens flank the central meeting house, or whare; here protesters are tasked with rubbish duty, building work or childcare.

“This isn’t a picnic you know,” shouts an organiser at a bunch of teenagers who have failed to join a work squad. “We actually need help here to look after the whenua [land].”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Four Green party MPs visit the Māori protest camp at Ihumātao, Auckland. Photograph: Phil Walter/Getty Images

The settlement is both a rag-tag festival collection of portable toilets, tarpaulin and dented tea urns – and a village that feels ancient and indestructible. For more than 10 days, protesters have occupied land in the suburb of Mangere which is slated for housing development. Activists say the land is too precious to lose, but the authorities insist the deal has been done and they won’t interfere.

Last week clashes between police and activists led to arrests, but since then the protest has remained peaceful and police have reduced their numbers, though officers maintain a discreet presence. “Police remain pleased with the relaxed atmosphere and peaceful behaviour of protesters at Ihumātao,” said Supt Jill Rogers of the New Zealand police.

Family groups sit in the rich volcanic dirt like they’ve always been there; cooking on open fires, sleeping under the stars, and letting their children roam free among the evergreen pohutukawa trees. For many, Ihumātao means home more than the thin, draughty walls of weatherboard houses. It means purpose more than transient, low-paid jobs. And it means family more than a fractured and individualistic modern world.

For these people, Ihumātao means to belong – and to survive.

The co-leader of Soul (Save Our Unique Landscape), Pania Newton, 29, says: “To me, this land is the very essence of who I am, it’s where my identity lies. How much more do we have to sacrifice at the hands of capitalism, at the hands of the crown, before it is all gone?”

Newton traces her ties to Ihumātao to the first Polynesian settlers to New Zealand, who planted market gardens to feed their people as early as the 14th century. She has become the driving force of the occupation. Dressed in gumboots, a rainjacket and carrying a flax-weave basket on her back, the former medical and law student is fed up: of land being taken from her people, but also of the diseases of poverty that claim Māori years before Pakeha [European] New Zealanders; of prisons heaving with her people; and of the record-high suicides of Māori teens.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Soul co-leader Pania Newton at the camp. Photograph: Eleanor Ainge Roy/The Observer

“We have experienced ongoing injustices since Ihumātao was forcibly taken in 1863. Our ancestral lands have been quarried, our waterways polluted. We feel as though we have sacrificed enough for the greater good of Auckland, and all we’re asking for now is that this small piece of land is returned back to the guardians so that we can hold it in trust for all New Zealanders to enjoy as a cultural heritage landscape,” says Newton.

It is a matter of record that Ihumātao was seized by the crown in 1863 and sold to settler farmers. In 2016 it was sold again to developer Fletcher Building, which plans about 500 homes on the prime site so close to the airport – made even more valuable by Auckland’s well-documented housing crisis.

The chief executive of Fletcher Building’s residential division, Steve Evans, said the company has committed to returning 25%, or eight hectares, of land to Māori and would take due care of the site.

But protesters want the government to buy Ihumātao from Fletcher Building and preserve it in perpetuity; a desire the government says would set a dangerous precedent for other unresolved indigenous land disputes across the country. The issue is complicated by the fact that some Māori – also with claims to the land – want the building project to go ahead, and say warm, dry homes are more important for their people than memories.

Minna Popata, 16, a student from nearby Aorere college, is touring Ihumātao with her school group. It is her fifth visit. Young Māori people have almost unequivocally supported the occupation, and there is a sense that the land rights struggle is about the survival of the Māori people.

“Maori has lost a lot of their land already, so getting more taken off us, it feels like it’s tearing Māori apart, and breaking our culture down,” says Popata, neatly dressed in her school uniform, her hair braided, her eyes moist with emotion.

“To us, this land has a deeper meaning. When people build on top of our land, you feel that disrespect. It just doesn’t feel right.”

Last week the call went out for bodies at Ihumātao. Countrywide, whanau (family) and friendship groups shared urgent messages on social media, calling for peaceful protesters to travel swiftly to New Zealand’s largest city, to bring bedding and food, pause their jobs and family lives, and sit, wait and hope.

“We heard the call and we came,” says Riki, a Māori man from Northland, who travelled to Ihumātao with his wife, Kylie. Stirring a saucepan of soup outside their tent, Riki says there’s something about Ihumātao that feels different from other land right disputes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Protest signs at Ihumātao call for the New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Arden, to visit. Photograph: Eleanor Ainge Roy/The Observer

“The government are in a stalemate zone, expecting us to bow down as the indigenous people, as we have done for the last 183 years,” says Riki. “The reality is, it’s not happening … There’s a new generation of children coming through that are educated in the specifics of what has happened to their people; their anger has forced them to self-educate. I need to be here to know my children and my grandchildren will still have land.”

This weekend the Māori king is visiting Ihumātao, bringing 10 busloads of supporters and his entourage with him. Two Māori government MPs have also visited; tasked with talking their way through the quagmire, which is tainting the government’s brand of kinder, more compassionate politics.

The prime minister, Jacinda Ardern’s governing Labour party has more Māori MPs than any other in New Zealand history, and took office in 2017 with expectations high that they would deliver for the country’s most marginalised population. Two years on, disillusionment has set in.

Further talks with government ministers are planned, a move activists applaud as “heartening”. But there is only one name on the lips of the protesters each day; one smiling face they want to see squelching through the mud: Ardern.

“Will we get Jacinda, is Jacinda coming?’ asks an old Māori man, his skin etched with blue tribal tattoos.

“Not yet,” the organiser replies. “But we remain hopeful.”