3 ideas
A developer the family calls the Dollarman offers a coastal hapū jobs and money for its land so a road can reach a planned tourist complex. When the family refuses, the road is cut around them through the hills, the altered earth sends floodwater and debris into their urupā, and their wharenui is set alight.
The developers' offer fails because it counts the land as a commodity whose value can be matched with wages, access and amenities. For the hapū the land holds their dead, their food and their genealogy, so selling it would cut the relationship that makes them a people. On this account compensation cannot even be priced, because what would be lost is not a possession but an identity.
When work in the wider economy disappears and the developers use jobs as bait, the family turns back to its own land. They restore gardens, fishing and communal labour, which strips the bait of its power. The novel frames resistance less as protest than as rebuilding the capacity to live without what the other side is offering.