August marks the first reading of the Heretaunga Tamatea Claims Settlement Bill in Parliament.
"It's very exciting," says the chairwoman of the Heretaunga Tamatea Settlement Trust, Liz Graham.
"But for me, in some respects it's a sense of relief, in other respects it's a sense of great sadness.
"We hope our tipuna will rest easy with where we are today and where we will be once the bill has finally passed to royal assent."
The bill will only become law or an act of Parliament once the Governor-General signs it after its third reading in Parliament, giving the legislation its royal assent.
"We also know it hasn't settled the mamae and grievances of so many of our people," explains Graham.
To mark the occasion a large contingent of whanau will head down to Parliament to hear the first reading on August 16.
In 2015 He Toa Takitini, the group mandated to negotiate the settlement of the historical Treaty of Waitangi claims within Heretaunga Tamatea rohe, signed a deed of settlement with the Crown of $105 million.
"What we've done is we have run a claim that's on behalf of everybody, the historical claim of everyone inside Tamatea and Heretaunga, but [it] hasn't dealt with individual claims.
"They've been lumped into a whole mass, Heretaunga Tamatea, that certainly hasn't settled things in a lot of our people's minds - and nor should it."
Graham says the group has wanted to operate from a ground-level up approach rather than from a top-down approach.
"Another significant thing in most other settled iwi is the pre-settlement and post-settlement groups are different, but we are one and the same people.
"We had a referendum with our people and they decided we would keep the same group of people working pre and post, but using the different names, with two different board structures, allowing continuity through to the final settlement.
"We wanted marae and hapu to tell us what we were doing, not the other way around, and that's been a little bit hard. But every marae does have an elected representative that those people have elected for themselves."
Moving forward it is looking for better ways to open the lines of communication to its beneficiaries rather than traditional avenues.
"In our agreement with the Crown we have to advertise our intentions via newspaper but our people don't even subscribe to newspapers."
The historical grievances began in the 1840s, where chiefs of Heretaunga Tamatea invited the Crown to acquire land in their region in return for economic opportunities from the European settlement.
But what eventuated was dishonest crown land deals, so that by the 1900s about 1.2 million acres (485,623ha) out of 1.4 million acres of Heretaunga Tamatea land had passed from Maori ownership.
The huge loss of land had left hapu socially, economically and culturally deprived during the 20th century.
The settlement includes $5m specifically tagged for Maori boarding school Te Aute College, something which Graham says is currently being investigated.
"There has to be an entity set up that will receive that $5m, an entity that has the ongoing sustainability as their primary goal."
The Crown has recognised that Heretaunga Tamatea is a large natural grouping which spans from southern Napier to Takapau in the central Hawke's Bay area.