How a territorial identity strengthening the process of national construction builds up itself through time? What are the development temporalities of spatially connoted mythological speeches allowing the rise of a collective consciousness of shared values? This article tries to answer these questions by proposing, through the example of the New Zealand society, a dynamic approach of the concept of territory. The geohistorical approach used here shows that these rallying speeches appear in periods of balance of social power questioning initial principles of representation, organization, sharing of space, and present the territory as an actor of the political life in the fact that it reveals the failures of the plans of a society, and is the object of symbolic appropriations developed in contexts of federative strategies. We will then see how the New Zealand society has managed to transcend its internal tensions and to maintain its territorial integrity thanks to constant references to a rural imaginary.