Te Ata o Tū Look Inside

Te Ata o Tū

Matiu Baker Katie Cooper Michael Fitzgerald Rebecca Rice

Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa

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The frontispiece to James Cowan’s book, The New Zealand Wars: A history of the Maori campaigns and the pioneering period, vol. 1, published in 1922, showing the main sites of engagement in the New Zealand Wars.

Contents Foreword / 6 Preface Te Ata o Tū / 9 Introduction A Library of Imperfect Memory / 13 Part One Contested Authority 1809––1863 / 22 Early conflict 25 The Musket Wars 32 The Union Jack flies over the North 36 From Wairau to Pōneke 43 The Northern War 66 Essay: Jade Kake 78 The Kīngitanga 86 Essay: Mike Ross and Paul Meredith 90

Part Two A Garrison Colony 1860––1865 / 98 Absolute sovereignty by force 101 Essay: Basil Keane 120 Waikato taniwha rau: The invasion of Waikato 128 Essay: Arini Loader 170 War at Tauranga 174 Kōrero: Kelcy Taratoa 178 The business of war 198 Spying out the land 206 Postal history 212 Essay: Danny Keenan 218

Part Three A New Kind of War 1864––1868 / 224 War through the North Island 227 Tītokowaru’s war 250 The East Coast and Te Kooti 270 Essay: Danny Keenan 294 Essay: Monty Soutar 299

Part Four Legacies of Conflict 1872––1881 / 306 Building an heroic narrative 309 Honouring and commending 314 Flags of war 320 Photography and the wars 329 He marara taonga 344 Memories and monuments 355 Parihaka 360 Essay: Mike Ross and Paul Meredith 366

Part Five Contemporary Resonances / 374 ‘Preposterous ghosts’ 377 Essay: Puawai Cairns and Ria Hall 402

Timeline, notes and more / 414 A brief timeline of the New Zealand Wars 416 Notes 428 Glossaries 459 Recommended further reading 464 About the authors 467 Acknowledgements 470 Index 472

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Foreword

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his publication is very timely. It directly addresses an important period in our nation’s history and challenges our knowledge and understanding of what happened during the period of the New Zealand Wars, from 1845 to 1872.

For some, the information on our colonial past that it presents will be both challenging and confronting. Many others will see having access to this knowledge as long overdue. After all, owning our histories and addressing the past is an important dimension of our present and our future. The historian Vincent O’Malley writes that ‘we can only navigate the future based on an understanding of where we’ve come from’.

For museums this is particularly pertinent. We cannot hide from our past.

We cannot say that our colonial history and practices were what our predecessors and forebears did, and that they have no association with and relevance to the present and future. The treasures stored in museums in Aotearoa and overseas were taken and ‘acquired’ as part of colonisation and western imperialism, and the tribal histories of these taonga were deliberately suppressed or ignored. Rightfully so, museums have been at the forefront of intense discussions about restitution and about addressing the impact and legacy of colonialism and its associated racist practices and traditions.

The Colonial Museum, which was established in 1865, and which evolved into the Dominion and National museums (the predecessors of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa) is an example of a museum legacy rooted in colonialism.

One has only to look at what our national museum did, or rather didn’t do, to get a sense of its active involvement and participation in colonial New Zealand during the time of the New Zealand Wars. The taonga and treasures illuminated in this publication have a value and a meaning far beyond the context from which they were ‘acquired’ as museum artefacts and booty during the wars. Today, they speak through the hearts and lives of their descendant kin communities who are intimately connected to and have a relationship with them. Their mauri and life force are given renewed meaning through their whakapapa and relationships with their peoples and land.

As the national museum of Aotearoa New Zealand, Te Papa acknowledges its colonial past and is committed to addressing its damaging legacy through its programme of exhibitions, research and activities. The inequities and systemic racism of our past museum practice are being addressed by giving voice and representation to Māori as tangata whenua of Aotearoa in the hope that we can heal our present and future — something we should have done a very long time ago.

The illegal and forcible confiscation of the Rongowhakaata wharenui Te Hau ki Tūranga by Crown forces speaks directly to the actions of the Crown. The wharenui was confiscated without justification or agreement, placed in the Colonial Museum in 1867 and promoted as one of the nation’s most prized treasures, a denial of the brutal reality of its forcible confiscation. The new Dominion Museum, opened in 1936, placed Te Hau ki Tūranga as the centrepiece of its Māori hall in total disregard

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for the circumstances of its confiscation by the Crown. The Rongowhakaata iwi have endured years of alienation from a meaningful relationship with their treasure, including the lack of recognition while the wharenui was restored in the 1930s. It was arrogant, racist and an example of deliberate memory loss, and it reveals an absence of integrity in which the museum was complicit.

Many of the taonga in this publication were acquired as war booty, trophies and mementos of the wars, bought by collectors. This period was tragic, and the painful legacies continue to resonate today. We can no longer shy away from and deny these histories for they speak to all of us and to our sense of identity. To move forward as a nation in a confident and renewed way we must acknowledge and own our histories along with the hurt, pain, and damage that was caused. The taonga illuminated in this publication are given new light and meaning and their people can once again stand tall beside them and with them, both today and into the future.

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s the Kaihautū of Te Papa, I find it hard knowing that our national museum contributed to injustice, racism and betrayal. As its editors say in the introduction to this book, ‘Te Ata o Tū attempts to begin the process of facing up to this past and addressing the silences that have reverberated throughout the histories of Te Papa and its predecessors.’

This publication highlights the lives of our ancestors and the mana of their taonga not as artefacts that lie dormant in backroom shelves, but rather as taonga that activate and connect whakapapa and histories. The texts by Māori writers in this book give authority, mana and voice to this important kaupapa. For Te Papa this is important: the mana and authority to write and speak about the New Zealand wars must come from the people whose histories and whakapapa were intertwined and whose lands and taonga were taken and lost. Seeking māramatanga and enlightenment is needed, as Jade Kake eloquently reminds us in her essay.

The important work that Te Papa’s Karanga Aotearoa Repatriation Programme does in returning ancestors held in overseas museums is a tangible example of recognising the damage and injury caused by our colonial history and realising what we must do to address and heal the future. Māori and Moriori ancestral remains were actively traded, stolen and taken from Aotearoa New Zealand and Rēkohu Wharekauri Chatham Islands without any regard for their mana and dignity as human people. Just as our ancestors, long in the care of museums, are returned home to be reunited with their whānau, so it is that this publication will provide enlightenment and understanding of taonga associated with the New Zealand Wars.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge and thank our curatorial and iwi relationship teams, who have worked with iwi, hapū and whānau to bring these important historical narratives to the fore.

Dr Arapata Hakiwai Kaihautū, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

Foreword

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Preface Te Ata o Tū

Hākopa Te Ata-o-Tū (Ngāi Tahu), c.1880, photographer unknown.

Photograph, carte-de-visite, albumen silver print, 105 x 64mm. Purchased 2014 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds (O.041486)

Te Ata o Tū, the shadow of the war god, is a metaphor for a ‘state of war’ and refers to that period in our formative history when Māori found themselves cast into conflict with the British Crown and its agents, today more generally distilled to those conflicts between 1860 and 1872: the New Zealand Wars.

It evokes the dark and foreboding shadow of Tū the war god across the landscape of human conflict as Māori and Pākehā increasingly struggled to share occupancy as the machinery of colonisation accelerated throughout nineteenth-century Aotearoa New Zealand.

That same warrior spirit was eminently present in the Ngāi Tahu rangatira Hākopa Te Ata-o-Tū, who in part inspired the title of this publication.

Hākopa Te Ata-o-Tū (?–1883) was dedicated in infancy by his father to Tūmatauenga, the god of war, and named for his warlike spirit – the shadow of Tū, the personification of war and human conflict.1 Te Ata-o-Tū, The Shadow of the War God, generated fear and respect in equal measure. He acquired considerable fame as a skilled tactical fighter and masterof-arms, undefeated in single combat, and fearless. His life spanned the period covered by this book, and was impacted by the conflicts. He was much respected by fellow Māori and by Pākehā, his deeds at times venturing into the realm of myth.

His strong tattooed and bearded visage was captured by photographers whose striking photographs later formed the basis of a painted portrait by Gottfried Lindauer.

In 1831 Ngāti Toa led a coalition of northern tribes to besiege Kaiapoi pā, north of present-day Christchurch, to avenge the deaths of Te Pēhi Kupe, Te Pōkaitara, Te Aratangata, Kikotiwha and others at Kaiapoi a few years earlier. 2 In the swampy wetlands that surrounded the pā, Te Ata-o-Tū distinguished himself in a remarkable and dramatic encounter with the warrior Pēhi Tāhau. In the early morning light, Te Ata-o-Tū, his toki kakauroa (long-handled tomahawk) ready in hand, rushed upon Pēhi Tāhau, who levelled his musket and fired.

The shot tore through Te Ata-o-Tū’s hair, grazing his scalp;

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the fire of the muzzle-flash scorching his hair. Te Ata-o-Tū deftly evaded a second shot, and with a flourish of speed, strength and precision brought his long-handled tomahawk around in a deadly arc and buried it deep in the sinking body of Pēhi Tāhau. Te Ata-o-Tū stripped Pēhi’s body of his gun, warrior’s waist belt and pounamu ear pendant as trophies.3 Te Ata-o-Tū then returned to the fighting and is said to have been the last warrior-chief of Kaiapoi to be subdued. He was ultimately overcome by sheer numbers of Ngāti Toa and taken captive.

Te Rauparaha personally requested to see the man who had despatched Pēhi Tāhau. Carefully scrutinising the bound warrior, he praised him for his extraordinary martial ability and spirit, and commanded that such a courageous and competent warrior should not be put to death. Instead, Te Ata-o-Tū and his wife Te Aopaki were taken back to Waikanae, 60 kilometres north of Wellington, as prized captives. Living in separate villages, they would secretly meet in the evenings to reaffirm their love for one another.

On hearing they were to be given away as trophies to a visiting tribe, they ran to the rangatira Te Hiko-o-te-rangi seeking refuge. Te Hiko and his uncle Te Rangihīroa, Te Pēhi Kupe’s son and brother respectively, agreed to help and took them into their household. Despite being a captive-of-war, Te Ata-o-Tū was afforded important tribal responsibilities among Ngāti Toa and was responsible for caring for many of their wāhi tapu on Kāpiti Island.

Te Ata-o-Tū fought alongside Te Hiko with Ngāti Toa and Te Āti Awa in the intertribal battles of Haowhenua (1834) and Kūititanga (1839) at Waikanae, the last major intertribal battles in the southern North Island. After Te Hiko’s death in 1845, Te Āti Awa chief Wiremu Kīngi Te Rangitaake called on Te Ata-o-Tū to assist his people to search out and capture ‘rebels’ fighting against government forces during the skirmishing and fighting at Pāuatahanui as well as in the Hutt War of 1846, where he is credited with capturing Wiremu Te Kumete, among others.4 It seems probable that he was more active during these events than the official record allows, and although Te Ata-o-Tū’s fighting days appear to end here, his fame continued.

During the heyday of the whaling industry at Kāpiti, Te Ata-o-Tū astonished everyone when he harpooned an enormous shark (in some versions a small whale)5 in the

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Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga

shallows at Motungārara Island. The harpoon fixed firmly in the huge fish, which promptly made off at high speed into the channel between Kāpiti Island and the mainland. Several local Māori launched a waka, expecting to retrieve Te Ata-o-Tū’s body, but instead found him being happily dragged behind the beast around the small islets and back again, before it finally beached itself.

Another account is of Te Ata-o-Tū fishing from Waikanae beach with his young son when a large bull appeared from the bush. Hiding his son under a pile of driftwood, Te Ata-o-Tū lured the bull away along the beach. The enraged bull followed him into the surf, pursuing Te Ata-o-Tū for three kilometres up and down the coast before he slowed its progress by swimming through heavy kelp, which he threw over the bull’s horns before swimming back to his son.6 An early settler, Mrs Brooks, said to be the only Pākehā woman to live on Kāpiti Island, recalled that Te Ata-o-Tū had ‘a commanding walk and look, though he was but a captive, and none of the white people cared to offend him. He was a rangatira by birth, and he never forgot that, nor lost his warrior mien.’7 By 1852 Te Ata-o-Tū had returned with his family to Kaiapoi, where he lived the remainder of his days as one of the great Ngāi Tahu chiefs of Ngāi Tūāhuriri of Kaiapoi.8 The studio portrait of Te Ata-o-Tū by an unknown photographer on page 8 portrays the aged warrior-chief, once feared by so many, in the winter of life. His relaxed posture and relationship to the camera gives the impression of someone who has attained the wisdom and self-assuredness of a life well lived. In Te Ata-o-Tū’s case, it was a truly storied life.

Te Ata-o-Tū epitomised the toa Māori, displaying all the warrior characteristics of Tūmatauenga the god of war.

A similar studio portrait by Daniel Mundy, made some time between 1863 and 1872, was later used by the Bohemian artist Gottfried Lindauer as the basis for his painting of Te Ata-oTū, although in Lindauer’s depiction his European clothing has been replaced by a fine korowai, making him the very picture of a ‘classical’ rangatira Māori. In 1980 he was further immortalised as one of several notable tūpuna Māori to be celebrated on a commemorative 60-cent stamp.

Te Ata-o-Tū died at his residence, Kaiapoi, on 6 September 1883 at an advanced age. ▲

Preface Te Ata o Tū

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The bird startled has flown, only the quiver of the bough remains.

Te Whiti o Rongomai1

Moving confidently into the future requires a robust understanding of where we have come from and been . . . a mature nation needs to own its history, warts and all.

Vincent O’Malley2

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Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga

Introduction A Library of Imperfect Memory

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he New Zealand Wars were a series of conflicts between some iwi and government forces that extended from Wairau, where there was a violent encounter between Ngāti Toa and New Zealand Company settlers in 1843, to the Bay of Islands, and from Taranaki to the East Cape. The Wairau incident notwithstanding, the wars are typically defined as beginning in 1845, when conflict broke out in the Far North, and ending in 1872, when Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Tūruki was exiled and took refuge in the King Country. They were, as historian James Belich explains, ‘bitter and bloody struggles, as important to New Zealand as were the Civil Wars to England and the United States’. 3 Issues of land and sovereignty were very much at their heart.

The histories of the New Zealand Wars and the period that preceded them have been well covered in books and other resources by authors including James Cowan, Claudia Orange, Judith Binney, James Belich, Vincent O’Malley, Danny Keenan, Anne Salmond and others. This book does not aim to present another comprehensive history. Instead, it draws upon the rich collections of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa to explore the material and visual culture, taonga and artefacts that are intimately connected with key events and players associated with the wars.

The stories of these objects, and of the people with whom they were associated, shed new light on the uncomfortable truths of our country’s civil wars. They encourage empathetic engagement with the difficult histories and painful legacies we must understand in order to move confidently into the future.

Histories of remembering and forgetting are embodied in these powerful taonga from Te Papa’s collections. They act as both windows and mirrors, opening new vistas on the past and reflecting the continuing relevance and legacy of the New Zealand Wars in our present moment. They also spark conversation and debate, inspiring curiosity as well as a desire to learn more about Aotearoa New Zealand’s complex colonial history.

Beginnings

Te Papa was created in 1992, when the National Museum and National Art Gallery merged into one institution. The former was founded in 1865 as the Colonial Museum, becoming the Dominion Museum in 1907 and the National Museum in 1972, while the National Art Gallery was established in 1930, opening to the public in 1936. When these institutions combined, the depth, diversity and richness of collections and their potential to open up stories about the history and culture of Aotearoa New Zealand increased enormously. These collections form the basis of this book; they span

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taonga Māori, historical objects, photographs, philately, rare books, maps and plans, decorative arts, oil paintings, prints, watercolours and drawings.

The inaugural director of the Colonial Museum in 1865 was Dr James Hector, a scientist whose chief interest was collecting, describing and cataloguing the colony’s natural environment, including its mineral resources and geology, rather than seeking out material relating to current events. Even so, taonga associated with the New Zealand Wars began to enter the collections from very early in the institution’s history, mostly through donations. The politician Sir William Fox, for example, donated two remarkable objects in 1872, the year he ended his third and final stint as premier of New Zealand: a watercolour painting by Gustavus von Tempsky, On General Chute’s March, West Coast, c.1868 – the first painting to enter the museum’s collection (see pages 248–249) and a flag that had belonged to Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Tūruki (page 281). A further eight Māori flags were gifted by former Governor George Grey in 1879 when he resigned as premier of New Zealand.4 As with the flag gifted by Fox, there is no information about how these flags came into Grey’s possession.

The appointment of Hector’s successor, Augustus Hamilton, in 1903 signalled a shift in the museum’s collecting activities. Hamilton was the author of Maori Art (1901) and, with Stephenson Percy Smith, co-author of The Maori Antiquities Act, 1901, which aimed to restrict the removal of Māori ‘antiquities’ from the country and proposed the establishment of a national Māori museum.5 The government’s directive was to pay ‘special attention to the collection of a representative series of specimens of Maori art and workmanship’.6 Hamilton, a collector himself, immediately set about acquiring sizeable numbers of Māori artefacts by purchasing several private collections, including those of Henry Hill, James Butterworth, Walter Buller and Thomas Godfrey Hammond. Many of these collectors lived or worked on the fringe of Māori communities who had participated in the wars and would buy objects from them while taking only occasional interest in the histories and tribal memory behind them. Hamilton also sought to acquire works of art that both described and recorded Māori and their culture. His most significant art acquisition was the purchase in 1905 of 70 watercolours by the soldier-artist Horatio Gordon Robley, arranged through Thomas Edward Donne, then superintendent of the New Zealand government’s Tourist Bureau in London.7 When James Allan Thomson was appointed third director of the Dominion Museum in 1915, he shifted focus again with his desire to establish an ‘historical collection relating to the early history of New Zealand’.8 The most notable contribution to this collection during his tenure was the acquisition of the Gordon Collection, comprising ‘portraits, maps, diagrams, &c., relating to the Maori wars of the “sixties”’ gathered

by William Francis Gordon. Thomson felt that together the Gordon and Robley collections would form a ‘fitting nucleus for the national historical collection’.9 It is interesting that Thomson considered two collections that focused so singularly on the New Zealand Wars as being representative of the early history of the colony, for the wars quickly became something Pākehā preferred to forget rather than remember. However, there were others associated with the museum during the first two decades of the twentieth century who would have exerted influence, including James McDonald, Elsdon Best and James Cowan.

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Māori flags from the New Zealand Wars arranged for photography outside the Dominion Museum, c.1910.

At this time the museum was located on Museum Street, behind Parliament, and collection care standards were clearly very ad hoc. Photograph, copy print, 160 x 205mm

McDonald was employed by the museum between 1905 and 1926, and worked variously as artist, model maker, photographer and filmmaker. In 1914, while covering as acting director, he organised an exhibition of the Robley watercolours to honour the 50th anniversary of the battle at Pukehinahina (Gate pā). McDonald enjoyed a long association with Best, who was appointed ethnologist at the museum in 1910.

In 1917, Thomson wrote in support of the journalist and historian James Cowan’s ambition to research and write a history of the New Zealand Wars that drew on the memories of Māori and Pākehā veterans. Thomson urged the under-secretary for internal affairs to employ Cowan, writing that it was ‘greatly to be regretted that no historical investigator is at present working on the history of the Maori wars, for such a person . . . could by means of leading questions obtain from actors in the scenes of war much additional information which in a few years will otherwise become lost’.10 Cowan drew upon a great deal of material in the Dominion Museum’s collection in developing his seminal two-volume history The New Zealand Wars: A history of the Maori campaigns and the pioneering period (1922–23).

In 1926, Te Āti Awa carver Thomas Heberly became the museum’s first full-time Māori staff member, employed to prepare exhibits for the new Dominion Museum and the National Art Gallery that was due to open in 1936. By this time, taonga Māori had begun to be presented less as evidence of a living culture than as

Introduction A Library of Imperfect Memory

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‘frozen fragment[s] . . . set within a timeless ethnographic past’, a display strategy that persisted through much of the twentieth century.11 In this context Pākehā New Zealanders did not wish to see nineteenth-century conflicts reflected in their national museum. As Hamilton had predicted in a presidential address to the Otago Institute in 1903, artefacts that strongly referenced the New Zealand Wars, such as the Māori flags and weapons, were, ‘as a rule, very undesirable to the curator of a museum, being ‘“documents” bearing upon a very difficult and intricate history’.12 Ironically, when the new Dominion Museum opened at Buckle Street in 1936, the centrepiece of the Maori Hall was the magnificent whare whakairo belonging to Rongowhakaata iwi, Te Hau ki Tūranga, a taonga that government officials had removed by force from Ōrākaiapu pā, near Tūranga-nui-a-Kiwa Gisborne, during the New Zealand Wars (see pages 282–284). The circumstances of its acquisition were conveniently forgotten as visitors and critics admired ‘a wonderful carved house that is a prized exhibit’.13 The ‘very difficult’ histories of the recent colonial past were manifest in the museum’s collection, but were largely ignored in exhibitions and displays at the museum for much of the twentieth century.

Thinking through taonga Hei tiki, 1600–1850, maker unknown. Pounamu and pāua shell, 162 x 93mm. Oldman Collection, gift of the New Zealand government, 1992 (OL000081)

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Since James Hector’s time, collecting in the museum and art gallery has historically been focused on the quality of specimens and how these fit into defined ‘types’.

Taonga Māori have been valued as examples of tools, weapons or adornment carved in wood, whalebone or pounamu, or woven in muka; artworks have been valued as products of significant artists; and historical objects have been collected to demonstrate excellence, innovation, and technological or industrial progress.14 In this vein, significant collections of taonga, such as the William Oldman, Kenneth Webster, Walter Buller and Alexander Turnbull collections, have been acquired for their ethnological value, rather than for what they can tell us about the circumstances in which the taonga were originally acquired, or the people or places with which they were originally associated.

The same is true of the National Art Collection, which houses collections of watercolours and drawings with material relevant to this period, including those

by Nicholas Chevalier, William Swainson and James Crowe Richmond, as well as collections of nineteenth-century cartes-de-visite, which are seldom contextualised, let alone interrogated, in terms of the experiences of these artists, photographers or subjects in relation to the New Zealand Wars. We have preferred to keep our artists above the realm of history, no matter how closely their work corresponds to or engages with defining historical moments.

For example, Richmond’s exquisite nineteenth-century watercolours of scenic views were regularly exhibited in the National Art Gallery following their acquisition in 1935, yet it has seldom been acknowledged that many were made during his travels around Aotearoa New Zealand in his capacity as de facto native minister in the 1860s, and when he facilitated the removal of Te Hau ki Tūranga to the Colonial Museum. How can we reconcile the beauty of these paintings with these histories?

And how can we begin to better connect taonga and historical artefacts with the people and places to which they relate?

Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga

The research for this book involved a deep immersion in the collections in order to identify taonga relating to the New Zealand Wars. As writers, we were confronted time and again by the western, imperial perspectives privileged by the museum.

Taonga have been collected through the lens of the coloniser, and often the recorded provenance tells us much more about the Pākehā collector – usually male – than it does about the people by whom the objects were once held or the iwi to whom they whakapapa. Historian Rachel Buchanan has written that ‘archives are part of the architecture of imperialism’, and the archives of Te Papa and its predecessors are no exception.15 Take, for example, the hei tiki of exquisite quality, made of pounamu from a Westland source with serrated pāua-shell inlaid eyes, on the previous page. We know that this taonga was ‘taken by a soldier of the 99th Regiment from the pa of Hone Heke, Ohaeawae [sic], 1845. Acquired from Major-General Robley in 1910’, as William Oldman recorded in his catalogue entry.16 But none of this information takes us any closer to the Māori owner around whose neck this hei tiki was once worn, or perhaps from whose body it was taken following battle. Instead, we trace a provenance through three British men, one soldier, one soldier-artist-collector, and one collector.

Taonga such as this hei tiki remind us that much of the material we are dealing with here is essentially ‘war booty’ – trophies and mementoes that combatants collected off the battlefield before embarking on global journeys that have disconnected taonga from their kōrero, from their whakapapa.17 While many have circled back to Aotearoa New Zealand, they have not quite made it home, or been reconnected with whānau or whenua. At the same time, it would be short-sighted to assume that only the colonial aggressors indulged in the practice of collecting battle trophies. The practice of acquiring taonga, or war trophies, from the field of conflict was not uncommon to Māori, and has been a universal practice throughout human conflict.

There are other gaps in the ways in which these histories have been collected and documented over the years. Generally speaking, they have largely been concerned with the logistics and consequences of ‘battle’ and little attention has been paid to the impact on families, both Māori and Pākehā. Taonga that would provide access to the experiences of women and children during the New Zealand Wars have seldom been collected, and nor have their words been widely drawn upon in writing the histories.

We have attempted to push against these absences and biases by bringing together a range of authors to work against a single-authored, objective historical account, opening up different ways to think through taonga. We have embraced material from across the collections, not just weapons of war, but also domestic objects, artworks and personal letters. We have engaged in a process of consultation and collaboration with those who can be identified as having a relationship to particular taonga, places, people and events. We have invited feedback and comment on the draft text and have also welcomed alternative perspectives offered by iwi, hapū and whānau.

This has made the book so much richer as we have been able to add greater nuance and balance to the historical accounts. We have been challenged to think beyond the context of conflict within which some of these taonga and people have been situated, and reminded that these people are tūpuna, not just actors in a historical drama. These exchanges have personalised the taonga and their

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Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga

associated stories, beginning the process of restoring their mana within the museum’s collections. Through this work we are re-establishing connections and relationships between taonga, peoples and places – past, present and future. This book signals many beginnings.

As historian Charlotte Macdonald has written, there has been a tendency to dismiss historical collections of artefacts and archives as ‘valuable only for what these reminders tell us of how things “used to be”, rather than for how things are “now”’; but ‘such separation of present from past, past from present, is not feasible whether or not it were desirable. The “past” never goes away; it can never be relegated to the side lines as a non-player.’ 18

Centenaries and petitions TR Ulyatt, ‘Parihaka, preparing a hangi, 18 March 1972’.

Photographic negatives (B.12219-B.12224)

These are difficult histories, and it is fair to say that neither Te Papa nor its predecessors have tackled them in any significant way. Exhibitions related to the New Zealand Wars within the National Museum, National Art Gallery and Te Papa have been scarce. Following the efforts of Thomson and McDonald in the 1910s, there was no major acknowledgement of these histories until 1972, the centenary of the end of the wars in 1872, when Te Kooti took refuge in the King Country.

The exhibition held that year was not only significant in terms of its subject, but it also marked a shift in approaches to exhibition making. Concerning Te Kooti Rikirangi Te Turuki was one of the first exhibitions worked on by Michael Fitzgerald, curator of history at Te Papa for over 40 years, and now a Te Papa research associate and contributor to this book. He recalls that it stood out for several reasons, the most important being that it was not curator-led, but rather engaged with an external expert, Frank Davis, who acted as a conduit between the museum and representatives of the Ringatū faith founded by Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Tūruki,19 enabling an ‘alternative story to the stereotypes of the time’ to be told. 20 Fitzgerald was also part of a group

Introduction A Library of Imperfect Memory

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Installation view of the Te Papa exhibition Rā Maumahara, held to mark the first national day of commmemoration of the New Zealand Wars, 2017.

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from the museum that was hosted at Parihaka in 1972 (see page 19), establishing a relationship between the institution and the significant papakāinga.

The momentum of the first half of the 1970s did not generate a sustained focus on this aspect of Aotearoa New Zealand’s history, which continues to be absent from exhibitions. In 2015, the stark contrast between the attention paid to the centenary of events at Gallipoli, including the staging of a significant and highly successful exhibition at Te Papa, and the comparatively meagre support for many 150th commemorations of conflicts relating to the New Zealand Wars highlighted what we, as a nation, prefer to remember and what we’d rather forget.

The same year, Leah Bell and Waimarama Anderson, and their fellow students from Ōtorohanga College, collected over 12,000 signatures for a petition in support of a national day of commemoration for the New Zealand Wars. In August 2016, the government announced the establishment of such a day, the first to be held in October 2017. In response, Matiu Baker and Rebecca Rice co-curated an exhibition for Te Papa, Rā Maumahara, to coincide with this first national day. Following this, our awareness of the need to further explore our collections and reconnect them to stories of the New Zealand Wars was given greater impetus. This was no longer a history that we as an institution could ignore.

Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga

J

oanna Kidman, professor of Māori education, has written, ‘People sometimes shy away from the brutality of frontier stories and this is perhaps understandable, but an ongoing and widespread reluctance to face up to the messy, difficult past can also set in train a series of unresolved public silences that loiter in the present.’21 This book attempts to begin the process of facing up to this past and addressing the silences that have reverberated throughout the histories of Te Papa and its predecessors.

The history we tell has been shaped by the taonga we hold and where they have taken us. The first section, Contested Authority, focuses on the first half of the nineteenth century, exploring interactions between Māori and Europeans as hopes for a mutually beneficial engagement slowly gave way to frustrations and conflict. The second section, A Garrison Colony, addresses the Taranaki, Waikato and Tauranga wars, while also considering the infrastructure and mechanics of war.

During the 1860s there was a dramatic intensification of British military presence, particularly but not exclusively in the North Island; Charlotte Macdonald argues that at this time New Zealand was in effect a garrison colony rather than a settler colony. 22 The third section, A New Kind of War, deals with the emergence of a new sort of conflict, one in which religion and the prophet figures of Te Ua Haumēne, Riwha Tītokowaru and Te Kooti Arikirangi Tūruki played a decisive role. 23 Following the ‘end’ of the wars, in 1872, the fourth section, Legacies of Conflict, considers not only their immediate consequences, including the devastating atrocities at Parihaka, but also the way the wars began to be documented, collected, and romanticised in the late colonial period. Finally, in Contemporary Resonances we highlight a remarkable range of works and interventions by artists and activists in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. These works respond to the histories of the New Zealand Wars and remind us of the words of Te Whiti o Rongomai: the past ‘quivers’ in the present, long after the bird has flown.

Interspersed throughout are essays on particular themes or topics by Māori writers, historians, artists and architects. These attempt to redress the balance of Pākehā voices that have dominated histories of the New Zealand Wars and allow the authors to tell deeper stories about specific topics from their perspective. These include the Kīngitanga, the 1860 Kohimarama conference, Māori legislature, the prophet movements, kūpapa, waiata as historial sources, spatial legacies, and popular culture.

Finally, we acknowledge, as Augustus Hamilton did, that these are difficult and intricate histories. But they are not just difficult, they are also confronting, upsetting, full of mamae. These histories have lost none of their emotion as they have been passed down through the generations. They are stories about real people, and they connect to people all around us, Māori and Pākehā, resonating through to the present day. Within these painful histories there are moments of hope and of resistance. They will, if we let them, take us into the future.

Matiu Baker, Katie Cooper, Michael Fitzgerald, Rebecca Rice

Introduction A Library of Imperfect Memory

21

Part On Contes Authori 1809–18 22

Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga

ne sted ity 863

Early conflict – ­25 The Musket Wars – 32 The Union Jack flies over the North – 36 From Wairau to Pōneke – 43 The Northern War – 66 Essay: Jade Kake – 78 The Kīngitanga – 86 Essay: Mike Ross and Paul Meredith – 90 Contested Authority 1809–1863

23

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Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga

Early conflict The histories of the New Zealand Wars are usually confined to the period of 1845–72, from the Northern War through to the retreat of Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Tūruki into the King Country. However, Māori and Pākehā relations prior to this time were dynamic, if complex, and there are several instances of cultural misunderstanding that would subsequently be seen to underpin, even serving to justify, later conflicts.

In 1769, two European ships visited New Zealand. By the 1830s there were nearly one thousand ship visits each year. The earliest long-term settlers were whalers, missionaries, timber workers and traders, who came for resources, religion and recreation. They arrived initially in small numbers, and often lived with Māori, but by 1830 they were becoming established in small settlements.

In the pre-colonial context the formation of mutually beneficial relationships between Māori and Europeans was crucial. These relationships were marked by intense curiosity and exchange of language, culture, knowledge and technology. Māori readily embraced new cultivation techniques and crops, developing businesses and trading with Europeans.1 But access to desirable resources quickly became competitive, and as iwi tried to retain control over wealth and power, rivalries over mana and leadership among rangatira were amplified.

Further, as the British Crown became more involved, Māori independence was actively contested: Māori sought to retain authority over their land as the Crown tried to loosen their hold. The inability of Europeans to read the cultural landscape, and their determination to impose themselves upon it, contributed to the intertribal and interracial conflict that ensued. ▲ Detail of the Union flag Pumuka c.1840, associated with Te Roroa hapū, Ngāti Hineāmaru iwi. The full flag is shown on page 38.

Contested Authority 1809–1863

25

A carronade from the Boyd Carronade from the Boyd, c.1780, made by Carron Co., Scotland. Cast iron, 530 x 500 x 1220mm. Purchased 1933 (DM000143)

26

A carronade is a short-barrelled cannon, lighter and easier to handle than a long cannon, used on British ships in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 2 This one, purchased for the Dominion Museum collection in 1933, is said to be a relic from the Boyd, a sailing ship that was attacked by Māori in Whangaroa Harbour in December 1809. This incident has been recorded by Pākehā as the most violent clash between Māori and Europeans in New Zealand in the early nineteenth century, and it had a heavy impact on trade and settlement.

The Boyd left London in March 1809 carrying convicts bound for Australia.3 Equipped for war with France, it carried 14 carronades that could fire heavy balls at short range.4 The Boyd docked at Sydney in August, collected hardwood, coal, furs and other supplies, and then departed for the return voyage via Cape Horn in November.5 The captain planned to make a short stop in New Zealand to collect kauri spars, and on board were a number of Māori including Te Āra, the son of Ngāti Uru rangatira Pipikoitareke, who was returning home.6 The Boyd put in at Whangaroa Harbour and the captain and crew went ashore to inspect a stand of kauri. They were attacked by their Māori guides, who then returned to the Boyd and killed those on board. Only four survived – as many as 70 crew members and passengers lost their lives.7 The next day the ship was looted, and during the pillaging the gunpowder stores were accidentally ignited, causing a huge explosion. Approximately 15 Māori were killed, including Te Āra’s father, Pipikoitareke. 8 The ship was burnt to the waterline and the carronades lay with the wreckage.9 Some were salvaged by local Māori; in 1824 British naval officer Richard Cruise noted

Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga

that at Kāeo, the principal settlement of Ngāti Uru, three of the carronades of the Boyd were planted at the summit of the pā, while three others lay on the banks of the river below.10 Others were later raised by Pākehā settlers.11 The exact provenance of this gun prior to 1933 is not known.

In the decades after the attack the story of the Boyd was told and retold many times, gaining new ‘layers, contexts and complications’ with each retelling.12 Initially the attack was seen by Europeans as senseless and barbaric. Blame was entirely placed on Māori and regarded as evidence of their inability to embrace ‘civilisation’.13 As new sources of information and alternative perspectives were introduced, the story gained more nuance. The ‘initial tabloid headline’, to quote literary historian Lydia Wevers, gradually broadened out into a narrative of ‘barbaric yet understandable reprisal’, taking into account factors such as internal tribal politics, commercial interests and cultural imperatives.14 On the journey across the Tasman Te Āra had been tied up and flogged, probably because he was ill and unable to work his passage.15 When the Boyd arrived in Whangaroa Harbour Te Āra reported his mistreatment to his iwi, and they vowed to obtain utu. The arrival of European ships was already a source of suspicion and fear, as Ngāti Uru believed a curse had been placed on them by the captain of the Commerce a year earlier. The captain – Ceroni – had been showing off his pocket watch when he dropped it into Whangaroa Harbour, and according to one source Ngāti Uru felt he had done them ‘an irreparable injury by leaving his Etua [atua or god] behind as a demon of destruction’.16 Shortly thereafter an outbreak of disease killed a number of local Māori, and this earlier tragedy likely factored into the events on the Boyd.17 [KC]

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An explosive encounter Louis John Steele (1843–1918) and Kennett Watkins (1847– 1933), The blowing up of the Boyd, 1889. Oil on canvas, 1218 x 1837mm. Purchased 1992 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds (1992-0019-2)

The Boyd incident gave pre-colonial New Zealand a reputation as a place of extreme ‘savagery’ and violence.

The bloody and sensational nature of the attack and its aftermath lent itself to being retold and reinterpreted time and again. One of the most theatrical interpretations was made some 80 years later, by artists Louis John Steele and Kennett Watkins, who created their work in the style of a European history painting – Steele working on the figures, and Watkins painting the landscape. They focused on the moment of the explosion, strategically choosing the most dramatic part of the story.

Historian Tony Simpson has described how this painting was used in the past as an example of ‘racist mythmaking’ because it misrepresents events for a political purpose, demonstrating Māori naivety in the face of British technology. 18 For example, when it was first exhibited in 1890 in Auckland, contemporary newspapers referred to the depiction of Māori in this painting condescendingly as ‘rascals . . . flabbergasted by the explosion’.19 The painting also played into late nineteenth-century Pākehā narratives of two peoples once in conflict but now at peace, and acceptance of the assimilationist views of Māori as a dying people; the artists were praised for capturing that ‘fast-departing though magnificent race’. 20 Whangaroa hapū acknowledge the historically influential event, the painting as a reminder of the unjust killing of Te Pahi, and the introduction of colonial forces to the region. [RR]

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Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga

Contested Authority 1809–1863

29

A party of military personnel and seamen came ashore at Te Namu on 28 September. 30 Rather than negotiate for the release of Betty and Louisa they captured chief Ōaoiti and dragged him to the Alligator, where he was subjected to brutal treatment by Guard and his crew. Te Namu pā was burnt to the ground, while Betty and Louisa were then taken to Ōrangituapeka pā. After tense negotiations they were released in exchange for Ōaoiti, who survived his capture.31 On 8 October the ships returned to the region to complete their final rescue; Jacky and Betty’s son, John, was still captive. More than 100 men landed on the cliffs below Waimate pā, close to Ōrangituapeka at the mouth of the Kapuni stream, with a sixpounder cannon.32 A rangatira named Māpiki approached with John on his shoulders, but once the boy was safe the British began firing on the defenders. They poured musket and cannon fire on the two pā and, having quickly occupied both, burnt them to the ground. One rangatira, probably Māpiki, was beheaded. 33 The violent incident was used as evidence of widespread anarchy by officials hoping for greater British intervention in New Zealand. 34 It also horrified humanitarian groups such as the Church Missionary Society (CMS), who argued that unrestrained colonisation must be prevented in order to protect Māori. 35 A subsequent House of Commons Select Committee report criticised the rescue party for the use of excessive force, and found that ‘these evils might have been avoided if farther efforts for negotiation had been made in the first instance’. 36 The drama of the event, but nothing of its full horror, is depicted in this naive watercolour painting by CW Watson of Wellington. Created more than half a century after the rescue of John Guard, the imagined scene casts Captain Lambert of HMS Alligator as a heroic figure, and offers no hint of the controversial and highly contested histories of the Harriet affair. [KC]

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31

The Musket Wars Muskets, or ngutu pārera, transformed intertribal warfare in New Zealand in the early nineteenth century.

It is estimated that about 20,000 Māori were killed in what have been referred to since as the Musket Wars, and the implications for iwi structures and boundaries were drastic and far-reaching. These wars changed the political map of Aotearoa New Zealand and also helped determine where concerted efforts for the mass colonisation of the country were directed.

The beginnings of the wars lay in the Far North. From 1818, northern Māori war parties armed with muskets attacked tribes further south, and the Ngāpuhi rangatira Hongi Hika became a key figure in these battles. An arms race began as iwi competed to obtain muskets.

The firearms were acquired in exchange for food and other supplies from European ships stopping over in the Bay of Islands, the Kāpiti coast and other trading locations, and were sought out by Māori, who travelled far and wide to gain access to weapons.

Opinions vary on the degree to which these battles were the result of European contact, or whether they were about utu – war being the ‘ultimate sanction in resolving disputes’.37 It has been said that warfare was endemic in Māori society and would have continued regardless of the introduction of muskets and of metal tools, such as the axe, that were repurposed as weapons. But there is no question that the active trading in firearms changed the scale of those conflicts and disrupted the existing societal balance in te ao Māori. The new technology of the musket offered a more lethal weapon, resulting in more deaths and increased migration and dislocation as iwi fled their traditional lands and entered new alliances. ▲

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Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga

Tuai and Tītere’s travels Silhouette portraits of Tooi [Tuai], Teeterree [Tītere] and Francis Hall, 1818, artist unknown. Ink on paper, 220 x 290mm. Purchased 2020 (2020-0008-1)

Tuai (c.1797–1824), a young rangatira of Ngare Raumati in the south-eastern Bay of Islands, was an important cultural ‘go-between’ in pre-colonial New Zealand.38 He was early to recognise the importance of gaining Pākehā allies from whom he sought both to learn, and, in turn, educate about the Māori world. By 1814 he was living with the missionary Thomas Kendall near Samuel Marsden’s home at Parramatta, west of Sydney. He was employed by Marsden in the effort to establish a Pākehā settlement in the Bay of Islands by helping Kendall to write a Māori-language school book, published in Sydney in 1815. In 1817, Marsden paid for Tuai and his friend Tītere (from Rangihoua) to travel to England, where they stayed until December 1818. Marsden wanted Tuai and Tītere’s stay to give them an education that would secure them as promoters of Christianity. Tuai and Tītere were more interested in iron, military allies and military technology, priorities not shared or encouraged by their missionary hosts.

These depictions of Tuai, Tītere and their companion and teacher, Francis Hall, 39 were made during this time, and the likenesses of the men rendered in popular silhouette portraits offer a distinctive record of their global adventures. In these pared-back portraits, it is apparent that Tuai, on the left, and Tītere, on the right, wore their hair in the style of the time, along with the high collars and Regency dress of fashionable English gentlemen. The deliberate composition of the silhouettes, with Hall in the centre, highlights his role as an intermediary, though it could also be interpreted as a hierarchical arrangement. It indicates, too, that there was an exchange of knowledge and language taking place between the three young men.

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All three portraits are encased in an original pink fabric and paper portfolio, suggesting they were treasured by the owner.40 When Tuai and Tītere returned to New Zealand in 1819, accompanied by Marsden, Hall and several Pākehā missionary settler families, Tuai and his elder brother, the rangatira Korokoro, hoped that Pākehā settlement would be extended to Ngare Raumati whenua in the south-east Bay of Islands, thereby strengthening their mana within the region. But to their dismay, Hongi Hika, a rival leader of the northern alliance of Ngāpuhi, offered the new settlers their choice of land in his iwi’s territory, including prime sites on the Kerikeri river.

Marsden established his mission at Kerikeri despite warnings from Korokoro, and his decision unbalanced the distribution of settlers in the Bay of Islands, further upsetting the already fragile relations between Ngāpuhi and other iwi, and placing more power and wealth into Hongi Hika’s hands. Marsden left New Zealand soon after, oblivious to the fact that he had set in motion a ‘devastating future for the many non-Ngāpuhi-aligned hapū of the inland and coastal Bay of Islands’.41 Tuai was torn between his desire to maintain relations with Pākehā and his obligations to his iwi. Initially he sought to integrate his Māori and European ideals and relished his role as cultural mediator, negotiating relationships and trade between Māori and visiting Europeans. But by 1821, when Hongi Hika, recently returned from England with muskets procured during his stopover in Sydney, led a taua or war party to Tāmaki and Thames–Hauraki, he was joined by Tuai, Korokoro and Ngare Raumati.

Their motives for joining their erstwhile enemy in battle are complicated.

On the one hand, it made sense to combine forces and not turn their newly acquired muskets on each other, but Ngare Raumati also had their own political reasons for joining Ngāpuhi to fight Ngāti Pāoa, having suffered losses at their hands previously.42 Ngare Raumati continued to fight alongside Ngāpuhi during the Musket Wars. In 1823, Korokoro was killed in a battle against Te Arawa near Rotorua and Tuai assumed the mantle of rangatira. He died only a year later from a brief unspecified illness. This left Ngare Raumati vulnerable, and by 1827 their papa kāinga were abandoned and their people dispersed. While Ngāpuhi claimed to have conquered Ngare Raumati, descendants of the latter reject this narrative and instead emphasise their intermarriage with Ngāpuhi, which ensured their survival. [RR]

Hongi Hika’s gift Opposite, above: Hei tiki, 1600–1820, Ngāpuhi. Pounamu (nephrite), 152 x 88mm.

Purchased 1907, Thomas Edward Donne collection (ME001611)

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This hei tiki belonged to Hongi Hika, who rose to prominence in the intertribal wars in Te Tai Tokerau Northland in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. By 1815 Hongi Hika had become the dominant Ngāpuhi war leader in the region.

In 1814 Hongi visited Sydney, where he met Samuel Marsden and further encouraged him to establish a mission station in the Bay of Islands. Hongi Hika ensured that his Pākehā were afforded protection under his personal mana, providing safe anchorage for shipping and trade, which flourished during his lifetime. Modern agricultural equipment was put to good use by the many slaves Hongi captured, vastly increasing crop yield. Through fostering commerce and expanding the Ngāpuhi economy, he was able to buy muskets and powder. This enabled Ngāpuhi to wage war against their rivals, and it put Hongi at the forefront of the Musket Wars.43

Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga

In 1820, Hongi Hika and the young warrior chief Hōhaia Parata Waikato visited England with CMS lay settler and schoolmaster Thomas Kendall. Kendall had previously submitted a manuscript of spoken Māori to Cambridge University linguist and professor of eastern languages Samuel Lee, and Hongi assisted Lee in compiling a Māori dictionary. While in England, Hongi presented his hei tiki to Kendall’s spiritual mentor, the Reverend Basil Woodd.44 Hongi Hika and Waikato were presented, possibly on two occasions, to King George IV, who was apparently impressed by their ‘fine physique’ and ‘thoroughly martial appearance’.45 The king gifted each of the chiefs a fine double-barrelled flintlock musket with an engraved plate bearing their ‘names and titles’, along with the royal crown and the letters ‘G. R.’ (Georgius Rex).46 Hongi also received a shirt of chain mail and gifts of agricultural implements and other items, which he traded in Sydney on his return trip home for the 300 muskets he would use in campaigns that reached beyond Auckland into the Coromandel, Waikato and even Rotorua.

Despite his spectacular military successes and warlike demeanour on the field, Hongi was described as ‘mild, gentle and courteous’ at home, where he was a loving father and where he supervised the planting and harvesting of crops, while assisting his people in communal tasks such as fishing.47 Hongi was shot in the chest at Whangaroa in 1827 and died from his wounds on 3 March 1828. [MB]

A musket from Massachusetts Model 1816 ‘Pomeroy’ flintlock musket, 1834, made by Lemuel Pomeroy, Massachusetts. Steel, wood and brass, length 1380mm.

Purchased 1917 (DM000049)

The many muskets acquired by Māori between about 1815 and 1840 were mostly sold or traded by the crews of ships from Europe and the United States. The ships, often on long whaling voyages, visited places such as the Bay of Islands and the Kāpiti Coast for rest, fresh food (pork and potatoes) and replenishment of supplies.48 It is not known just how many muskets came into New Zealand during those years. A picture of a taua of about 50 warriors armed with muskets published in 1859 suggests that the total number would have been in the thousands.49 Historian Angela Ballara reports that armed taua during the 1820s carried anything from 30 to 40 muskets, with larger war parties bearing as many as 500.50 This musket is likely to have been traded from an American ship not long after it was manufactured in 1834. It was purchased by the Dominion Museum from James McDonald in 1917, as part of his collection of New Zealand Wars mementoes.51 At that time, McDonald was the museum’s photographer and artist, but he had acquired the mementoes from Māori when travelling around New Zealand as an employee of the government’s Tourist Department. 52 [MF]

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The Union Jack flies over the North James Busby arrived in the Bay of Islands in May 1833 as King William IV’s ‘Official Resident’. Busby had been despatched to New Zealand to oversee and protect British settlers and traders and to encourage Māori ‘toward a settled form of government’.53 Lacking support from troops, however, Busby held no authority in New Zealand, and had no means to give effect to his mission except by exercising a moral influence ‘solely by virtue of his powers of personal persuasion and the dignity of his Vice-Consul’s uniform’.54 Shortly after his arrival, Busby met 22 leading rangatira at Paihia, read them the king’s message, and announced his intention to guide them to become ‘a rich and wise people like the people of Great Britain’.55 Over the next several years Busby hosted three important meetings at his residence in Waitangi. In August 1834 he called a meeting with senior rangatira to choose a national flag. In the company of settlers, missionaries and the commanders of 13 visiting ships, a group of 25 Māori leaders selected a British naval ensign that was already being used by the Church Missionary Society. The flag was a legal requirement for Māori-owned sailing vessels coming out of New Zealand, allowing them to berth at mainly British ports and to conduct business.

In October 1835 Busby called another meeting of Ngāpuhi rangatira.

This time 34 mostly northern chiefs assembled to sign a declaration addressed to King William IV. It declared their independent status as a nation state, to be exercised under the authority of the hereditary chiefs and to be designated ‘The United Tribes of New Zealand’. Written

by Busby, the four-article 1835 He Whakaputanga Declaration of Independence of New Zealand thanked His Majesty for his recognition of the United Tribes flag and sought his continued support and protection from ‘all attempts upon its independence’, while offering in return the same for his subjects who settled in or visited New Zealand for the purposes of trade and commerce.

In early 1840, following Captain William Hobson’s arrival on 29 January, Busby announced a meeting to be held at his Waitangi residence on 5 February. This time it was to facilitate a discussion between the hereditary rangatira and Hobson, who represented the Crown and would become the colony’s first governor, to sign a treaty 36

Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga

with Great Britain that would make New Zealand a British colony.

Hobson and his secretary immediately set to drafting what would become Te Tiriti o Waitangi the Treaty of Waitangi, but when Hobson fell ill Busby continued to draft it, and it was finally completed with Hobson on 4 February.

The final draft was translated into Māori that evening in haste by the missionary Henry Williams and his son Edward, and the final version was written on parchment on 5 February by Reverend Richard Taylor. It was this document that was presented for debate that morning to the 500 assembled chiefs and 200 attending Pākehā.

The tone of the debates on 5 February appears to have favoured a continued independence; many Māori chiefs questioned the need for a treaty with Britain. However, the mood changed with the arrival of Ngāpuhi leader Hōne Heke Pōkai and the prominent Ngāti Hao brothers Eruera Maihi Patuone and Tāmati Wāka Nene, who advocated strongly for the benefits to Māori of strategically aligning themselves with Britain.

Hobson retired to the Herald, announcing they would reconvene the hui on Friday, 7 February. But the following day – Thursday, 6 February – after an evening of continued debate and enquiry about the Treaty, a large congregation of chiefs assembled outside Busby’s residence wanting to conclude the hui and leave Waitangi to return to their homes. Hobson hurriedly returned to the unscheduled meeting in informal attire, without any of his officers present, attended only by missionary representatives. Williams read the Treaty to the assembly once more, after which Hobson called Hōne Heke up as its first signatory.

Some Northland Māori became disillusioned with Te Tiriti o Waitangi following the signing. The relocation of the capital to Auckland from Ōkiato, near Kororāreka Russell, and the imposition of restrictions and penalties such as customs duties and tariffs upon Māori reduced trade and relegated the north to the margins, rather than keeping it at the centre. In protest, Hōne Heke, Hongi Hika’s sonin-law, attacked the symbol of British authority by felling the flagstaff at Kororāreka, which he had originally gifted. Each time troops replaced it he cut it down again (four times in total), an act that the government declared seditious.

Governor Robert FitzRoy, who had succeeded Hobson, requested reinforcements to protect the Kororāreka garrison, securing HMS Hazard in support. Hōne Heke, and allied leaders Te Ruki Kawiti of Ngāti Hine and Whiria Pōmare of Ngāti Manu, were determined to resist the military occupation of their territories, and by 1845 were in open conflict with the colonial government. ▲

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Te mātāika!

The first fish Union Flag ‘Pumuka’, c.1833, associated with Te Roroa hapū, Ngāti Hineāmaru iwi. Wool, cotton, 1470 x 2590mm. Gift of Rae Honetana Te Kero, 1960 (G002524)

38

According to family history, this Union Flag was presented by James Busby, the official British Resident in New Zealand, to Te Roroa chief Pūmuka not long after Busby’s arrival in May 1833. Through Pūmuka’s assistance and friendship Busby was able to forge a strong network with many of the region’s tribal leaders. In gratitude, Busby presented Pūmuka with his Union Flag – the Union Jack. 56 After the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, relationships in the north deteriorated, and in March 1845 Pūmuka, possibly out of obligation to his elder kinsmen, joined Kawiti and Hōne Heke in an attack on Kororāreka. Prior to the outbreak of hostilities Heke had sent a letter to the people of Kororāreka declaring that he harboured no ill will towards the Pākehā settler community; his enmity was for the Queen’s soldiers.

In the fighting at Christ’s Church, Pūmuka was cut down in dramatic hand-tohand combat by the acting commander of HMS Hazard, David Robertson. Pūmuka was the mātāika – the ‘first-fish’, or first person of distinction – to fall in the first battle of the New Zealand Wars. Heke requested his body, and Martha Ford, a local doctor’s wife, oversaw its retrieval and escorted it across the harbour to be handed over to Heke and Kawiti for funerary rites and burial.

The flag Pumuka could be said to embody all of the hopes and despair of the Treaty story. Pūmuka had remained a conspicuous supporter of Busby through three of the significant events in New Zealand’s early history – the selection of a national flag, the Declaration of Independence, and the Treaty of Waitangi — and was a vocal advocate for the Treaty during the debates that preceded its signing. It is believed that Busby added Pūmuka’s name to the flag at Waitangi in 1840 in acknowledgement of his support. The words ‘Tiriti Waitangi’, which appear in missionary script, are thought to have been added later at the request of a grateful Hobson.

Pūmuka was the sixth rangatira to sign the Treaty and today his descendants continue to honour their tupuna, and the spirit of the Treaty he endorsed so completely, by raising a replica of this flag every Waitangi Day – a tradition they have maintained for over 175 years. [MB]

Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga

A binding gift Mere pounamu, 1500–1820, associated with Eruera Maihi Patuone. Inanga pounamu, 381 x 88mm. Gift of Department of Internal Affairs, 1961 (ME010819)

Eruera Maihi Patuone (Ngāti Hao, Ngāpuhi) presented this mere pounamu to Lieutenant-Governor Captain William Hobson following the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi on 6 February 1840, a gesture infinitely more meaningful to Patuone than writing his mark on the Treaty parchment. Mere pounamu are among the most prized of all personal possessions, valued for their inherent beauty and as a potent and enduring symbol of the mana rangatira of their owners.

They possessed personal names and became imbued with the mauri of their owners, becoming taonga tuku iho and acquiring mana and tapu with each successive owner. The gifting of pounamu in this manner is a significant and binding social contract between the giver and the receiver; in Patuone’s case, one he honoured for the remainder of his long life.

The late intervention of Patuone and his brother Tāmati Wāka Nene at Waitangi on 5 February 1840 is considered a critical moment in the Treaty debates that swayed opinion among the majority of rangatira in favour of signing. Wāka Nene delivered a forceful and compelling speech, reminding the chiefs that it was now too late to turn back time and turn away Pākehā and the benefits they brought.

He argued they needed the governor to control the growing and increasingly demanding and unruly Pākehā population. The elder Patuone supported his younger brother in calling on the assembled rangatira to sign the Treaty and accept the governor as a guiding matua and parent, and as a peacemaker between their peoples.

During the 1845 Northern War Patuone, Wāka Nene and Mohi Tāwhai remained steadfast in their support of the colonial government, despite their own reservations about the government’s intentions and their sympathy with the concerns of Hōne Heke, Kawiti and other northern leaders. Patuone remained loyal to the government but ideologically opposed to war, while his brother Wāka Nene reluctantly took the field against Heke and Kawiti, probably when he thought Heke had encroached upon his mana as his senior and elder kinsman. Consequently, Wāka Nene led the only socalled British victory over Māori forces during the war. After the war, Governor Grey asked Wāka Nene to stand as one of his esquires during his investiture as a Knight Commander of the Bath in 1848.

In the studio portrait overleaf, made two decades after the signing

Contested Authority 1809–1863

39

40

Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga

Opposite: Eruera Maihi Patuone, c.1865–72, photographer unknown. Photograph, albumen silver print, 92 x 60mm. Purchased 1997 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds (O.004269)

Pomp and power

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Cocked hat, c.1840, made by Barclay, London. Beaver skin, silk ribbon, feather, silver thread, gold thread.

Silver epaulettes, c.1840, maker unknown. (Shown on coatee and separately.) Silver thread, gold thread, silk, metal, leather.

Dress coatee, c.1840, maker unknown. Wool, silk, silver thread, metal fasteners.

Gifts of Miss P Lowe, 1979 (PC001943, PC001944, PC001945)

of the Treaty of Waitangi, Eruera Maihi Patuone cuts a confident and dignified figure. He appears remarkably comfortable and well fitted out in his gentleman’s attire; indeed, Patuone was a rangatira and a gentleman by any measure. He lived out his latter days peacefully in a kāinga named after his deceased wife Rīria (Lydia) at Waiwharariki, Takapuna, and was celebrated as a statesman, diplomat and peacemaker. Both he and his brother lived to become icons of New Zealand’s formative nation-building years. Wāka Nene died in 1871, and Patuone died a year later, by which time he was thought to be well over 100 years old. [MB]

On the next page are the surviving components of Lieutenant Willoughby Shortland’s dress uniform, which symbolise the arrival of the Crown colony regime in Aotearoa New Zealand. The uniform includes a beaver-skin bicorn hat with a silk ribbon cockade, silver trim, gold tassel and plume of cock’s feathers. The double-breasted coatee is made of a fine navy blue wool, with a stiff standing collar and cuffs of red cloth. Each of the 20 silver buttons depicts a crown surrounded by a laurel wreath, and the coat is ornamented with acorns and oak leaves worked in silver cord and sequins. The epaulettes have a leather and metal frame which has been covered with silver braid, and metal threads forming a crown and a crossed gold and silver sword and baton.

Shortland would have worn this stately court dress for ceremonial occasions.

The signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 brought an entirely new system of government to Aotearoa, one based on established practices in other British colonies.57 From 1840 to 1852 New Zealand was a Crown colony, ruled by a nonelected governor appointed in London. The governor was assisted by the Executive Council, comprising the colonial secretary, attorney-general and colonial treasurer, and the Legislative Council, which included the governor, Executive Council and three justices of the peace.58 Māori were not offered positions of power within the colony’s administrative structure, and nor were provisions made for the development of Māori government of any sort.59 Shortland was New Zealand’s first colonial secretary – Governor Hobson’s chief aide.60 His office was the hub of the colonial administration, and when Hobson died in September 1842 Shortland acted as governor until Robert FitzRoy arrived to take over 15 months later. This particular uniform probably dates from Shortland’s time as governor of Tobago in the 1850s, but his counterparts in New Zealand would have worn something very similar.61 For all the authority, pomp and circumstance conjured by this elaborate uniform, the extension of British law in New Zealand after 1840 was initially limited.

Inadequate financing jeopardised the establishment of an effective administration and meant laws could only be enforced in and around Pākehā settlements.62 Māori remained in a sense provisional British subjects, and although some chiefs willingly allowed the government to intervene in certain matters, particularly disputes between Māori and settlers, compliance with British law had definite limits.63 The extension of the government’s authority may have been initially constrained, but the systems of power established during the Crown colony era allowed the government to act unilaterally, and tensions between Māori rangatiratanga and Crown sovereignty were quickly exposed.64 Throughout the 1840s government

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officials repeatedly reiterated the guarantee of rangatiratanga given in Te Tiriti o Waitangi, but as early as 1844, Chief Protector of Aborigines George Clarke admitted that chiefly rights conflicted with Crown authority and would ultimately have to give way.65 The wars of the 1840s revealed ‘deep fissures in the Treaty relationship’, and when the Crown colony era ended in 1852 it was clear that the practical application of the Treaty in New Zealand still had to be determined.66 [KC]

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Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga

From Wairau to Pōneke Land is the foundation of all our troubles; the Europeans say it is theirs, but who says so besides themselves. The Tory came to Port Nicholson, and that was the commencement of the evil.

—Te Rauparaha to Governor FitzRoy, 12 February 1844, at Waikanae, nearly a year after the Wairau Incident67

The ‘commencement of the evil’ identified by Te Rauparaha had its origins in a scheme imagined by 30-year-old Edward Gibbon Wakefield in 1827. An aspiring politician, Wakefield formulated his plans for the colonisation of New Zealand while imprisoned in Newgate Prison for the abduction of a 15-year-old heiress, Ellen Turner. It was there that he conceived, wrote and published an original scheme to systematically colonise England’s landed possessions for the ‘cure and prevention of pauperism’.68 Wakefield considered that Britain was failing to realise the vast potential of her colonial territories and proposed a plan that would use immigrant labour to free up the landowners and colonial capitalists – a new landed gentry – to stimulate economic growth and form a cultured and advanced society. On his release from prison in 1830 Wakefield established the National Colonisation Society, and in 1837 he set up the New Zealand Association.

Wakefield’s scheme depended on buying land cheaply from Māori and selling it at a profit for shareholders to fund colonisation. In March 1839, he learnt that the British government was drafting a Bill for the colonisation of New Zealand. The Bill included a clause that land could only be bought from the government, prompting Wakefield and others to swing into action so that they could beat the government to New Zealand. Wakefield’s Association merged with the New Zealand Company, and in May the Tory set sail for New Zealand to expedite the acquisition of land.

The company established settlements at Wellington, Nelson, Whanganui and Dunedin, and was involved in the settlement of New Plymouth and Christchurch. But the land purchases on which they were founded were hasty and controversial, and trouble was quick to follow. A series of deadly conflicts spread from Wairau to the Hutt Valley and the new town of Wellington quickly became a militarised settlement. Wakefield’s ambition would be a root cause of the wars that followed. ▲

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A colonising system Horatio Gordon Robley, Ngati – interpreter to the NZ Co, 1925.

Watercolour, 206 x 154mm.

Gift of Horace Fildes, 1937 (1992-0035-1645)

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This watercolour portrait of Nayti or Ngati, properly Te Whāiti, was painted in 1925

by Horatio Gordon Robley from a 1830s wood engraving. The engraving had been published in British newspapers when Te Whāiti, a little-remembered figure in histories of the New Zealand Company, was living in London with the architect of New Zealand settler society, Edward Gibbon Wakefield.

In 1837, Wakefield became aware of two Māori, Te Whāiti and his companion ‘Jackey’, who were visiting France. When ‘Jackey’ died in France of disease, Wakefield arranged for Te Whāiti to come to London, where he spent the next two years living with the Wakefield family. During this time, Te Whāiti’s intimate knowledge of New Zealand and the Cook Strait region specifically informed the company’s plans for systematic colonisation.69 It is surely no coincidence that the first major land purchases from Māori, organised by Wakefield’s brother William, were made in the Wellington region, where Te Whāiti, who returned to New Zealand with William Wakefield in 1839, had connections and possibly a degree of influence. [RR]

Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga

A makeshift flag New Zealand Company flag, 1839, maker unknown.

Wool bunting and linen, 1295 x 1880mm. Gift of Andrew Haggerty Richard Gillespie, 1967 (GH002925)

In May 1839, a New Zealand Company expedition, led by Colonel William Wakefield, Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s brother and the company’s principal agent, left for New Zealand aboard the barque Tory. He was accompanied by his 19-year-old nephew, Edward Jerningham Wakefield; Te Whāiti, who acted as interpreter; and a young artist and surveyor, Charles Heaphy. During the voyage, one of the Tory’s sailmakers made this flag for the New Zealand Company. Pieced together and handstitched from wool bunting and linen – materials found on board – it is styled after the flag adopted by the group of Māori rangatira at Waitangi in 1834, known as the United Tribes flag.

William Wakefield’s objective was to buy sufficient land from Māori for the allotments that the company, in a piece of breathless and speculative bravado, was already selling to would-be settlers in England, despite no company agent having set foot in New Zealand. The success of their daring scheme depended upon their ability to buy land from Māori before Hobson arrived in New Zealand, whereupon he would put a stop to the company’s expansion through imposing an exclusive pre-emptive right of the Crown to buy Māori land and extinguish ‘native title’. [MB]

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Acquiring ‘Wellington’ After Charles Heaphy, Warepori, or dark house (left), Epuni, or Greedy (right), plate 1 from Edward Jerningham Wakefield’s Illustrations to Adventure in New Zealand (Day & Haghe, London, 1845). Lithographs, 360 x 550mm. Gift of Charles Rooking Carter (RB001053/001a)

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The Tory arrived in New Zealand in August 1839, visiting Te Awaiti shore whaling station in the Marlborough Sounds, where it picked up resident whaler Dicky Barrett, who would act as the ship’s pilot. Sailing on, it entered Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington Heads on 20 September 1839. Inside the heads the Tory was met by two large waka taua headed by Te Āti Awa rangatira Hōniana Te Puni and Te Kakapi-ote-rangi (later known as Te Wharepōuri), who boarded the ship.70 Both rangatira remained on board overnight, discussing William Wakefield’s plans for a settlement at Port Nicholson (now Wellington). Te Puni and Te Wharepōuri recognised the opportunity to further their people’s prosperity and security, and pointed out the lands they would sell to the company. But they almost certainly failed to fully grasp the sheer scale and impact the purchase would have on their autonomy and way of life. The early support of these two prominent and influential rangatira seems to have been instrumental in influencing the purchase, which was signed on 27 September 1839.

Charles Heaphy, who was only 19 at the time, made drawings of the two rangatira which were later reproduced and circulated as lithographs to advertise the success of the New Zealand Company’s negotiations. Te Wharepōuri appears to be gesturing to the land available, while Te Puni stands in front of a flagpole on which the New Zealand Company flag was raised on 30 September. The captions correctly translate Te Wharepōuri’s name as ‘dark house’, but offer a more uncomfortable English name for Te Puni, referring to him as ‘Greedy’, no doubt in reference to his apparently ready agreement to exchange land for goods. [MB/RR]

Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga

Contested rights Te Rauparaha, from the album New Zealand and South Seas, c.1870s, photographer unknown.

Photograph, albumen silver print, 94 x 58mm. Acquisition history unknown (O.032365)

The Port Nicholson purchase, hurried and deeply flawed, occurred at a time when Te Āti Awa were preparing for impending war with Ngāti Raukawa of Ōtaki. Barrett’s knowledge of te reo Māori was probably insufficient to adequately convey the full implications of the deed of sale for Māori, and the sale remained contentious among tribal leaders, who considered that Te Puni and Te Wharepōuri had sold lands outside of their authority.

One of those who contested the right of Te Puni and Te Wharepōuri to sell was the Ngāti Toa rangatira Te Rauparaha (?–1849), paternal uncle to Te Whāiti. This portrait, a c.1870s carte-de-visite photograph of an engraving made after an original watercolour painted from life by Isaac Coates in 1843, shows a proud, aquiline profile, and suggests a figure not to be trifled with. It also suggests that Te Rauparaha’s reputation extended well beyond his lifetime.

Following the New Zealand Company’s Port Nicholson purchase, the Tory arrived at the Ngāti Toa stronghold of Kāpiti Island on 17 October 1839, one day after the much-anticipated Kūititanga, the last major intertribal battle in the lower North Island, which was fought between Te Āti Awa and Ngāti Raukawa on Waikanae beach. The Tory remained at anchor off Kāpiti for nearly three weeks while the ship’s surgeons attended the wounded from both sides and William Wakefield negotiated the Wellington purchase with Ngāti Toa chiefs.71 Te Rauparaha and other chiefs accepted guns, blankets and other goods for the sale of land, but the extent of purchases was later disputed. Further, when he signed the Treaty at Kāpiti in May 1840,72 Te Rauparaha understood that his signature guaranteed his acquired customary rights to the entire Wellington region through raupatu.

The Tory continued on to Taranaki, where Wakefield negotiated similar purchases at Ngāmotu for what would become New Plymouth and its environs with resident rangatira, all of whom were closely related to many of the principal Wellington chiefs. He was assisted by Barrett, Barrett’s Te Āti Awa wife Rāwinia Wakaiwa, and the Wellington chiefs Tuarau (Rāwinia’s first cousin) and Hēnare Te Whare, son of Te Puni.

Wakefield then sailed the Tory to Northland, where he purchased Captain Blenkinsop’s dubious 1832 deed to Cloudy Bay, in the Marlborough region, from his widow for £100. The original agreement between Blenkinsop, Te Rauparaha and Te Rangihaeata awarded Blenkinsop the right to draw the water and timber he required in exchange for a ship’s carronade.

Unknown to them, the written indenture had assigned Blenkinsop comprehensive terms for the conveyance of the entire Wairau valley, something Te Rauparaha became aware of only after he showed the document to a visiting ship’s captain.

Enraged, Te Rauparaha immediately tore up the document and discarded it. Eight years later, and within a matter of months of Wakefield’s arrival in New Zealand, the audacious New Zealand Company had secured a claim to 20 million acres of land in New Zealand in and around Cook Strait.73 [MB]

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Despite everything, we are still here Jade Kake

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I start by trying to understand the whakapapa from me, that extends back to the time of the battle.

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place is not there to be made. There are many ways to tell a story. There are many ways to trace the origins of something. Unearthing the story, sifting through layers of whakapapa, layers of soil, layers of meaning. On this journey, I think about the many threads that are knotted together, woven together neatly, or frayed at the ends. I find myself trying to untangle them and weave them together in new ways. I stretch the threads I discover along the way and roll them between my fingers, testing for credibility. In the process, some I discard, others I weave through, another line of inquiry and connection, the tapestry becoming more complete with each additional piece of information.

Where do I start? When I try to understand the battle of Ruapekapeka, I start with the whakapapa. When do I start? Time feels like an imprecise notion as I consider something that cuts across space and time. Time isn’t linear, for those of us who are the living descendants. It’s circular. It moves in spirals. We hit dead ends, secrets buried for generations in a box in an uncle’s back shed, the red herrings we follow for years, yielding nothing. The many connections across time: the time of the battle, before the battle, after the battle. These are all intricate and many-layered and interconnected. We can see it in our people, we the present-day descendants, in our ongoing connections, in the ways we continue to exist today.

Whakapapa is not a simple thing. I start by trying to understand the whakapapa from me, that extends back to the time of the battle. When I go seven generations back, there’s Ruku, who was a sibling to Te Ruhi and Mokonuiārangi, the three branches of Ngāti Hau ki Whangārei. The people of Whakapara descend from Te Ruhi and Mokonuiārangi (Te Tawaka descends from Te Ruhi, and her husband Eru Nehua descends from Mokonuiārangi). Those of us from Pehiāweri and Akerama descend from Ruku (Pehiāweri from Ruku’s son Peru, and Akerama from Ruku’s daughter Peti). The missing piece of the puzzle, the one I haven’t been able to figure out yet, is ko wai te hoa rangatira o Ruku? This seems like an important omission.

From Ruku descends Peru, descends Kake Peru and his brother Himi Peru. Kake Peru is my tupuna, the tupuna of all of the Kake whānau.

I’ve learnt that three generations of tāne in my line were involved in the Northern War. The koroheke, Ruku, had a pā at Kawakawa1 and a kāinga at Pukeahuahu, 2 at the northern end of Puhipuhi. George Clarke Jnr, the son of lay missionary George Clarke, named 16 key rangatira of the time as ‘the most disaffected’, and I find Ruku among these names as one of the main instigators who led the resistance in the Northern War. 3 Marianne Williams, wife of missionary Henry Williams and a substantial recorder of early Māori and Pākehā interactions through her journals and

Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga

letters, cites Ruku’s whakapapa as Te Roroa, and identifies his place of residence as Kāretu, but I’ve been unable to verify either of these claims.4 When I speak with Te Roroa kaumātua on another matter, they think there is a connection and encourage me to find my tātai. Ruku’s son Peru is also named in several sources. His marriage to Te Roma is a significant one, the beginning of our family’s connection to and identity as Te Parawhau. Several sources state that Peru fought alongside his father, Ruku, at the battle at Puketutu, on the shores of Lake Ōmāpere, and that both father and son died there.5

W

hen I first went to the site of the battle of Puketutu6 (at Puketutu pā, also known as Te Mawhe pā), I didn’t realise that this was where my tūpuna had died. It was hard to follow the kōrero. Most of it was in te reo Māori.

A crowd had assembled, and I strained my ears, caught snippets, but I felt like I was too far away, both physically and in my level of te reo comprehension to understand.

So instead I focused on the living connections of those present, making a mental game of threading together the whakapapa I knew and tracing it down to those gathered. As we rode together on our bus on a tour of battle sites around Taiāmai, I tuned in and out. When we paused outside Pūtahi maunga, my ears pricked up.

I looked over at the grove of tōtara, Te Wai o Hua Kaunamu, and the burial caves Rangitoto, Rangikohu and Rangihāmama opposite. I shivered as I listened to the kaikōrero explain that this is where many rangatira of note were interred. But where – I later wonder – were Ruku and Peru interred after the battle?

From Ruku, down to Peru (both of whom died at that battle at Puketutu), come Himi and Kake Peru. There’s an account in the diaries of Antoine Garin that Himi Peru visited Tangiterōria in the 1840s, trying to garner support for the conflicts of the Northern War (remembering that Himi Peru is a grandson of Tirarau’s sister Koke through his mother Te Roma). Garin’s diaries state (although I am yet to find another reference for this) that in 1846 at the battle of Ruapekapeka, Himi Peru was shot in the neck, leaving him disabled for the rest of his life.7 The Māori Land Court records show that Himi Peru lived for another 20 years. In 1871, Kake Peru stood in front of the Land Court and stated that Himi ‘had been dead about six years. I do not know the date. I was present when he died and saw him buried. He was my younger brother. He has a daughter living about seven years of age. Her name is Onepū Peru.’8 So Himi Peru had a daughter, but as far as we know, she didn’t have any issue.

His line ends with her. Those of us who are descendants of Kake Peru, we claim him too, much like the descendants of Patuone claim Tāmati Wāka Nene.

On the grave of Kateao (daughter of Te Ruhi, a daughter-in-law to Patuone and the mother of Te Tawaka) at Whakapara, the headstone reads ‘Ratou ko ona Tuakana Himi Peru me Mataiti’. Kateao was a first cousin to Himi’s father, Peru. I can’t even begin to puzzle out the meaning. The use of the term tuakana confuses me, as it’s usually not used to signify the opposite gender (at least not now, in the present day).

Is Mataiti another person? Who are they? In the records I find a ‘Mataititi Matarau’9 who I suspect may be Mataiti Whatarau – the historian Mark Derby notes that the spelling may be incorrect due to the illegibility of the original – but I’m unable to verify this. What was the significance of their relationships to Kateao that they were

Despite everything, we are still here

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The contradiction sits heavy on me, uncomfortable, as the pīhopa leads our Sunday service at Ruapekapeka.

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inscribed on her tombstone? Another pātai for the wānanga.

What about Kake Peru? Where was he during the time of the battle? Did he have a position on all of this? Was he not the elder brother? Was he looking after the kāinga?

The records are silent. These are the things that I would like the answers to. As I sift through the historical records, there are so many gaps. The knowledge is held in pockets, slow-released like a deflating balloon: a conversation outside the wharekai, in the urupā during a tangihanga, on the taumata in language I can sometimes understand clearly; other times it’s fuzzy, like radio static.

The next way to move is across. When I trace the whakapapa, weaving up and across, I find we tātai to Kawiti and his wife Kawa, to Hōne Heke, to Hongi Hika.

Through our tupuna Kāuta (who was also known as Katerina or Mate), who married Kake Peru’s son Pirini, we descend from Whata, a sibling of Kawiti. Kawiti’s wife Kawa was a granddaughter of Whitiao (tuatahi) and a first cousin to Whitiao (tuarua), from whom we descend through Te Roma. If you travel upwards, to the time of Hineāmaru, to the time of Torongare, you will find the whakapapa reconnects towards common ancestors.10 Kapiri (Eru Nehua’s mother and a daughter of Mokonuiārangi) is a younger sister to Hōne Heke’s mother Te Kona.11 Te Ruhi married Te Takupu, who was a sister of Hongi Hika.12 That’s only the beginning – I haven’t yet begun to map out our connections to Ngāti Manu and Te Kapotai – although sources identify Ruku as being ‘from Waikadi’ 13 (Waikare), and Major Cyprian Bridge identifies Ruku as Pōmare’s ‘fighting man’.14 When you begin to chart the whakapapa, you start to see how very closely connected we were and are. You begin to understand the alliances that were made, and who was present at the battle, and why. Many of those key rangatira signed He Whakaputanga15 in 1835, and Te Tiriti o Waitangi in 1840. In detailing my own whakapapa the intention is not to elevate it above anyone else’s. Each of us who are the living descendants, of whom there must be thousands or more likely tens of thousands, can similarly trace a direct path from our tūpuna involved in the Northern War and weave across to find our present-day connections to each other.

Although these names have always been embedded in my whakapapa, I had not previously realised the roles that they played in the conflict. The things that we do remember, as well as those that are omitted, the things that we don’t say, are as interesting as the things that we recall, that we remember, that we talk about.

For us at Pehiāweri, history has become truncated, it’s become more recent. And I do believe that, for all the positive things the hāhi has done for us, that our early exposure to Christianity and our close ongoing relationship to the church is one of the reasons we only really talk about five generations back. Sir James Hēnare said in an interview for Waka Huia in 1989 that ‘māminga a ka hinga noa iho ngā Māori i tō rātou whakapono hoki ki te Atua o ngā Pākehā i tērā wā’ – ‘Māori were only beaten [in the New Zealand Wars] because of their belief in the God of the Pākehā at that time’.16 The contradiction sits heavy on me, uncomfortable, as the pīhopa leads our Sunday service at Ruapekapeka. I join in as we sing the hīmene ‘Tēnei hoki au, e Ihu’.

The clergy swells with my own whānau. ‘We went to the hāhi willingly,’ my Aunty Pauline Hopa tells me. ‘We weren’t forced.’

Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga

T

here’s been a lot said about why the site for Ruapekapeka was chosen.

Most interpretations state it was of no strategic value and could be easily abandoned. Others state that fighting on the land of other hapū was a strategic move to entice them into battle. Another reason may have been that many of the kāinga were visible from the pā, and a signal system was arranged to communicate that the kāinga were safe.17 Not a lot is often said about what it was before it became the place of the battle. Sifting through the archives, I find some fragments that describe the place it was before.

It was a wāhi charged with a different kind of meeting and associations than are held now. There’s a Ngāti Manu kōrero about a tapu stone at Ruapekapeka named Te Tia o Te Uhinga, after the Ngāti Manu tupuna Te Uhinga.18 Te Tawai Kawiti’s account of the war provides a tantalising clue – before it was Ruapekapeka, he writes, ‘an ancient burial ground nearby was known as Tepapakurau [sic] – meaning a hundred corpses’.19 More recently, I discover that both Te Tawai Kawiti (a greatgrandson of Te Ruki Kawiti) and my great-grandfather Toki Kake (a great-grandson of Peru) attended St Stephen’s in Parnell. There’s two years between them, and I wonder if they attended school at the same time and if they knew each other well.

Before he died, Allan Halliday – our whanaunga from Akerama and then chair of Te Ruapekapeka Trust – often talked about Kahukurī’s pā, which he said is somewhere in the area around Ruapekapeka. Kahukurī was the son of Hautakowera, the ancestor after whom Ngāti Hau was named. Kahukurī left Ōmanaia in the Hokianga and settled in the areas north of Whangārei, around Puhipuhi and Ruapekapeka. In the whakapapa as it’s been told to me, Kahukurī is eight generations before Ruku, and from Kahukurī, it’s another four generations back to Rāhiri. To understand Ruapekapeka, we need to understand the whakapapa to the land, the whakapapa and connections underpinning the site before the battle. Mana i te whenua. Ngāti Manu and Ngāti Hau both claim mana whenua status at the pā, and I wonder about the respective stories, the consistency and the contradictions.

How do you make How do you make a place? What makes the place? It’s these many layers of meaning. And how do we uncover these layers of meaning? We can do it in many a place? What makes the place? ways: through tracing our whakapapa, by digging into the soil and looking at the physical artefacts. When I speak with the archaeologist, his eyes shine as he It’s these many layers of meaning. describes the physical archaeology, and all of the things you can intuit if you know what you’re looking for. It can be achieved by threading together the sites through And how do we time, through space. uncover these It is not only the battle that is important – the earlier battle sites of Ōhaeawai layers of meaning? and Puketutu in Taiāmai are very important – as is what happened after the battle.

We can do it If I were to map the battle of Ruapekapeka spatially, I would map the pā sites of key in many ways: rangatira, overlaid with their whakapapa connections, the raw source of the people through tracing and the reasons for their strategic alliances. I would map the sites of key conflicts – our whakapapa, which others have already done – but I would also map the places that living people by digging into the (both those who were injured and those who escaped harm), tūpāpaku (later kōiwi) soil and looking and physical artefacts were taken after the battle.

I’ve heard it said – and the records verify this20 – that Kawiti took the bodies of at the physical the dead and the injured back to Te Waiariki, and to us at Pehiāweri. The rumour artefacts. goes that the injured were brought to be healed at Pehiāweri, and those who did

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We often speak of the greenstone mere smeared with human faeces, presented to Te Ruki Kawiti

by Hōne Heke, a potent symbol of the authority of the British contaminating the rangatiratanga of chiefs marking the precipice of war.

not survive are buried in our urupā. I don’t know if that’s true. It hasn’t been verified.

Because if they are buried there, it would pre-date the whare karakia, which was built in 1888, 100 years before my birth. Maybe the whare karakia was sited there because it was already a tapu place, already a burial ground.

But if they were buried, why were they interred in the ground, rather than the burial methods of the time, which would be to hang them in the pūriri or tōtara trees, and then inter them in the caves? Perhaps this was the first generation to have had their burial practices influenced by the conversion to Christianity. Maybe it’s true, or maybe it’s just an extension of the fact that they were brought to Pehiāweri for healing, or else the bodies of the dead were brought back. Another topic for the wānanga.

We often speak of the greenstone mere smeared with human faeces, presented to Te Ruki Kawiti by Hōne Heke, a potent symbol of the authority of the British contaminating the rangatiratanga of chiefs marking the precipice of war. What of the other taonga, the physical artefacts? Taiparu Munro told Te Raa Nehua that guns used at Te Ruapekapeka were taken to Poroti after the battle and hidden in the swamp. 21 What of the others? The precious taonga worn, the weapons, the tools, the everyday objects? Were these buried? Have they ended up in museums, the kōrero lost, the index drawing on the scant information that exists? Perhaps the index names the Pākehā settler who collected these objects, and not the rangatira who would connect the taonga back to its living descendants?

One of the problems is that the physical taonga in the archives and records favour the British perspective. History has always favoured the British perspective. The year after I was born, Sir James Hēnare said the history books are incorrect, because ‘E kore au e whakaae ki a rātōu kōrero, nō te mea e kore hoki rātou e whakarongo ki ngā kōrero o ngā uri o ēnei tāngata’ – ‘They never listen to the stories of the descendants of these people’. 22 There’s a persistent issue with our systems of recordkeeping, the metadata associated that so infrequently corresponds to whakapapa records, the things that would tie the taonga to a specific people, place and time.

These details matter to us, the living descendants.

When I think about taonga, I think about how we don’t necessarily trust institutions for the care of our taonga. What is the reason? There are whole PhD theses by esteemed Māori working in the area of museums and heritage that would have more to say about this than I do. But my point is that we have a spiritual connection and a relationship with these taonga as touchstones to the past, but also as items imbued with a mauri or life force of their own. The way we think about our taonga, the cultural lens through which we see them, impacts the relationship we have with them, and the ways in which we care for them.

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few years ago I sat next to Allan Halliday on a plane departing for Auckland.

As the engine whirred, he told me that the night before he had received a phone call from a whanaunga who had a taonga associated with Ruapekapeka dating from the time of the battle. On the phone, the man had told him that a particular taonga had been intended to go to his sister, but his sister had been unable to care for the taonga, due to an illness or something like it. He explained that the taonga had fallen into his care, but that he was uneasy about it. ‘I have this, but I

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Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga

Our whakapapa is strengthened in the areas where we retain land, and weakened in the areas where none remains.

don’t think I should have it. What should I do with it? How can I return it?’ At the time, there was no place available to facilitate that return. As the story concluded, Allan told me, ‘I receive phone calls like that often.’

When I think about Ruapekapeka, I think of spatial justice. I say spatial justice because the whakapapa is embedded in the land. The whakapapa relationships between people do not exist severed and independent of occupation, of belonging.

The threat of raupatu – by the British – was a key trigger for the conflict. Raupatu represents the severing of relationships to land, uri scattered and resettled along other lines of their whakapapa. The loss of land is a kind of death for people defined by the land, tangata whenua, whose mana is derived through land – mana i te whenua. But, as one speaker noted at the recent commemorations to mark the 175th anniversary of the battle of Ruapekapeka, despite everything, we are still here.

Our whakapapa is strengthened in the areas where we retain land, and weakened in the areas where none remains. Within my whānau, we cling to our remnant landholdings in Raumanga (Te Rewarewa) and Glenbervie (Pehiāweri), remembering and prioritising our whakapapa to these places, and forgetting others where we no longer occupy land. The present-day Māori Land Court records show a single fragment of the original Ruapekapeka block that remains within our whānau ownership. The block is 10 hectares, located close to State Highway 1 and bordered by the Waiotū river. There is no governance structure over the block. My cousin and I walked the land once, down a sandy trail towards the river. More recently, I ask again, should we call a hui?

At the commemorations, the way we chose to remember was unapologetically hapū-centric. It prioritised our relationships and experiences, historically and through to the current day. It took the form of wānanga, of kōrero. The key hapū involved in the conflict and our relationships were acknowledged. So too was the mamae, the acknowledgement of grievances – not necessarily healed, but acknowledged. On my personal journey of learning, repetition is key, inscribing over the same narratives again and again. When we do our research together as a whānau, we prioritise our tūpuna kōrero, but we use the archival records to fact-check, to cross-reference.

My phone buzzes with the notification from our group chat, entitled ‘Whakapapa O’Clock’. The pieces we pull together get pulled apart again at the wānanga – digital and ā-kanohi, impromptu and formal. Even this essay is only a snapshot of my own learnings to date, imprecise and incomplete, which will no doubt be revised, reinforced and reinterpreted as the wānanga continues, throughout my lifetime and down through the future generations.

There are many ways to consider the importance of Ruapekapeka. The way we choose to remember things says a lot about us culturally. What is the purpose of a memorial? What is the difference between remembrance and maumaharatanga?

How do we remember the conflicts at Kororāreka, Puketutu, Te Ahuahu, Ōhaeawai, Ruapekapeka? The cultural knowledge is embedded in our whakapapa, communicated through whaikōrero. Our tūpuna kōrero is transmitted to us through pūrākau, waiata tawhito and takuate. 23 This is at times validated, reinforced and salvaged through the archival written records. Remembered through whenua, and the physical taonga. For all that has been forgotten, much more is remembered and kept alive through us, the living descendants.

Despite everything, we are still here

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