MAORI SOLDIER HONOURED

Taranaki Daily News, 30 January 1934, Page 11

MAORI SOLDIER HONOURED

WAIOKURA PA MILITARY FUNERAL MAORIS’ ATTITUDE. Rangi Ira Katene, who served with the first New Zealand contingent in the Great War, was accorded a military funeral at the Maori cemetery at Waiokura pa. The event marked the great change which has taken place in the attitude of the Ngati-Ruanui Maoris towards the pakeha during the last few decades. Thirty years ago tfie land over which the funeral procession so recently made its way was strictly barred to all white men, and so antagonistic was its then owner, Ahu Rei, to European ideas that, although a by no means contemptible scholar of English, he refused to let his family learn to read, write, or even speak the language, and set his face sternly against all intercourse with the white man, who, he held, was harmful to the Maori in every way. This is certainly the first time that English soldiers, as such, have marched over the ground. A generation ago the spot on which they assembled to pay their last respects to a Maori comrade who had fought with them against a common enemy was the camping ground of the redoubtable HauHau chief and warrior. Titokowaru, one of the most determined opponents of the white man in all Taranaki. On the strip of level grassland near Waiohura River his forces were assembled, and on that peaceful knoll beside the cemetery stood the famous “Pai Marere” pole, since through carelessness destroyed. It is a typical and fitting example of the changed “relationships between the two races that on this, the site of one of the last strongholds, of the Maoi-i against the pakeha, the successors of the troops they fought so valiantly in days gone by should gather to do honour to one of the Maori race who fought not against but for’the white man in that greater struggle where Maori and pakeha forgot their differences in their common cause of the Empire.