CHIEFS PROTEST.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 663, 17 January 1933, Page 8

CHIEFS PROTEST.

Removal of Bones from Graveyards. REBURIAL DEMANDED. (Special to the “ Star.”) TE KUITI, January 17. Leading chiefs of the Ngatimaniapoto tribe are greatly incensed at the removal, by some Taranaki men, of the bones of their dead from Urupa, at Mangungu, an ancient cemetery on the West Coast, north of Mokau. The report that the skeletons of a male, a female and a child were carried away to Taranaki last week by some investigators has awakened the deepest feelings of the leaders and elders of the Maori people here. Tainui, Whare Ilotu, Ilori Tana, Moerua and others all expressed their indignation at the local pa to-day. “It is sheer nonsense to suggest that our people gave them permission,” declared Whare Ilotu, “ when it is well known to all Europeans that we have taken up firearms in defence of our graveyards on many occasions in the King Country.” These ancient burial places are the tombs of all leading chiefs, with all the particulars of death and burial communicated from father to son in perfect detail, explained an educated representative of the tribe to-day. If the pakehas are looking for bones, said another, let them go and dig up the bones buried at Kiritekere, a little cemetery a few miles further up the beach, where the bodies of several Europeans, drowned in the wreck of the Kia Ora, were buried. The Natives ridicule the suggestion of a feast. There were, they declared, no inter-tribal wars fought on the coast. The ovens spoken of were used for cooking fish (para). The Natives demand the immediate return and reburial of the skeletons disturbed by the explorers.