TE KOOTI'S WAR

Te Ao Hou, December 1957, Page 21

TE KOOTI'S WAR Personally I can see no reason to disbelieve Te Kooti's statement to Major Biggs' emissary that he and his men wanted nothing more than to be left unmolested, to be allowed to travel through to the King Country. The Upper Waikato, Urewera, parts of Taranaki and the centre of the island were virtually closed to the white man and were the refuge of the embittered and intransigent among the defeated Maori tribes. It was to these remote hill-country fastnesses that Te Kooti eventually withdrew. Permission for his journey was not given. Biggs hurried his men to the spot and demanded that Te Kooti should lay down his arms forthwith and trust to the white man's clemency. As an appeal, and from Biggs of all people, it was ridiculous. Te Kooti replied, and probably believed, that the arms had been put into his hands by God's will and that he would retain them. Te Kooti again stated his intention of withdrawing peacefully, but Biggs summoning reinforcements forced the issue by attempting to arrest the escapees by force. It seems clear from the debate which later took place in Parliament, that the Government would have acted with more tolerance and less haste had its hand not been forced by Biggs' impulsive action. However, once the first shots had been fired and the European forces been so soundly beaten in the inital engagements, it was useless to contemplate any peaceful solution. Neither side would have trusted the other and so the campaign, which was to stretch out for three bitter years, was on. It is not the purpose of this article to tell the story of that campaign. It can be found in the history books. There are two aspects of Te Kooti's long defensive campaign which I would like to comment on. The first is the Matewhero massacre. It was an ugly affair, whose motive was not, however, mere wanton brutality. It was an ‘utu’ raid, a raid of revenge and punishment, in the old Maori tradition directed at Biggs, who had tried Te Kooti on the bogus horse-stealing charge and had been mainly responsible for his deportation. It must be remembered too that Matewhero was a military settlement, and that its settlers were militia. Te Kooti had retreated to the customs of his race, reinforced and aggravated by the retributive accounts to be found in almost every book of the terrible testament the pakeha missionaries had taught him. Biggs had put on Te Kooti and his followers the stigma of slavery, which is the utmost stigma in Maori eyes. It was a stigma which could be wiped out only in blood and in blood it was wiped out. Yet, even in this dark and bitter hour, Te Kooti gave orders that the houses of the Dunlops and the U'Rens, who had formerly befriended him should be spared, and spared they were. There is in the Gisborne Museum a manuscript letter signed by Paora Matuakore, Wi Pere, Henare Ruru and Pita te Huhu which must be regarded as the expression of opinion of a large body of Maoris of the Poverty Bay district at that time, many of whom had fought on the Government side in the Hauhau wars. This letter to the Government made it clear they regarded the escaped rebels as being entirely on the defensive, and having had originally no intention other than returning to their homes. I have been tracking down a persistent story that Te Kooti buried a revolver at the Makaraka cross roads where the north and south roads converge to lead to Turanga (or Gisborne as it now is). After a good deal of painstaking enquiry I have found that there are quite a large number of older people who remember hearing this story in their youth, which in most cases would be only a decade or so after the events. The story is that Te Kooti buried this pistol at the crossroads as an ‘aukati’ or a barrier between his followers and the infant township of Turanga. This would be quite understood by all his adherents as meaning that no further vengeance was to be taken and that Turanga was not to be attacked. One old lady, Waioeka Paroune, of Puha, actually showed me the place where the pistol is supposed to have been buried. The other point I wished to comment on was the relation between Ropata Wahawaha and his Ngati Porou, and Te Kooti and his Rongo Whakaata. In its later stages, as indeed from the beginning

this was largely a private war. This is not to say that Ngati Porou were not loyal to the Crown—they were and have always been. Nor is it to discount the inveterate opposition to the pakeha and his ways which animated Te Kooti and his ever growing number of followers. The Ngati Porou contingent under Major Ropata carried the British flag through to the end of the campaign, and achieved more and endured more in the war against Te Kooti than any pakeha force. But it had another underlying motive, the motive of an old and bitter tribal and personal grudge. Ropata Wahawaha, in his boyhood, had been enslaved by a Rongo Whakaata chief, and as we have already said, slavery was the ultimate stigma which only blood could efface. This explains why Major Ropata was so merciless in dealing with his prisoners. A great deal has been made of Te Kooti's massacre at Matawhero, but little of Ropata's shooting of some hundred or more prisoners after the capture of Ngatapa Pa. We must not let our interest in this side-issue blind us to the fact that in its main aspect Te Kooti's campaign, defensive though it was in the main, was the last, final defiance of the pakeha government and all it stood for. To Te Kooti's flag in the east flocked all those who repudiated the pakeha and pakeha ways and to Titokowaru in the west flocked those who refused to accept, at any price, peace and submission under pakeha law. Some, like Te Kooti, were men who had tried out the friendship of the pakeha, and would now have nothing further of him. The first shots of the Maori wars were fired at Kororareka on March 11th 1845. The last shots were fired in a skirmish against Te Kooti at at Mangaone on February 13th 1872.