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Louise Smith as Keita, the kuia that defied the Crown’s surveyors. Image: RNZ
Louise Smith as Keita, the kuia that defied the Crown’s surveyors. Image: RNZ

ĀteaNovember 7, 2019

‘The Māori trouble’ at Waitara: Revisiting the Taranaki wars and myths set in stone

Louise Smith as Keita, the kuia that defied the Crown’s surveyors. Image: RNZ
Louise Smith as Keita, the kuia that defied the Crown’s surveyors. Image: RNZ

A new documentary by Mihingarangi Forbes and Great Southern Television for RNZ tells of the first conflicts over the fertile lands of Taranaki. 

A re-enactment shouldn’t be this touching. In the opening scenes of NZ Wars: The Stories of Waitara, a young wahine methodically plants her kūmara crops in the fertile Taranaki soil, unaware of the horror about to be brought on her people by the colonial government. Western history has a habit of tagging people as groups, dates and statistics. It allows the descendants of invaders to demand that those who have inherited a legacy of loss should “move on”. She may be an actress but in that moment she’s someone’s tupuna and I feel a very real fear in the pit of my stomach for what is about to happen to her.

Following on from the incredible 2017 documentary on the Battle of Ruapekapeka, creator and presenter Mihingarangi Forbes dives into the trenches once more at Waitara, and the first conflicts of the Taranaki wars. Forbes is tasked again with running up countless damp hillsides in service to the journey, and as usual she steers the waka with grace and gravitas.

Like Ruapekaka, it’s not just a story about people who were victims of invading forces. It’s about peaceful resistance, military strategy, the magnificent engineering of fortified pā and the bravery of those who fought. But most importantly, it’s Te Āti Awa’s story. Aside from NZ Wars historian Vincent O’Malley, all of the storytellers are iwi historians, leaders and descendants. It’s their voices that call through the mists of time and summon, with the help of modern filmmaking tools, the lived stories of their ancestors.

Through Te Āti Awa’s narrators, we learn that the story starts with a meeting of Taranaki chiefs at Manawapou in 1854. Among them, Te Rangitāke, the great diplomat, Te Matakātea, the infamous military strategist, and Hapurona, the fearless leader. There they discuss the growing appetite of the British for land and decide that what is being offered to iwi is of no value. They make an oath that there will be no more sales. Instead they will retain and develop their own lands.

This of course was unacceptable to the Crown land agents, representatives of a growing settler population that couldn’t stomach the idea of living in economic thrall to Māori. They embarked on a divide and rule mission, enticing one young Waitara chief, Te Teira, to sell them land without the permission of other rangatira. This is handled with great delicacy and kindness by the documentary. The Waitara land is contested to this day and recognised as the first spark in the wildfire of loss and degradation for Taranaki. Narrator Rāwiri Doorbar of Otaraua hapū instead acknowledges the pain of Te Teira’s descendants and places the blame with the land agents. It’s a masterful expression of compassion.

The great military leader, Hapurona. Image: RNZ

Another re-enacment shows a last ditch attempt at diplomacy, a hākari for iwi and government to meet and negotiate. Taranaki iwi make plain their desire not to fight with the settler government, with Hapurona delivering his famous karakia o Te Maungarongo, advocating for peace. Iwi historian Dr Ruakere Hond recites the words of the famous karakia over images of Hapurona delivering the same. It’s a moment filled with hope and ultimately, sadness.

The portrayal of the three ensuing conflicts is where the use of digital animation and AR really brings the story to life. We’re shown, overlaid on the actual landscapes, where pā stood, their scale and how they were used defensively. Drone footage is often overused by documentarians but here, used alongside the animations, it shows in stunning detail the very thing Te Āti Awa were fighting for.

The story is of course about the bravery of women too – from those who fought alongside the men on the front lines, to Keita, the kuia who pulled the surveyors pegs out of the ground in sight and defiance of British soldiers, to the young girl sent to climb the tallest peak in the mountain ranges to light a fire sending a message to the south that war had begun.

Even though a shaky ceasefire and a time of confusion for the settler population followed these battles, within 18 months Governor Grey would amass 18,000 troops and invade Waikato. In 1863 they would return to Taranaki with a scorched earth policy laying waste to the area over an 18-year period, after which the Crown would confiscate 1.2 million acres of land from Taranaki for defending their home.

Of course the real price was paid by Taranaki iwi over the next 160 years. In a particularly heartbreaking scene, Forbes and O’Malley visit the graveyard at the Taranaki cathedral. The headstones read: “Killed by hostile Maoris”, “those that fell in the Maori trouble of 1861” and “cruelly murdered by the rebel Maori at Waitara.” At a far corner of the church grounds, a single headstone lists a handful of rangatira. We learn from O’Malley it was considered offensive to let them be buried alongside British officers in the cemetery.

This seems as fitting an illustration as any of how New Zealand history has been presented to date – the Crown were fighting a just war, Māori were rebels, these are truths set in stone. Initiatives to teach our history in schools will hopefully start to chip away at those ‘truths’ and let New Zealanders ask of themselves ‘what would I do if someone wanted to take my land and my identity? What wouldn’t I do to protect my family and community?’ The fields where Te Kohia and Puketakauere pā stood bear no markers whatsoever, no signs or plaques to indicate two of the most important conflicts in the country took place there. They are paddocks populated by cows that know nothing of the ghosts in their midst.

A headstone at St Mary’s, Taranaki Cathedral. Image: RNZ

Māori don’t remember their dead by gravestones though, they know the names of the ancestors that stood and fought through song and story. Documentaries like these expand our capacity for remembering, allowing Māori to share their oral histories after centuries of being made to read the books and headstones from the other side’s perspective. Surely that can only make us smarter and braver as a country.

There are some great extended interviews available too. I especially enjoyed the explainer by Ngamata Skipper about the three Te Āti Awa waiata poi that mark different chapters in the documentary. These are also stories of Waitara and deserve to be witnessed as much as the spoken retelling. They remember the sadness and celebrate resistance and peace, living history for ngā uri o Taranaki and a celebration of their continuing bravery.

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Stephanie Gibson, Matariki Williams and Puawai Cairns and their new book, Protest Tautohetohe. Photo: Supplied.
Stephanie Gibson, Matariki Williams and Puawai Cairns and their new book, Protest Tautohetohe. Photo: Supplied.

ĀteaNovember 6, 2019

Signs, songs, stumps, symbols: A history of protest in Aotearoa in 350 objects

Stephanie Gibson, Matariki Williams and Puawai Cairns and their new book, Protest Tautohetohe. Photo: Supplied.
Stephanie Gibson, Matariki Williams and Puawai Cairns and their new book, Protest Tautohetohe. Photo: Supplied.

New book Protest Tautohetohe: Objects of Resistance, Persistence and Defiance explores our history of protest through objects symbolising the power and lasting legacy of activism in New Zealand.

From Hone Heke cutting down the flagpole to the 1981 Springbok tour protests, New Zealand has always been a country of activists. Movements led by Māori, by women and by children continue to shape New Zealand’s community and policy, and have made us world leaders in areas like women’s suffrage. A collection of objects become the markers of every movement, and Stephanie Gibson, Matariki Williams and Puawai Cairns have collated some of the most important, most beautiful and most confronting of these into Protest Tautohetohe, an illustrated history of protest and activism in Aotearoa.

Gibson and Williams (Tūhoe, Ngāti Hauiti, Taranaki, Ngāti Whakaue) spoke about four objects in the book and their significance to Aotearoa’s rebellious history.

Flagstaff stump, circa 1840.
 Auckland Museum.

Stump from a flagstaff cut down by Hone Heke, 1840

Williams: He’s deliberately taking aim at a symbol of power… Māori saw quite quickly how Pākehā were using flags in terms of showing their dominance over the land. We know flags are raised to show authority, so you will see with some of the early religious movements that flags also became a way of saying ‘this area is Paimārire.’ It’s an action to say no, you do not have authority in this area. Your symbol of authority? We will cut it down. 

Even though he is using an axe I would still see this protest as non-violent. It’s not against people and at the same time there were wars going on which were inflicting violence on people. Taking to a flagstaff is taking to the symbolism that they’re trying to impose. It was never explicitly linked to the action that is also covered in the book with Mike Smith [felling the tree on] One Tree Hill. He did that because it was a symbol of a new power asserting itself in this landscape… 

It was another response or resistance against a further oppressive law that’s been imposed on the country, which is the Crown determining the rules for how Treaty settlements can play out into the future, which is a further infliction of their power.

Women’s Suffrage Petition, 1893. Produced by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Photo: Mark Beatty, Archives New Zealand.

Woman’s Suffrage Petition, 1893

Williams: It was incredibly physical and it required probably thousands of hours of physical labour. You had to be able to get around territories, knock on doors, staff tables in the street, and it was all very time consuming. It was a very community-based and social form of protest but took a lot of effort, thousands of hours. 

Gibson: It was a very convincing result, physically. The book is about the material culture of protest, so the suffrage petition of 1893 is a beautiful, convincing piece of material culture. There was so much energy put into those pieces of paper in the way that they were all glued together and wound around a broom handle, which I always thought was ironic.

The object itself has so much presence. It’s a very important material object about effort and belief and passion and determination and the object is the focus of that and it’s incredibly powerful. An online petition, it’s digital, you can’t feel the weight of it. Even if it’s got a million signatures you still couldn’t feel that weight.

‘My Old Man’s an All Black!’ record, 1960. Recorded by the Howard Morrison Quartet and La Gloria Records.
Purchased 2001. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

‘My Old Man’s an All Black!’, 1960

Gibson: The Howard Morrison Quartet was hugely popular, everybody loved them and that was a Māori band. It was very clever of them to pick up on repurposing an already famous song, ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’, which was popular anyway, and they repurposed it very cutting, biting lyrics, but it’s sung so fast and so happily that you probably, at first hearing, don’t realise how barbed it is.

Williams: That’s how music is used as well, getting music into those spaces because singers are popular or beloved and so all of a sudden the music is on the airwaves or they’re playing live. I was listening to a podcast and they were playing Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’, she was singing to white audiences. Nina Simone, when she sang ‘Mississippi Goddam’, [her first civil rights song], she was singing to the same [white] audiences as she was singing her other songs. You get hit with these lyrics that hopefully tell people how they are complicit or how they’re supporting something that is very oppressive and racist.

School Strike for Climate Action placard, 2019. Made by Hazel Cubis, 2019. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

School Strike for Climate sign, 2019

Gibson: There seems to be at the moment a particular zeitgeist and it’s driven by young people, which has been a really exciting thing to see how well mobilised young people have been over the last few years. They’re actually creating that movement and getting people out onto the street on certain days. What we’re seeing is very well-organised, very mature people leading those experiences and those events. 

They are picking up the baton from earlier protest movements that worried about the climate and worried about the planet and a long history of environmental protest in this country. They’re taking the torch forward.

It also seems very inclusive. People are being very inspired to join in and it’s not just young people. People are coming together and it’s been a catalyst for this intergenerational stuff, people are taking their children along.

Williams: When we went along to the School Strike for Climate, the amount of people who would stop and talk to each other because of the signs, they spark a cool conversation… It creates this other level of community beyond the purpose that you’re out there marching for, and provides a bit of comic relief, as well. 

Gibson: And it also catches the eyes of media, so people need to be quite savvy when they’re out there marching, you need to be documented for posterity by the media, so the better and funnier the sign the more likely you are to catch their eyes. I think that’s really important.

Protest Tautohetohe: Objects of Resistance, Persistence and Defiance is on sale now.

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