Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki

In 1865 and 1866 colonial and allied Maori forces fought adherents of Pai Marire on the east coast of the North Island. Te Kooti fought on the government side and was then accused of passing supplies to the other. No charge was laid and no trial was held. He was put on a ship with several hundred prisoners and deported to the Chatham Islands, five hundred miles out in the Pacific, where the men were held without sentence and without any stated term.

He fell seriously ill there, and out of that illness came the visions and the scriptural teaching that made him a leader among the prisoners. He drew on the Old Testament, and the identification his people made was exact and consequential: a captive nation, in exile, promised return.

On 4 July 1868 the prisoners seized the supply schooner Rifleman and sailed it back to the mainland with nearly three hundred people aboard, including women and children. They landed on the Poverty Bay coast and asked for passage inland; it was refused and troops were sent. What followed was four years of campaigning through some of the roughest country in the island, including the raid on Matawhero in November 1868 in which around fifty settlers and Maori were killed, and a long pursuit that the colonial forces never concluded. He reached the King Country, which was closed to the government, and stayed. In 1883 he was pardoned.

The name Ringatu means the upraised hand. Where a Christian congregation might make the sign of the cross, worshippers raise the right hand at the end of a prayer, and the gesture gives the church its name.

Its liturgy was built out of the Old Testament and composed in the Chatham Islands and afterwards. The texts, the panui, were not written down for the first generations; they were held in memory and recited, and the ability to carry them was what qualified a person to lead worship. Services are held on the twelfth day of each month, a pattern that structures the church's year, with two of those days observed as major festivals. There is no ordained ministry in the usual sense and no building requirement; a meeting house serves.

After the pardon Te Kooti spent his last decade travelling among communities, settling disputes, composing waiata and sayings that are still quoted, and consolidating the church rather than leading anything else. He died in 1893.

Ringatu is a living church, with congregations concentrated in the Bay of Plenty and the East Coast, and it is described here rather than assessed. The reassessment of its founder in New Zealand, from a figure named in a century of settler accounts as a murderer to one recognised as a religious leader and a prophet, came slowly and is bound up with a wider reckoning over the confiscations and the wars.