Te Whiti o Rongomai

The Taranaki confiscations of the 1860s took more than a million acres from tribes described as being in rebellion, including land belonging to people who had not fought. Much of it was not immediately occupied. When surveyors moved onto it in the late 1870s to cut it into farms, the question of what could be done about it became urgent.

Te Whiti and Tohu Kakahi had built at Parihaka, under the mountain, a settlement with a reputation for order, prosperity and hospitality, and they had been holding monthly meetings there since 1866. Their answer to the surveys was a campaign of deliberate obstruction with an equally deliberate refusal of violence. In 1879 parties of ploughmen went out and ploughed land that had been taken, working steadily and submitting to arrest when the police came. When those men were taken, others went. Other parties erected fences across surveyed roads and pulled out survey pegs.

The arrests ran into the hundreds, and the government passed legislation allowing the men to be held without trial. Many were shipped to the South Island and imprisoned in Dunedin and Hokitika, where a number died. Throughout, the discipline held: no ploughman resisted arrest.

The campaign was designed to make the confiscation visible as an act requiring force, and it succeeded. It also drew the government into exactly the response it had been designed to provoke.

On 5 November 1881 an armed constabulary force with volunteers, more than fifteen hundred men with artillery, advanced on Parihaka. The Native Minister had issued a proclamation and the community had been given notice.

The village did not resist. Accounts agree on what met the column: children seated at the entrance singing, girls offering food, and the adults of the settlement sitting in the open in silence. Te Whiti and Tohu were arrested and later held in the South Island without trial. The houses were pulled down, the crops destroyed, the stock driven off, and something like sixteen hundred people not from the immediate district were dispersed and told to go home.

The emblem the community wore, and wears, is the raukura, three white albatross feathers, standing for peace. Both leaders returned to Parihaka after their release and rebuilt, and the monthly meetings resumed.

Parihaka has held an unusual place in New Zealand memory ever since, invoked whenever non-violent resistance is discussed and increasingly taught in schools. In June 2017 the Crown made a formal apology and a settlement with the Parihaka community, acknowledging the invasion, the imprisonments without trial and the assaults that followed. The fifth of November is commemorated at Parihaka each year, and the community is a living one, described here rather than assessed.