2:35 PM |
This cataclysm began unfolding in 1865, when Anglican priest Rev Carl Volkner was killed at Opotiki by locals from the Te Whakatohea tribe. At the instigation of Kereopa Te Rau, from Taranaki, Volkner was hanged, before his eyes were scooped out and eaten.
Tuhoe had nothing to do with the killing, but Te Rau fled to the Ureweras and Tuhoe were accused of involvement. The government reaction was overwhelming. In 1866 181,000ha of land was confiscated by the government from Tuhoe, Te Whakatohea and Ngati Awa. Ultimately, Tuhoe lost 5700ha on their northern border. The Crown took Tuhoe's only substantial flat land and their only access to the coast. This was most of their fertile, cropping land, and the pathway to rich sources of kaimoana in the sea.
The Tuhoe people were left with harsh, more difficult land, setting the scene for later famines.
Tuhoe were left with "encircled lands", in the words of historian Judith Binney in her evidence to the Waitangi Tribunal.
Even now, the confiscation line looms large for the locals. Kruger says when driving past it feels to him "like it would if you had to travel every day past a point where your family was murdered".
"...But the 1866 confiscations were only the beginning. Tuhoe's isolation and loss was to intensify. Two years later the Maori leader Te Kooti and his followers began what Michael King has called "the most effective guerrilla war ever waged in this country". Te Kooti killed about 30 Europeans and at least 20 Maori men, women and children in raids on Poverty Bay settlements.
When the government gave chase, Te Kooti took sanctuary in the Ureweras among Tuhoe, provoking a bitter, three-year campaign by the government: "In a policy aimed at turning the tribe away from Te Kooti, a scorched earth campaign was unleashed against Tuhoe; people were imprisoned and killed, their cultivations and homes destroyed, and stock killed or run off. Through starvation, deprivation and atrocities at the hands of the government's Maori forces, Tuhoe submitted to the Crown," says Te Ara, the online encyclopaedia of New Zealand.
Te Kooti was never handed over. But according to Binney, Tuhoe's peace compact with the government accepted Tuhoe as a "self-governing realm" in exchange for Tuhoe's active assistance in the last stages of the colonial war.
By 1872 the chiefs of a governing council made a historic decision to protect themselves from the land-hungry Pakeha. They closed access to their lands. Signposts went up warning strangers, especially Pakeha, not to enter. On the northern confiscation line, one chief, Eru Tamaikoha, put up signs warning "Trespassers will be eaten".
"The encircling boundaries that they proclaimed were intended to enable them to choose who entered their realm, and on what terms," says Binney.
Remarkably, for a time at least, it also looked like the New Zealand government would give Tuhoe a form of independence. The Urewera District Native Reserve Act of 1896 was drawn up by Premier Richard Seddon to allow the Urewera people to be regionally autonomous, in his words a "self-governing" people.
That act "was unique in that it recognised the encircling boundaries of a tribally defined zone in the centre of the North Island," says Binney. "The act was presented as an experiment in tribal self-government; it thus allowed for other possibilities than the discourse of `one nation, one law'."
But as Tuhoe tried to hold the government to its perhaps insincere promise, tragedy was unfolding on a staggering scale. A wave of disease, extreme frosts, crop failures and famine sent Tuhoe reeling. Census figures indicate that between 1896 and 1901, 23% of the Tuhoe population died, says Binney. A high proportion were children under 15. With Seddon's death in 1906, the Tuhoe dream of self-governance that still lives for some today began to be torn down. The Liberal government abandoned attempts at partnership, says Binney, and reverted to the view that a separate Tuhoe "realm" contradicted the uniformity of laws.
There was to be a final crushing of hope. In 1907 the messianic pacifist leader Rua Kenana offered a new path to a people in despair by establishing a "City of God" for around 600, deep within the Ureweras. Trade, agriculture, even banking and mining, were part of his plan.
But the government saw Kenana as subversive, and in 1916 a large military force was sent in to crush him, using minor charges of supplying liquor as a pretext for what historians now consider to be an illegal armed invasion. Kenana was arrested deep in the Ureweras at Maungapohatu by 57 constables from Auckland, and more from Gisborne and Whakatane. Kenana was unarmed, but a shot was fired, and in the resulting gunfight two Tuhoe were killed, including Kenana's son..."
Ends.
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