Parihaka
Parihaka is a community in the Taranaki region of New Zealand, located between Mount Taranaki and the Tasman Sea. In the 1870s and 1880s the settlement, then reputed to be the largest Māori village in New Zealand, became the centre of a major campaign of non-violent resistance to European occupation of confiscated land in the area. Armed soldiers were sent in and arrested the peaceful resistance leaders and many of the Maori residents, often holding them in jail for months without trials.
The village was founded about 1866 by Māori chiefs Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi on land seized by the government during the post-New Zealand Wars land confiscations of the 1860s. The population of the village grew to more than 2,000, attracting Māori who had been dispossessed of their land by confiscations and impressing European visitors with its cleanliness and industry, and its extensive cultivations producing cash crops as well as food sufficient to feed its inhabitants.
When an influx of European settlers in Taranaki created a demand for farmland that outstripped the availability, the Grey government stepped up efforts to secure title to land it had confiscated but subsequently not taken up for settlement. From 1876 some Māori in Taranaki accepted "no fault" payments called takoha compensation, while some hapū, or sub-tribal groups, outside the confiscation zone took the government's payments to allow surveying and settlement. Māori near Parihaka and the Waimate Plains rejected the payments, however, the government responded by drawing up plans to take the land by force. In late 1878 the government began surveying the land and offering it for sale. Te Whiti and Tohu responded with a series of non-violent campaigns in which they first ploughed settlers' farmland and later erected fences across roadways to impress upon the government their right to occupy the confiscated land to which they believed they still had rights, given the government's failure to provide the reserves it had promised. The campaigns sparked a series of arrests, resulting in more than 400 Māori being jailed in the South Island, where they remained without trial for as long as 16 months with the aid of a series of new repressive laws.
As fears grew among white settlers that the resistance campaign was a prelude to renewed armed conflict, the Hall government began planning a military assault at Parihaka to close it down. Pressured by Native Minister John Bryce, the government finally acted in late October 1881 while the sympathetic Governor was out of the country. Led by Bryce, on horseback, 1,600 troops and cavalry entered the village at dawn on 5 November 1881. The soldiers were greeted with hundreds of skipping and singing children offering them food. Te Whiti and Tohu were arrested and jailed for 16 months, 1,600 Parihaka inhabitants were expelled and dispersed throughout Taranaki without food or shelter and the remaining 600 residents were issued with government passes to control their movement. Soldiers looted and destroyed most of the buildings at Parihaka. Land that had been promised as reserves by a commission of inquiry into land confiscations was later seized and sold to cover the cost of crushing Te Whiti's resistance, while others were leased to European settlers, shutting Māori out of involvement in the decisions over land use.
In a major 1996 report, the Waitangi Tribunal claimed the events at Parihaka provided a graphic display of government antagonism to any show of Māori political independence. It noted: "A vibrant and productive Māori community was destroyed and total State control of all matters Māori, with full power over the Māori social order, was sought." Historian Hazel Riseborough also believed the central issue motivating the invasion was mana: "Europeans were concerned about their superiority and dominance which, it seemed to them, could be assured only by destroying Te Whiti's mana. As long as he remained at Parihaka he constituted a threat to European supremacy in that he offered his people an alternative to the way of life the European sought to impose on them."
The Parihaka International Peace Festival has been held annually there since 2006.
Marae
The local Parihaka marae now features the Rangikapuia, Te Niho, Toroānui and Mahikuare meeting houses. It is a tribal meeting ground for the Taranaki hapū of Ngāti Haupoto and Ngāti Moeahu.In October 2020, the Government committed $457,693 from the Provincial Growth Fund to upgrade the Toroānui meeting house, creating 6 jobs.
Settlement
The Parihaka settlement was founded about 1866, at the close of the Second Taranaki War and a year after almost all Māori land in Taranaki had been confiscated by the Government to punish "rebel" Māori. The settlement was established by a Māori chief and veteran of the Taranaki wars, Te Whiti o Rongomai, as a means of distancing themselves from European contact and association with warlike groups of Māori. The pā was set in sight of Mt Taranaki and the sea, in a clearing ringed by low hills and beside a stream known as Waitotoroa. He was joined by a fellow chief, Tohu Kākahi and a close kinsman, Te Whetu. Later that year King Tāwhiao sent 12 "apostles" to live at Parihaka to strengthen the bonds between the Waikato and Taranaki Māori who were opposed to further land sales to the government or white settlers. Within a year the settlement had grown to house more than 100 large thatched whare around two marae and by 1871 the population was reported to be 300. The Taranaki Medical Officer visited in 1871 and reported food in abundance, good cookhouses and an absence of disease. It was the cleanest, best-kept pā he had ever visited and its inhabitants "the finest race of men I have ever seen in New Zealand". Large meetings were held monthly, where Te Whiti warned of increasing levels of bribery and corruption to coerce Māori to sell their land, yet European visitors continued to be welcomed with dignity, courtesy and hospitality.By the end of the 1870s, it had a population of about 1500 and was being described as the most populous and prosperous Māori settlement in the country. It had its own police force, bakery and bank, used advanced agricultural machinery, and organised large teams who worked the coast and bush to harvest enough seafood and game to feed the thousands who came to the meetings. When journalists visited Parihaka in October 1881, a month before the brutal government raid that destroyed it, they found "square miles of potato, melon and cabbage fields around Parihaka; they stretched on every side, and acres and acres of the land show the results of great industry and care". The village was described as "an enormous native town of quiet and imposing character" with "regular streets of houses".
Land pressures
In June 1868 hostilities resumed in Taranaki as a Ngāti Ruanui chief, Riwha Tītokowaru, launched a series of effective raids on settlers and government troops in an effort to block the occupation of Māori land. Te Whiti remained neutral during the nine-month-long war, neither helping nor hindering Tītokowaru. When the war ended with Titokowaru's withdrawal in March 1869, Te Whiti declared the year to be te tau o te takahanga, "the year of the trampling underfoot", during which kings, queens, governors and governments would be trampled by Parihaka. He told a meeting there would be a new era of "fighting peace" with no surrender of land and no loss of independence. He also declared that because they had remained independent during the recent war, the confiscation of their land for being "rebellious British subjects" was unjust, invalid and void. Te Whiti's announcement at the meeting was reported to Premier Edward Stafford by Taranaki Land Purchase Officer Robert Reid Parris, who described him as "this young chief whose influence was strong in the province and with Tawhiao".In 1872 the Government acknowledged that although all Māori land in Taranaki had been confiscated, most of it had effectively fallen back into Māori ownership because so little had been settled by Europeans. As a result, the Government began buying back the land, including reserves and land given as compensation for wrongful confiscation.
As Te Whiti continued to reject the offers, however, European anger towards Parihaka grew, fuelling calls for his "dangerous" movement to be suppressed. Newspapers and government agents that had earlier praised him as peaceful and amiable began describing him as a "fanatic" who gave "rambling", "unintelligible" and "blasphemous" speeches, producing a "baneful influence".
By the mid-1870s, Taranaki was enjoying a rapid growth in immigration, with the founding of Inglewood and other farming towns, the creation of inland roads as far south as Stratford and a rail link from New Plymouth to Waitara. In mid-1878, as the provincial government pressured the Government for more land, Colonial Treasurer John Ballance advocated the survey and sale by force of the Waimate Plains of South Taranaki. Cabinet members expected to raise £500,000 for government coffers from the sale. In June Premier Sir George Grey and Native Minister John Sheehan held a big meeting at Waitara to dispense "gifts" including tinned fruits and jam, alcohol, clothing and perfume to Taranaki chiefs willing to sell. Neither Te Whiti nor Tawhiao attended, so Sheehan visited Parihaka and then the Waimate Plains, where he appeared to have persuaded Tītokowaru to permit land to be surveyed on the proviso that burial places, cultivations and fishing grounds would be respected and that fenced reserves would be created.
Māori unease mounted as the surveying progressed, with little sign of the promised reserves. In February 1879 surveyors began cutting lines through cultivations and fences and trampling cash crops and also ran a road into Tītokowaru's own settlement. Māori retaliated by uprooting kilometres of survey pegs. Sheehan rode to Parihaka to justify the government's actions, but left after being verbally abused by Te Whiti. The next day, 24 March 1879, Te Whiti ordered his men to remove all the surveyors from the Waimate Plains. Though the surveyors would not leave of their own accord, the Māori quietly packed up each survey camp, loaded horses and drays and carted everything back across the Waingongoro River, between Manaia and Hāwera.
Hectored by the settler press, which claimed extra farmland was needed and that "these lands should no longer be retained by turbulent, semi-barbarous people, too idle to put them to any use", the Government on 26 March began advertising the sale of the first of the Waimate Plains. On 24 April it announced the sale was postponed indefinitely. Sheehan determined to find out what had been promised to Māori and whether this was the cause of the interruption to the survey. Still, however, the Government refused to confirm its promise of reserves.
Monthly meetings at Parihaka attracted Māori from all over New Zealand and let was set aside for each tribe to have its own marae, meeting house and cluster of whares throughout the village. As the population grew, so did the industriousness, with cultivations over a wider area and more than 100 bullocks, 10 horses and 44 carts in use. Yet the gatherings continued to disturb settlers, who in late May called on Grey to boost Taranaki's armed constabulary, claiming they were "living in a condition of constant menace", in fear of their lives and "utterly at the mercy of the Natives". Māori in Ōpunake had begun ploughing up and fencing off settlers' fields, and threatening to take over the flour mill. Residents at Hawera were convinced war would be commenced "at any moment" and the Patea Mail urged a new "war of extermination" be waged against the Māori: "Justice demands these bloodthirsty fanatics should be returned to the dust... the time has come, in our minds, when New Zealand must strike for freedom, and this means the death blow to the Māori race."