Colonial troops invade the Urewera

The first shots were fired by colonial troops in the heartland of the Tūhoe iwi. The invasion of the Urewera was intended to punish Tūhoe for supporting Te Kooti Rikirangi, whose ‘rebel’ force it had sheltered after its defeat at Ngātapa, inland from Poverty Bay, in January.

The expedition was also designed to demonstrate that there was no secure sanctuary – however remote from Pākehā settlements – for Te Kooti or any other Māori leader.

The plan was for three columns of Armed Constabulary and kūpapa (Māori allies of the Crown) to converge on Ruatāhuna, a kāinga deep in the interior. The 1300 men outnumbered the entire population of the Urewera. Two of the columns started in Bay of Plenty and marched up the valleys of the Rangitāīki and Whakatāne rivers respectively. The third column reached Waikaremoana from Wairoa, but then prudently found itself unable to build boats on which to cross the lake before marching over the snowbound Huiarau Range, the most forbidding part of the Urewera.

Led by Lieutenant-Colonel George Whitmore, the commander of the New Zealand forces, the Rangitāīki column was the first to see action. Its 100 Armed Constabulary and 200 Arawa kūpapa left Fort Galatea (near Murupara; its ruins are still visible) on 4 May.

On 6 May, Lieutenant Gilbert Mair and the Arawa attacked the stockaded Te Harema (Salem) pā, which was sited on a hill just beyond today’s village of Te Whāiti. En route to Te Harema they entered an old pā. Here the tohunga Matiu Raputu fired at Mair but missed and was himself killed. Te Harema was stormed by Mair’s force a few minutes later and four of its defenders were killed.

The two Bay of Plenty columns met at Ruatāhuna on 9 May and spent several days systematically destroying Tūhoe settlements, crops and food supplies before beginning the return march to Fort Galatea. Whitmore encouraged the Arawa to take captured women with them, ‘so that this hapu will be destroyed’.  

This first successful invasion of the Urewera was followed by another three-pronged attack in 1870 and several subsequent kūpapa incursions in search of Te Kooti, who hid in Tūhoe territory with his dwindling force despite having been renounced by the iwi.

The events of 1869 have continued to reverberate. In 1916, the ‘last shots of the New Zealand Wars’ were fired at Maungapōhatu, the Urewera base of Te Kooti’s successor, Rua Kēnana, when police killed two Tūhoe men while arresting him. The warrant was for liquor offences; Rua’s real crime was to challenge the authority of the state.

Past injustices were evoked again in 2007 by a large-scale police ‘anti-terrorist’ operation which turned up few guns and no terrorists. The police believed activists hoping to create an independent Tūhoe state were training for guerrilla warfare. Four people were convicted of firearms offences.

In August 2014, following the settlement of Tūhoe’s Treaty of Waitangi claim, Minister of Treaty Negotiations Chris Finlayson apologised to the iwi for ‘many injustices including indiscriminate raupatu [land confiscation], wrongful killings, and years of scorched-earth warfare’.

Image: detail from image of Gilbert Mair's flying column