Toitu links iwi to ancestors

A GROUP of Ngati Ruanui youth from Taranaki recently visited the Toitu Otago Settlers Museum to learn more about Pakakohe ancestors once held prisoner in Dunedin.

The recent visitors also received documents about the imprisonment of people held in the city in the late 19th century, a recent museum board report said.

Seventyfour prisoners, known as the Pakakohe group, were sent to Dunedin in 1869 after Titokowaru’s War, an armed dispute in the midtolate 1860s, sparked by land confiscations in south Taranaki.

While in Dunedin, the men worked to build important parts of the city’s infrastructure, including University of Otago building foundations and parts of the Andersons Bay causeway.

Most later returned home, but 18 died and were buried in unmarked paupers’ graves in the Southern Cemetery.

Dunedin and Otago historian Bill Dacker said the group of men from Taranaki had won widespread respect from Dunedin people at the time and a party had been held in their honour before they left.

A group of 110 visitors from Taranaki, accompanied by Ngapari Nui, chairman of Ngati Ruanui Runanga, a tribal council based in the Hawera area, travelled south to take part in a kohatu (‘‘memorial stone’’) unveiling at the cemetery, in honour of their ancestors, in March 2011.