Book of the week

Extract from Ko Taranaki Te Maunga by Rachel Buchanan Bridget Williams Books, $14.99

The invasion of Parihaka is sometimes described as the final act in the New Zealand wars, and Taranaki itself suffered from the longest ‘‘regional conflict’’ of these wars. The fighting went from 1860 to 1881, with smaller skirmishes and unrest on either side of these dates.

In Taranaki, war encompassed violent exchange, non-violent resistance and what Richard Hill has described in his work on the Armed Constabulary as periods of ‘‘coercive occupation’’ that were necessary in a ‘‘post-conquest situation’’.

Given this, it is difficult to imagine a Taranaki Ma¯ ori agreeing with the sentence that opens Roberto Rabel’s essay on ‘‘New Zealand’s Wars’’ in The New Oxford History of New Zealand: ‘‘War has generally touched lightly on New Zealand.’’

There was little that was light about the 19th century for people in Taranaki; and the wounds of war, occupation and invasion were intensified by raupatu (confiscation) and the perpetual leasing regime that continues to this day.

Our wha¯ nau still ‘‘owns’’ land granted in 1883 by the West Coast Settlement (North Island) Act 1880; it is a perpetual war memorial, policed by 21 separate pieces of legislation beginning with the New Zealand Settlements Act 1863 (the confiscation legislation) and ending with the Ma¯ ori Reserved Lands Amendments Act 1997.

Taranaki, our mountain, was confiscated along with everything else in 1863. As Te Miringa Ho¯ haia put it in his essay for Te Maunga Taranaki (2001): ‘‘In 1978, the Government introduced legislation to return Taranaki as long as it was given back immediately to be a national park. This twominute event took place at O¯ wae Marae at Waitara. Amid heavy emotion and mayhem, the Taranaki Ma¯ ori Trust Board reluctantly yielded to the Government’s duress. The mountain was lost to its people.’’

The Trust Board and iwi lodged claims with the Waitangi Tribunal in 1989 for the return of the mountain. Many Ma¯ ori people in Taranaki never even visited the maunga, so great was the loss and pain. As historian Dennis Nga¯ whare-Pounamu writes in his doctoral thesis on ‘‘travelling mountain’’ narratives about Taranaki: ‘‘Throughout the long years of confiscation, the maunga has been the silent observer, the only constant in shifting boundaries and sold land blocks. The iwi takes its name from the maunga and the ancestor, yet many have never climbed upon the maunga.’’

The depth of injustice inflicted on Taranaki people is, perhaps, one reason why the Waitangi Tribunal made reference, controversially, to ‘‘the holocaust of Taranaki history’’.

These are some of the hard facts of Taranaki history, but what do we do about them?