Table Of Content'HAUHAU'
The Pai Marire Search for Maori Identity
'HAUHAU'
The Pai Marire Search for
Maori Identity
Paul Clark
Auckland University Press
Oxford University Press
1975
©P. J.A.Clark 1975
First Published 1975
Printed in New Zealand
Wright & Carman Ltd
Trentham
ISBN 0 19 647935 5
Contents
Preface Vll
1. The Years of the Prophet I
2. The Gospel and the Tribes 27
3. The Politics of Pai Marire 50
4. The Theology of Pai Marire 76
5. Pai Marire: End or Beginning 102
Appendix 1. Ua Rongopai (Gospel of Te Ua) 113
Appendix 2. Lament for King Tawhiao 132
Abbreviations 138
Notes 139
Glossary 168
Bibliography 170
Index 181
V'
Illustrations
Page
North Island, New Zealand, showing places mentioned
in the text. xii
Facing page
Te Ua Haurnene (1823?- 1866), prophet of Pai Marire,
photographed in Auckland, 1866. (Alexander Turnbull
Library] 4
Followers of the prophet. 'Hauhau' prisoners, captured in
the Waitotara district, imprisoned in a hulk in Welling-
ton harbour. (Harding Denton collection, Alexander
Turnbull Library) 5
Patara Raukatauri, leader of Pai Marire emissaries to
Opotiki and the East Coast. (Alexander Turnbull
Library) 20
Kereopa Te Rau, regarded as the murderer of the mission-
ary Volkner at Opotiki. (Alexander Turnbull Library) 21
Niu pole at Putahi, southern Taranaki, from the Ua
Kongo pai notebook. (Auckland Public Library] 68
Maori drawing from the notebook of Aporo, who was shot
by a European soldier in January 1867. It depicts a
niu pole, and a reptilian form, probably symbolic of evil.
(Alexander Turnbull Library) 69
Drawing from Aporo's notebook showing (on the right)
the niu pole as ethe key' to the cglory of the sun' for
supplicant Maoris, represented by the upraised hands.
(Alexander Turnbull Library) 84
Western technology, time, and the cosmos seen through
Maori eyes. Watch design from the Ua Rongopai
notebook. (Auckland Public Library) 85
vi
Preface
"No one really knows or understands me. Some might see me in
another way in another world.'
Te Ua Haumene, a speech in late-1865^
On 2 March 1865 New Zealand history gained its first martyr
and New Zealand historiography her first madmen. The former
was Carl Sylvius Volkner, a missionary murdered at his church,
decapitated, his eyes swallowed at his pulpit, his blood drunk
from his chalice. The madmen were the perpetrators of the deed,
the Hauhaus. Almost every New Zealander knows something of
the Hauhaus. The most common element in this knowledge is
the assertion that the Hauhaus thought they could stop bullets
with their hands, and that they killed the innocent missionary.
These attitudes are fostered in the education of New Zealanders,
and in popular and scholarly writing. Words like fanaticism,
reversion, and barbarism abound. It is a wholly negative view,
and is false.
A school history of the country, speaking of Hauhauism, that
is of the Pai Marire movement founded by Te Ua Haumene in
1862, claims that 'wherever it spread, the war took on a new
and horrible character. No longer was there clean brave fighting
as at Orakau.'2 Travel guides, hardly acclaimed for the accuracy
of their factual information, epitomize the popular view of
Pai Marire, 'which means, believe it or not, "Good and Peace-
vii
viil 'Hauhau'
ful". ... [It was] surely one of the weirdest of all cults dreamed
up by the murky mind of man . . . and a fine example of the
tragic silliness of fanatic man.'3 The Anglo-Maori war context
dominates such attitudes towards the cult. 'Hauhauism provided
the most intense fighting of any phase of the Land Wars, during
which its followers fought with a complete disregard for their
safety engendered by a belief that bullets could not harm true
believers.'4
Scholars have not taken a very different approach. The two
most widely-read general histories of New Zealand largely
perpetuate the negative attitude to Pai Marire, particularly its
origins. 'It arose from the despair of defeat', writes Keith Sin-
clair, 'to bring new hope to many rebels. The resistance to the
settlers became more savage, more implacable.' W. H. Oliver
adds colour to the picture. 'Observance centred in the traditional
niu, a tall stake surmounted with the head of an English enemy
. . . Pai marire had been too bloodthirsty to last long.'5
There have been three major specific studies of the move-
ment : one as part of a general account of Maori-European wars,
one a history thesis, and one a by-product of an American
student's brief interest in Maori religion. The first was by James
Cowan, a publicity officer for the New Zealand Railways Depart-
ment in the nineteen-twenties, who often seems more intent on
telling a good story for tourists than on ensuring accuracy. Pai
Marire is seen as a battle creed, producing 'a kind of holy war
[which] imparted to the racial struggle a savagery and a bitter
persistence'. The religious revival 'was in the nature of a return
to barbarism and superstition'.6 The second study, by a student
who later became a theologian, was published in 1937. Like
Cowan's work, S. Barton Babbage's draws heavily on published
settler descriptions and on three sets of parliamentary papers
relating to the movement.7 The emphasis is again on a relapse
into barbarism, an approach explained by the cyclical evolu-
tionary view, endorsed by anthropologists, that saw ideal Maori
acculturation as the almost complete replacement of one set of
traditional beliefs by European, Christian ones.8 The most
recent, though twenty year old, major study is prefaced by the
epigram 'Today is but yesterday coming in by the back-door*.
Preface ix
Robin W. Winks's tone is frequently condescending. 'When
examined by reason, the doctrine of Hau-Hauism is seen to be
like a great sieve. . . . However, when dealing with a religious
movement, the invoking of reason can not dissuade a Maori
from his beliefs.'9 Pai Marire ritual is likened to *an emotional
orgy or a foot race', and it therefore exploited 'the Maori men-
tality'.10 In effect the religion 'showed few signs of Christian
thinking, although a small amount of Christianity did manage
to be incorporated into a general revival of ancient practices.'11
Winks based this study of 'the sickness of Hau-Hauism'12 on only
Cowan, Babbage, and a collection of newspaper and other
published contemporary accounts which even Elsdon Best, an
amateur ethnographer and friend of Cowan, condemned as a
'slovenly . . . confused, badly arranged' manuscript.18
The present book is an attempt at a new, more positive
approach to Pai Marire, one that emphasizes its adaptive quali-
ties. Concepts like relapse and barbarism seem too encumbered
with Victorian value judgment and prejudice to offer a useful
understanding of a mid-nineteenth-century movement of such
significance and popular recognition. Pai Marire can be better
approached as an effort to come to terms with European settle-
ment, not to drive all Pakehas from New Zealand. Although
brief discussions of Pai Marire along new lines have been pro-
duced in recent years, they have almost invariably relied on the
same sources, the three published studies and the parliamentary
papers.14
The extent of the new sources unearthed in the present
research has been surprising. Written Maori evidence, including
an illustrated record of a number of speeches by the prophet
Te Ua himself, and letters by adherents and opponents, proved
invaluable. Contemporary Pakeha unpublished sources, includ-
ing papers of White and Warre, government officers at Wan-
ganui and New Plymouth on the fringes of the Pai Marire
heartland, were more useful than the rather selective published
contemporary material and offered scope for comparative
analysis with the Maori sources. Even records of letters to the
government from Maoris and Pakehas, amounting merely to a
line or two in a bound register, added to the collective evidence.
