From Parihaka to He Puapua
- 25 June 2026
by Richard Shaw | Jul 25, 2021 | E-Tangata
“It is long since time we Pākehā confronted the unsettled history of the place in which the ‘team of five million’ lives,” writes Richard Shaw, professor of politics at Massey University, in this piece republished from The Conversation. “Time we were honest with ourselves. Time we ended the forgetting.”
Whenever I visit my mother in New Plymouth we drive out around the Taranaki coast to visit the old family farms, chugging along the South Road that was built to carry the armed constabulary (AC) and sundry volunteer forces that invaded Parihaka on November 5, 1881.
My great-grandfather, who joined the AC in 1877 and served in it for nine years, worked on that road. He was standing alongside 1,588 other men as the sun rose on the morning of te Pāhua (the sacking).
By the time he left the pā three years later he had participated in the assault on Parihaka, the weeks and months of despoliation that followed, and the years of occupation as the colonial government and its forces knelt on the throats of the people led by Te Whiti-o-Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi.
Having contributed to the military campaign, several years later he returned as part of the agricultural campaign to complete the alienation of Taranaki iwi from their land.
In time, he and his wife would own two farms on the coast. One of these had previously been returned to Māori via a Crown grant said to be “absolutely inalienable”, which turned out to be anything but.
They also leased a third property under the baleful West Coast lease system which, among other things, excluded Māori landowners from the process of negotiating rent, gave them peppercorn rentals and locked them out of their land in perpetuity. All three farms were part of the 1,199,622 acres of land confiscated from Māori — “rebel” and loyalist alike — by executive decree in 1865.