chapter 14 Te Ua Haumene Horpapera Tuwhakararo, and Others who saw Visions in the Maori Wars of the 1860s

What Governor Eyre had feared in Jamaica in the early 1860s actually came to pass in . Large numbers of Maori evangelists, teachers and assis- tants chose to fight the British army rather than see more of their land seized by white settlers and the colonial government. Some of them claimed the authority of God and the Bible for their cause. Many held denominationally orthodox Sunday services throughout the conflict. Others claimed inspiration from heavenly messengers who commanded them to preach new versions of Christianity. Atrocities and murders carried out by prophets and their acolytes shocked white New Zealanders and called the whole missionary endeavour into question. However, because they were not perceived as an existential chal- lenge to colonial authority, they did not provoke anything like the extreme reactions against indigenous evangelism seen in Jamaica.

Causes of the Wars and Maori Christian Involvement

Christianity and Maori evangelists are everywhere to be seen during the that dragged on without a decisive resolution right into the early 1870s. The conflict originated in 1860 over a land dispute in on the North Island. Governor Gore Browne had become concerned that the Maori King movement launched in 1858, which aimed to stem the tide of Maori land alienation by establishing a single authority to deal with the British Queen, would become an insuperable obstacle to legitimate land transfers from will- ing Maori sellers to eager colonial buyers. He provoked a test case in Taranaki by sending police to evict people from land he believed to have been legiti- mately sold by its Maori owner. The aggrieved people and supporting chiefs protested that the Maori seller was not the legitimate owner. Gore Browne chose to view the protest as a manifestation of the King Movement’s determi- nation to halt all land sales. The refusal of the people to vacate the disputed land therefore posed a constitutional challenge. He pronounced it to be an insurrection which he resolved to crush – and with it the nascent challenge of the Kingites.

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When Gore Browne failed to strike a decisive blow and resistance spread to other parts of the North Island, his superiors recalled him and appointed George Grey as governor, believing that his experience in dealing with the Maori people would enable him to negotiate an end to the war. After a lull in fighting in 1862 Grey repeated the mistake of his predecessor. Having first pro- nounced Gore Browne to have been in the wrong on the Taranaki land dispute, in 1863 he launched an invasion of central districts in an effort to ensure that the King movement could never again threaten the security of colonists. When his invading column encountered resistance he pronounced the whole popu- lation guilty of insurrection and announced that huge swaths of territory would be given over to soldier settlers capable of handling any future emer- gency. Thus the war widened and new enemies found profoundly sensible rea- sons to take up arms. Maori evangelists and teachers figured prominently on both sides of the conflict. This was hardly surprising because after four decades of Christian preaching virtually the whole Maori population appeared to have embraced the new faith. Printing of the Maori New Testament had begun in 1838. Even before that date ‘knowledge of the gospel preceded the establishment of mis- sion stations as Maori travelled to other areas spreading the word’ (a classic instance of the crucial role of indigenous evangelists). For literate people the Maori version of the Bible was the first book they read. And because Maori capacities to absorb and communicate knowledge orally had not yet been sapped by print culture, large numbers of illiterates could quote extensive pas- sages verbatim. Despite the brief appearance of prophet movements before the British annexation of 1840, Maori Christians appeared in 1860 to be securely anchored to the orthodoxy dispensed by the leading European missionary societies, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and Roman Catholic. Maori evan- gelism had spearheaded the Christianization of the North Island but had not yet broken free of white direction. Insofar as they aroused suspicion and hostility among the white settlers of the colony, it was more for their association with missionaries than for any perceived dangers in their preaching. Tensions between governors and Anglican missionaries of the Church Missionary Society (cms) went way back. The cms had opposed ’s project of white settlement in the 1830s. While the missionaries had not opposed British annexation, they viewed it as a protection for Maori people bedevilled by unscrupulous and degraded white traders and gun merchants. They regarded the 1840 , which ceded sovereignty to , as the foundation of Maori rights to their traditional lands. On numerous occasions in the 1840s and 1850s they found official and settler anger directed against them for their insis- tence that all Maori land sales be certified as genuine.