Witi Ihimaera - The Parihaka Woman

‘Meanwhile, Huhana had fully taken me to her breast as my mother. She also took in two other orphans, Ripeka and Meri, as w’angai or adopted daughters. She said to Te Whiti, “If I have to take in one it might as well be three”, which was her way of saying that she had an embrace that could accommodate us all.

‘I can remember only hard-working but happy times through that warming weather. Ripeka and Meri and I helped the adults smooth down the earth and take the stones away so that the houses could be built. Ripeka was the pretty one, with her lovely face and shapely limbs. As for Meri, she always tried to please, and that endeared her to everyone.

‘Both my sisters were older than me but somehow they were followers rather than leaders. For instance, we had a small sled on which Ripeka and Meri would pile the stones, but I was the one who pulled the sled from the construction sites. Even in those days, although I was always slim, I was strong. Ripeka would follow my instructions but Meri was often disobedient. One time she thought she would give me a rest and pull the sled while I wasn’t looking, but she took it to the wrong place and unloaded it there. “I was only trying to help,” she said to me plaintively as I reloaded the sled. “Please, Meri, don’t try, ” I answered.

‘It took us the best part of the season and then the summer to raise Parihaka. I think one of the reasons why it happened so quickly was that Te Whiti discouraged the carving of meeting houses or any such adornment on other w’are. He was more concerned with us concentrating on food-gathering and sustaining ourselves. He also wanted to discourage any competition between the various tribal peoples who came to live with us.

‘The days turned hot, and we sweated under the burning sun. Te Whiti ordered the men to build the houses in rows and very close together. Those men were out day and night selecting good trees to cut down for all the w’are. They sawed the trunks into slabs of wood, two-handed saws they used in those days, one man at each end. When a w’are’s roof was raised, we would cheer, sing and dance in celebration!

‘My sisters and I graduated to helping the women thatch the roofs with raupo, which the men brought from the bush. Huhana was always yelling to me, “Erenora, hop onto the roof.” Men mostly did the thatching but, sometimes, they were busy on other heavier work — and Huhana knew I had good balance and was not afraid of heights. The women threw the thatch up to me and I laid it in place. After that, my sisters and I helped the women as they made the tukutuku panels for the walls of the houses: I sat on one side pushing the reeds through the panels to my sisters on the other side; they would push the reeds back and, of course, Meri’s reed kept coming through at the wrong place. Why was she so hopeless?

‘Everybody was vigorous with the work. Later, my sisters helped to make blankets, pillows and clothing, but I had no patience with such feminine tasks and preferred to work outside with the men. Te Whiti and Tohu had marked out the surrounding country for cultivations and there were a lot of fences to construct, and small roadways and pathways between them. As we worked, we sang to each other and praised God for bringing us here. There could have been no better place really. The Waitotoroa Stream was ideal as a water supply, and it would have been almost impossible to sustain ourselves without it.’

‘It must have been around this time, as autumn descended and the leaves began to fall, that Te Whiti had word from the South Island that the Reverend Johann Riemenschneider had died. Apparently, after he and his wife had left Warea in 1860, Rimene had spent two years in Nelson. Then he accepted an invitation from a society in Dunedin to do mission work among the Maori people in the city. He lived four years there, and his body was committed to the earth in Port Chalmers.

‘Te Whiti mourned the German missionary, telling us, “Rimene did not achieve great victories but he sowed the seed of God so that the harvest was sure. What more can you ask from a servant of Christ?”

‘We all said a prayer for him. Now he was forever with the Lord. And I found my own karakia for him from the German phrasebook:

‘“Selig sind die Toten. Blessed are the dead.”’

The next few years flew by. Sometimes when Erenora looked back on them, it was as if the raising of Parihaka, so that it would stand triumphant in the sun, had taken place on one long day. Of course it hadn’t, but certainly Parihaka grew as Maori fled from the British soldiers in Taranaki.

‘From 200 people we increased to 500. Word got around, you see, that Te Whiti and Tohu were building a city, a kainga like the Biblical city of Jerusalem. We therefore mushroomed to over 1,000 as refugees poured in, driven by the encirclement of Taranaki. They were all hungry and thirsty, and some were grievously wounded. Once they had been fed and recovered, however, they had to pitch in straight away — no mucking around and having a rest! The consequence was that we were building all the time, and Parihaka was quickly forced to become a large kainga.

‘Still the refugees sought us out. Sometimes we would see a cloud of dust and know they were painfully making their way to salvation. Or the rain would part like a curtain and there they were, ghost-thin, crying out to us from the space between. At night, we lit a bonfire so that the flames would show those who were searching for us. During the day, a pillar of smoke, like the sword of an angel, revealed the gateway to Eden:

‘“Here be Parihaka.”

‘And when the pilgrims arrived, nobody was turned away.’

‘Depending on our skills, Te Whiti organised the iwi into working groups to ensure a continuous food supply. Farmers tilled the cultivations mainly of potato, pumpkin, maize and taro to the north and between us and the sea. The sea, of course, remained the source of our primary sustenance; whenever nga tai o Makiri came, down we would go to harvest the kai moana as it rose to the surface of the sea. Some men even ventured in waka out to the deep water to fish, but usually we kept close to shore. You could drown so easily in those dangerous seas; the weather could change even as you were watching it.

‘At the beginning Te Whiti didn’t like us to eat meat but, rather, to use our oxen and cattle as our beasts of burden. He wanted us to be self-sufficient but later we began to run sheep, pigs and poultry.’

‘One day the villagers were all busy storing kumara and kamokamo carefully away for the winter. Huhana happened to notice that some tataraki’i, bored with helping us, were baiting each other. She gave me a shrewd look and said, “Erenora, the children have stopped chirruping and are pulling each other’s wings off. Go and teach them something.”

‘I was astonished! After all, I must have been only eleven. Te Whiti was passing by and he said, “Yes, you go, Erenora. Plenty of others can store food but not many have your brains.” My sisters were affronted by Huhana’s remark that I was “too clever” and even more by Te Whiti’s acknowledgement of it. They were practising a poi dance, their poi going tap tap tap, tap tap tap. Ripeka sniffed and said, “You may have the brains but we have the beauty.” And Meri said, “I can do anything that Erenora can do,” which was true, but she always did it wrong.

‘Now, about Te Whiti, don’t forget that he himself was not without Pakeha education and knew the value of such learning. He was a scholar, had been a church acolyte at Waikanae and Warea; later he became a teacher, and he even managed the flour mill. Both he and Tohu were good organisers too. As Parihaka grew even larger, they were the ones who promulgated the regulations every person had to comply with; we all knew our civic duties. As well, they organised the daily and weekly timetables by which we conducted our work.’