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Overview
The mere pounamu Whakaaewhenua belonged to the Puketapu chief Rawiri Waiaua. Waiaua, his brother Paora and three other members of Puketapu were killed by fellow Puketapu clansmen on the 3 August 1854 over a dispute about the rights to sell land.
The killings were conducted on the order of another Puketapu chief named Te Waitere Katatore.
Waiaua and Katatore disagreed over the selling of a portion of the Puketapu block to the government.
Katatore was opposed to the selling of Maori land to non-Maori, the basis of what was to become known as the Taranaki Land League.
Local settler W.K. Hulke spoke with Waiaua on the morning of the incident and subsequently heard the gunshots shortly afterwards. Hulse immediately went to the scene where he found four of Waiaua's party dead, and twelve more, including Waiaua himself, badly wounded. Waiaua gave his mere pounamu into Hulse’s care and asked him to secret it away, warning him that Katatore would return to seek it out. Hulse took the mere home and hid it in his mattress when Katatore and his followers burst in to his house demanding the mere. They searched the house but never found it.
Whakaae-whenua was later presented to Rawiri Waiaua’s son by Hulke at meeting between Puketapu and Native Lands Commissioner Sir Donald McLean.
Two other murders, the killing of Rimene of Ngāti Ruanui, and later in 1858 that of Katatore, who was ambushed in retaliation for Waiaua, triggered a series of violent retaliatory inter-tribal feuds that eventually collided with the ongoing political tensions around Māori land and resulted in the violent conflagration that was the Taranaki Land Wars.
Whakaae-whenua was later presented to district land purchase commissioner Robert Parris by two elder relatives of Rawiri Waiaua named Karepa and Haena who stated that it had been promised to Ihaia Te Kirikumara as payment for the killing of the Katatore. But Karepa and Haena now feared to hand Whakaae-whenua over in case it escalated hostilities and reprisal attack. Parris agreed on the condition that he would consult Ihaia and seek his approval. Ihaia consented on the understanding that it would remain with Parris. Parris retained the mere for the remainder of his life.
On one occasion Rawiri Waiaua’s widow visited Parris to see the mere. “I put it into her hands, and she lay down on the floor with it on her breast, weeping and sorrowing in true Maori fashion.”
The name Whakaae-whenua is probably a contraction of ‘whakaae ki te whenua’, or ‘agree’ or ‘consent to the land’, a reference to his position on consenting to sell land to the government.
Sources:
Taranaki Herald 28 October 1906
In 1903 Robert Parris wrote an article, which was subsequently printed as a booklet, called A Narrative of Some Native Troubles in Taranaki from 1854 to 1859.