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This extract originally appeared in Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga: The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2024) on page 238.
This extract was authored by Rebecca Rice.
Te Ua’s personal flag, the uppermost flag in this image, has a red border and features a black trefoil, two Greek omegas, one red and one black, and the word ‘Kenana’ followed by a semicolon on a white ground. A predominance of red in Māori flag designs was indicative of rank and mana.1 The trefoil device could be derived from playing cards and employed to represent the trinity, demonstrating the links of Pai Mārire to Christianity. The word ‘Kenana’ means Canaan and implies that Te Ua, like other nineteenth-century Maori prophets – Te Kooti and Te Whiti – identified the plight of the Māori with that of the Jews in the Old Testament.2 The meaning of the semicolon is less clear, but perhaps connects to the engagement of Māori with language and print technology in the early colonial period.3
1 Garth Sutherland Woodhouse, ‘Maori flags’, MS-Papers-2470-07, Alexander Turnbull Library.
2 Paul Clark, ‘Hauhau’: The Pai Marire search for Maori identity (Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1975), pp. 78, 89.
3 See Peter Cleave, From the Anthropology Conference: Essays on culture and society (Campus Press, Palmerston North, 1998).