THE MAN & THE MANA
Te Rauparaha’s footprints cover much of the country, from the west coast of the North Island down to the east coast of the South. His haka, Ka Mate, thunders across rugby fields around the world.
Yet his story, 125 pages of neat copperplate writing in te reo Māori penned by his son Tamihana Te Rauparaha, has been quietly shelved – or wilfully ignored – for close to a century.
However, a new translation by Ross Calman is a riveting account drawn from the stories of Te Rauparaha himself, those of other Ngāti Toa elders and Tamihana’s own memories.
Beginning with Te Rauparaha’s birth in Tahāroa near Kawhia Harbour around 1770, it maps the migration of Ngāti Toarangatira (Ngāti Toa) down to the Wellington region during the turbulent fallout of the Hingakākā battle between Ngāti Toa and Waikato and Ngāti Maniapoto tribes. In a historic shifting of tribal boundaries, the migrating group makes new alliances with the Ngāti Awa people of northern Taranaki and Ngāti Raukawa, the tribe of
