Te Rarawa Hector Matthews

Te Rarawa unlike most other iwi in Aotearoa, does not derive from one eponymous ancestor or one major migratory waka. The name Te Rarawa is some 15 - 18 generations old and was given to a collective group of hapü sometimes referred to as Te Aewa. The origin of the name is recounted below by Ngäkuru Pene, a respected elder of Te Rarawa:

An ope taua of Ngäti Whätua had come from Kaipara and killed a very high born woman of the Te Aewa people named Te Ripo, by casting her off a cliff to her death.

In search of utu a number of hapü, all descendants of Rähiri, sent an ope of their own against Ngäti Whätua. The descendants of Rähiri arrived at Kaipara, at Te Tauhara, there were no people there. Ngäti Whätua had crossed to the other side of the Kaipara, to their pä at Okika. Only one person remained, an old woman named Toko. The Kaipara waters were rough for Ngäti Whätua had said karakia over the sea so that the descendants of Rähiri could not cross it.

A Ngäti Whätua priest had died and he was lying upon a stage. Toko, the old woman, was guarding him. The war party who had come looking for utu, knew there was no mana in killing a old kuia. so they went to the wähi tapu of Ngäti Whätua. There they exhumed their dead chiefs, boiled them and consumed them to get the mana of Ngäti Whätua and extract the utu they desired. The priest lying on the stage was burnt in the fire and his ashes were scooped up and scattered on the water. The sea at once became calm.

Then the old woman on guard came out with the saying "kätahi anö te iwi kairarawa, ko Te Rarawa kai whare!" (This is the first iwi to consume from sacred places. Te Rarawa, consumers of houses of the dead). The explanation of this old woman's words is that these were the first people to eat from burial grounds. To eat the sacred houses of paramount chiefs.

Following this incident the people of this ope, those descendants of Rähiri, predominantly from the hapü of Ngäti Tümamao and Ngäti Te Aranui, become known as Te Rarawa and frequently referred to as "the desecrators of tapu". Te Rarawa have never seen this as an insult but rather as a sign of their mana that their atua have always been powerful enough to overcome the tapu of other iwi that choose to call them desecrators.

Kairarawa is an ancient practice of acquiring mana from the vanquished by consuming parts of their bodies. It was an act of defiance and humiliation towards the conquered in a conflict and served to assert the mana of the victors. It was not an act of nourishment for the victor but rather a method of gaining the mana that lay within the flesh of their enemy.

According to the well respected Northland kaumätua Mäori Marsden, kairarawa was a rite used to replenish one’s mana from a defeated enemy. Rarawa in this context means with violence or force and is a term used to denote the forces that underlie the whole range of divine powers implied in the terms "ihi". "mauri", "tapu" and "mana". Kairarawa denoted the consumption of the life force and the psychic and spiritual forces of the enemy, which replenished one’s own powers. By eating the enemy’s flesh the victors were consuming the defeated person’s mana and ihi, thereby replenishing their own. In one sense the gods were deserting those who had been defeated and aligning themselves with the victors.

Thus the event which led to an entire iwi being named after such a rite is a clear example of the acquisition of mana and specifically mana atua.

This history clearly shapes the identity of Te Rarawa in perhaps a stronger way than any other event of historical or contemporary times for many reasons:

· It establishes an ancient source of mana atua asserted by Te Rarawa to extract utu from an enemy.

· It defines their name and in many ways defines their character as an iwi.

· It set them apart from the other the descendants of Rähiri in Northland, of which most grew to become Ngä Puhi.

· It gave them an air of confidence (as distinct from arrogance) about their ability to overcome tapu imposed by other iwi through the mana of their atua.

· It afforded them an aura of fear for generations afterwards thus protecting them from the encroachment of other larger and often ruthless iwi, looking for political expansion.

· It provides for its members today a uniqueness of identity that again sets them apart and allows them to assert and maintain their own mana regardless of their relatively small size.

References

Hector Matthews Research paper

Ngakuru Pene

Maori Marsden