New curriculum will bring raw history to life

• Published date: 13 February 2021
• Publication title: Weekend Herald

Auckland teachers, attentive to her, should be taking keen interest in a tribal dispute that came to the High Court this week. Ngāti Whatua of Ōrākei are contesting the claims of the Marutūahu Confederation to a couple of sites in the city.

Not many Aucklanders may have heard of the Marutūahu, though many have been inside their ancestral meeting house in Auckland Museum. I’d never heard of them until 2010 when I was doing research for a Herald project called “Auckland — Our Story”, published as five booklet inserts in the paper that year.

The confederation consists of four related tribes now based in Thames but once having dominion on both sides of the Hauraki Gulf, including the eastern half of the Auckland isthmus. They are by no means the only iwi who lived on the isthmus at various times before a hapu of Ngāti Whatua moved from the Kaipara to Ōrākei around 1740, just a century before the Treaty of Waitangi.

Even the Crown seemed not to have heard of the other tribes when it reached a Treaty settlement with Ngāti Whatua. The others objected strenuously and the settlement had been redone to provide for them by the time we did the Herald series.

It provided a brief introduction to them but I thought it fair to invite Ngāti Whatua and one other to tell their stories at greater length. The one chosen, for no particular reason, was Marutūahu.

I went to Thames to meet their designated writer of the piece, William Peters. He took me into a room where a map of the Auckland region, the Gulf and the Western Bay of Plenty covered a wall. There he proceeded to tell a story that began with the arrival of the waka Tainui and continued through the centuries, giving meaning to the names of many places around Auckland today.

He did not speak like an academic or a venerable kaumātua. He seemed a regular working guy, entrusted with a history that had been handed down through generations to him. It was pure oral history. He spoke for hours, with not a scrap of paper in sight.

It was a story of battles and conquests and, early in the course of it, he found it necessary to explain that when a war party found a village in its path, neutrality was not an option for those living there. If they did not side with the taua, they were killed — men, women...