SIGN OF THE WHITE FEATHERS

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 225, 21 September 1940, Page 6 (Supplement)

SIGN OF THE WHITE FEATHERS

(Continued from last week) A Visit to Te Whiti. All these proceedings are recorded in the histories, and I need not go further into the sorry tale of the unavailing peace campaign. It is pleasanter to recall Parihaka as it was some twenty years later, when I visited the venerable Te Whiti, at the invitation of chiefs of his patriot party, and was received with the hospitality for which the Prophet of the Mountain was always noted. The old fire had died down; Parihaka was a smaller town, but a measure of the former excitement returned at the periodical festivities and gatherings to hear the great leader speak again. I passed many parties of Maoris on the roads, families in bullock wagons, leisurely making for the meeting on the 17th of March. - That was a kind of sacred day in Parihaka; it was the day in 1860 on which the first shots were fired in the long Waitara War, the beginning of all the trouble of Taranaki— and also of Waikato in the Sixties.. - Te Whiti and his family lived in a large house built in the pakeha mode on a mound overlooking the town. The first people I met were the prophet's jolly - looking daughter and her husband, Tare Waitara. Presently the grey old chief came up, and sat with me on the verandah. The korero that iolJowed was joined in by one and then another of the eiders until there was a cheerful party, asking and answering questions. Te Whiti pointed to this historic place and that; one was the hill on which the artillery in 1881mounted a field gun commanding the town, ready to pound it in case of a sudden rebellion.

The Russo-Japanese war was being fought at the time of my visit, I remember, and Te Whiti asked for the latest news about it. It was rather surprising to find these people taking so much interest in it; one after another of the older men came up to listen. Te Whiti took the side' of the Russians. His opinion of the Japanese was brief and severe: "He iwi kohuru" ("A treacherous people.")

OUR TELLER OF MAORI TALES CONCLUDES THE ARTICLE BEGUN LAST WEEK

He did not say why he had come to that conclusion—with which the other men ail empliati* cully agreed. But I thought it could be attributed to the fact that Japan was at that time (1904) friendly with Britain—and no friend of the British Government could be otherwise than treacherous. An oblique kick at us! Te Whiti's dining hall was a patriarchal institution. All the men at his periodical meetings had tlieir meals there at the long baronial table, at the foot of which was a box for the offerings of visitors. Everyone as he rose to go dropped go me money in the lid-slit. There was no fixed rate, but the contributions must have been on a generous scale. Mine was to the limit I could afford, or more; I observed that the man before me dropped in two banknotes. I don't suppose that was repeated at every meal! It was not only these offerings that supported the prophet's little king-

dom and the lordly meals. Money and food were sent from all districts where the "raukura" was the popular badge. The Taranaki Poi. That evening there was a poi practice, for a series of poi song-and-dance ceremonies at the coming meeting on the St. Patrick's Day of tragic memory. The thirty or more women and girls who appeared before the good old chief for hie inspection and approval were the most expert in Taranaki. Te Whiti asked me to sit with him and compare them with others I had seen in the Maori districts of the island. Certainly they were the most truly Maori of them all. No pakeha instruments there, no ukulele, not even a jews' harp. The human voice was sufficient. How they chanted, those earnestfaced women of Taranaki; their white-plumed black hair tossing, as they swayed and turned in perfect harmony! They did not chorus love-songs; it "was a high semi-religious rite that poi. They chanted old historical songs; they recited the prophet's exhortations done , into poi time. For two hours I watched and listened to that poi; and the patriarch was a delight to see. His beloved poi seemed everything to him; he heard again the ancient chants of his ancestors and the story of his. troubled career, culminating in the invasion of Parihaka when he was reviled as a madman. Peace, peace was still the burden of his poiparty's service of song; and on his burial day the poi-girls, with their dark eyes glittering and their white feathers tossing, would chant his patriot poems over the silent form of their ariki.