MAORIS’ SACRED BURIAL GROUND

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 138, 1 September 1927, Page 9

MAORIS’ SACRED BURIAL GROUND

USE AS MOTOR TRACK PETITION FROM MANGERE (THE SUN’S Parliamentary Reporter .) WELLINGTON, Wednesday. The desire of an enterprising pakeha to form a motor-racing track on land at Pukaki, near Mangere, which has long been a Maori burial ground, has resulted in the presentation of a petition to Parliament by Maoris interested, in the name of Kahupake Rotatau, of Mangere. The petition, which was introduced by| Dr. Pomare to-day, begins; “An injustice has been inflicted upon my people in connection with the burial ground where our relatives are buried even from the times of our ancestors, situated at Pukaki, near Mangere, and Manurewa.

“The land was included by mistake in a sale to pakehas, who treated the Maors with courtesy and civility, but when the present owner bought the land trouble began, because he desired to exhume the dead so as to form the land into a motor-racing track. “A large number of Maoris, who were the victims of the severe influenza epidemic of 1918, are buried there, and as the exhumation of bodies of persons who died from influenza is prohibited by law, they find it impossible to exhume their dead, nor do they agree to exhume the remains and bury them in another place, because it would be impossible to gather up all their ashes.

“The Maoris desire legislation authorising them to buy the burial ground on a valuation basis, to be decided upon by the Native Land Court, so that it shall remain sacred for all time.”