NOTORIOUS TE KOOTI.

Taranaki Daily News, 8 February 1922, Page 7

NOTORIOUS TE KOOTI.

AND HIS RINGATU CHURCH. PROPOSED EDOWMENT WITHDRAWN (From Our Parliamentary Reporter.) Wellington, Feb. 4. A clause with interesting historical associations vanished from the Native “Washing-Up” Bill to-day after the attention of the Legislative Council had been drawn to its effect. The clause, which had been passed by the House, vested in trustees for the Ringatu Church some six hundred acres of land known as Wainui in the parish of Waimana, Bay of Plenty. The Hon. J. P. Gow objected to the clause. He explained that Ringatu Church was a native religious sect and that the clause proposed to give this sect an endowment. Sir Francis Bell remarked that he had been under the impression that the church was merely a building. Mr. Gow said that the church mentioned was a sect, not merely a building. It represented a form of religious belief held by a small section of the Maori race. The property had formerly been occupied by Te Kooti, the notorious Hau Hau, who settled there because it was unsafe for him to return to the Poverty Bay district after he had perpetrated a massacre. .Te Kooti had been a cause of much unrest and rebellion among the natives, and he had sought to establish a religion which would assist in cutting off the Maoris from the Europeans. Scraps of the Old Testament and odds and ends of native superstition went to the making of his creed. The land mentioned in the clause had been given to Te Kooti as a home, not as an endowment for his religion, and it ought to go to his descendants, not to the church.

Sir Francis Bell agreed that the Council ought to be cautious about endowing a faith that might be pernicious, and the Council struck out the clause.