'The Food Basket of Rakaihautu': Taumutu

Tu Tangata, Issue 35, 1 April 1987, Page 28

'The Food Basket of Rakaihautu': Taumutu

ONGARA O M U A

Dedicated to Riki Ellison

Tu Tangata features this issue, part one of ‘The food basket of Rakaihautu: Taumutu’. This feature looks at Te Waihora (also known as Lake Ellesmere) and Maori settlement there at Taumutu. It traces the time up to one of its most outstanding people, Hori Kerei who was an MP from 1871 to 1905.

Part two will trace his time until the present day when Te Waihora is under threat from commercial exploitation and the food basket is now much depleted. This feature is just one chapter in a book compiled by the New Zealand Historic Places Trust called The Past Today. The publisher is Pacific Publishers and the price is $49.95.

Ko te pae tawhiti, whaia kia tata. Ko te pae tata, whakamaua kia tata.

Seek out the distant horizon and cherish those you attain.

Lake Ellesmere, the large body of shallow water which laps against the southwestern flank of Banks Peninsula, is known to the Maori as Te Waihora, “water spread out”. On the southern edge of the lake, near where for several hundred years it has periodically been opened to the sea at the narrowest point of Kaitorete, the spit which separates it from the sea, is the small settlement of Taumutu, a place long of importance in the history of Te Waipounamu. The name Taumutu comes from one of the names of the original pa in the area, Te Taumutu, also known as Te Pa o te Ika Mutu. Its site has been lost to coastal erosion. Two older traditional names for Te Waihora are Te Kete Ika o Rakaihautu and Te Kete Ika o Tutekawa, “the foodbasket of Rakaihautu” and “the foodbasket of Tutekawa”. Rakaihautu was the commander of the Uruao canoe which sailed down the east coast of the South Island about A.D. 900. Tutekawa was the father of Te Rangitamau, one of the first Ngai Tahu chiefs to make his base at Taumutu. These traditional names indicate Te Waihora’s importance as one of the South Island’s greatest mahingakai. Traditionally, and into modern times, Taumutu has gained its standing from the access people living there have to the abundant food resources of the lake. In or on the waters of the lake

itself were tuna (eel), patiki (flounder), awa (mullet) and water birds. Tuna were specially abundant and more than 33 names identified different types of tuna according to the different ways they could be preserved. The tuna were taken in hinaki or, in huge numbers, by lowering the level of the lake. Stories of eeling practices of the past are preserved in old waiata, oriori and pao. Flounder were taken by digging trenches into the shingle of Kaitorete. Duck and other water birds were taken in great drives when they were moulting and unable to fly. From streams which flow into the lake were taken uaua (whitebait), kanakana or piharau (the lamprey eel) and koura (fresh-water crayfish). Many of these foods were dried and stored for winter, including uaua, manga and tuna. The tuna were dried on whata, large wooden frames erected on the lakeside. Besides these resources of food, raupo, wiwi and harakeke grew in abundance in the swamps on the lake

margin and on the sandy spit were large areas of pingao, a native sedge used for traditional crafts. A special black mud (paruparu) was used to dye fibres. A lake as important for its food and other resources as Te Waihora had to ave a guardian. Te Waihora’s was Tuterakihaunoa, who lived in a cave at Whakamatakiuru (Fishermen s Point), Taumutu. Tuterakihaunoa was a protective taniwha who preserved the lake as a source °f f°°d and any breach of respect by any of the tribes occupying l around the lake was fatal. To the area , s na(ural resources> the Maori added , he im rtant crop ku . mara . A Taumutu are the remains of some of the southern-most kumara dens in New Zealand ' In traditional times there was a well organised round of food-gathering from the pa and kainga of Taumutu which kept the local communities

supplied and provided commodities for exchange with, or presentation to, other communities in Te Waipounamu. Before the arrival of Europeans, the spit, Kaitorete, was a major route south from populous Banks Peninsula and points further north (Kaiapohia and Kaikoura), south towards Murihiku. This route avoided the swamps around Te Waihora, then much more extensive than they are today. The many middens to be found on Kaitorete are evidence of its importance as a route of travel. Taumutu, at Kaitorete’s southern end, was a strategic point on this “southern highway” of earlier times. Because it also had access west across the Canterbury Plains and over passes of the Southern A ps to the Poutini Coast (Westland) it was a centre of greenstone working, probably second only to Kaiapohia, north of the Waimakariri River, which enjoyed more direct access to easier passes across the Southern Alps.

Being a place of such importance in traditional times, it is not surprising that many archaeological remains ovens, middens and burials dating from moa hunter times are to be found at and near Taumutu today. The first “archaeological” investigation of Taumutu was made in 1868 by Julius von Haast. He recognised that Taumutu was a place of long occupation. Modern archaeological investigations of a moa hunter midden at the Rakaia Rivermouth, just south of Taumutu, have dated occupation of the area to, conservatively, 550-600 years ago. The traditional history of Taumutu begins at the time the Ngati Mamoe kainga there became caught up in the Ngai Tahu “conquest” of the South Island. (There was intermarriage as well as conquest during the Ngai Tahu occupation of the South Island and many South Island Maori to this day proudly claim Ngati Mamoe as well as Ngai Tahu descent.) The pa of three Ngai Tahu heroes, Te Rangitamau, Te Ruahikihiki and Moki 11, were established at Taumutu. Members of the local hapu to this day refer to themselves as Ngati Ruahikihiki or Ngati Moki.

Te Rangitamau, one of the earliest Ngai Tahu chiefs to make his headquarters at Taumutu, crossed Brownings Pass and by defeating Ngati Wairangi in battle at Lake Kaniere, took the Poutini Coast, and its greenstone, for Ngai Tahu. Te Rangitamau’s pa has been washed away by coastal erosion affecting the shore south of Kaitorete. (The remains of burials uncovered by this erosion have been respectfully reinterred in the graveyard of the Hone Wetere Church.) The pa of Te Ruahikihiki and of Moki II remain, their surviving earthworks guarding the Hone Wetere Church and the Ngati Moki runanga hall. The low earth walls of the old'pa rise today out of dry land, but at the time the pa were built the lake’s high-water level was more than 2m higher than the level at which the lake is opened to the sea today. The pa, when built, would have occupied tongues of dry land surrounded by swamp and open water and so been easy to defend.

In the early nineteenth century, Taumutu was involved in the Kai Huanga feud, a bitter dispute within Ngai Tahu, and its population was much depleted by the time Europeans first began arriving in Canterbury. The land of Canterbury passed into European hands with the Kemp Purchase of 1848. Reserves were set aside at Taumutu, but they were relatively small

areas of poorer land, close to the lake edge and so subject to flooding. The Taumutu Native Commonage Act of 1883 added some 283 ha to reserves in the Taumutu area to support the native residents of the vicinity, but already by then the pressure on the Maori community from European farmers occupying the surrounding land and from European fishermen congregating at Fishermen’s Point was strong. Kainga remained at Taumutu through the late nineteenth century and turn of the century photographs show parts of the old pa and kainga at Taumutu still occupied. But by then the largest settlement in the Taumutu district was at Fishermen’s Point, a fishing community of up to 250 people of very varied nationalities. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century a substantial commercial fishery developed on Te Waihora. The fishermen caught eel, flounder and “herrings” (yellow-eyed mullet). They built their huts on a landing reserve which had been gazetted by Canterbury’s Provincial Government in 1867. (The status of this land is still a source of ill-feeling among local Maori, who feel it should be returned to the commonage of which it was part.) The community at Fishermen’s Point flourished and in the early twentieth century, Taumutu’s New Year’s Day regattas, held at the point, drew crowds of people from all through the

Ellesmere district. But as European farmers prospered on the farmlands of Ellesmere and as European fishermen exploited the rich resources of Te Kete Ika o Rakaihautu, the Maori kainga declined. Many Taumutu Maori drifted away, to work on local farms, to Southbridge, Leeston and even further away. Today the sites of the nineteenth-century kainga are bare paddocks, although their locations remain known to those Maori in the Ellesmere district who trace their descent from those who lived in the kainga. It was at this time of decline, for the Maori people as a whole as well as for the Maori community at Taumutu, that a Maori of national standing and influence entered Taumutu’s history. Hori Kerei Taiaroa, Member of the House of Representatives for Southern Maori 1871-78 and 1881-85 and Member of the Legislative Council 1879-80 and 1885-1905, decided, in the late 1870 s, to move to Taumutu. H. K. Taiaroa was a member of the influential Maori “gentry” which emerged in the late nineteenth century and which played an important role in straddling the divide between the still more or less separate Maori and Pakeha worlds. Taiaroa is a key figure in the story of Maori adjustments during the difficult years of the colonisation of New Zealand by Europeans. To be continued in Tu Tangata June/ July 1987.