The 1840s were a tough time for Kāi Tahu.
A lack of resistance to European introductions, from measles to muskets, from alcohol to sexually transmitted diseases, had reduced their numbers, Te Rauparaha had sacked Kaiapohia and Kāi Tahu’s own internecine "Kai Huaki" feud — which can be loosely translated as "eat relations" — had all combined to scatter the populace.
The iwi was now mainly living in smaller whānau groupings with just their children, aunts, uncles and in-laws, where whaling and farming was helping them to survive, boosted by the ability to trade any surplus with incoming people.
The people could be termed morehu: survivors.
Wiremu Potiki, a rangatira of the Ōtākou headland, lived with his whānau at the Te Ruatiti settlement on the Otago Peninsula. This was before the days that the first marae was built at Ōtākou.
Potiki made a living by running cattle, pigs and horses and dealing in them. He had land in the Otago Heads reserves. The food the chiefs and their followers produced was traded with Europeans at a time when the settlers’ gardens were not yet established.
L Langlands, writing in the Otago Daily Times in 1910, reminisces: "There was plenty of life in the long slip, now known as the sandhills — this was before any portion had been blown on to Harington Point, as the following kaika, each some distance apart, were there: Pukekura and Te Rua-a-titi (chief Potiki); Te Rauone (chief Kaikoarare, generally known as "Big Fellow");
Tahakopa (chief Koroko); O Mate and Te Waipepeke (chief Te Raki). Each chief had his own small following. The men were principally engaged in fishing, while the women attended to the garden, as well as the stripping flax with shells and making it into mats and kits. They found a market for their produce at Dunedin, where at high water, it was delivered from their boats at the conflux of the Kaituna Creek ... ."
French explorer Dumont D’Urville gives an unflattering account of Ōtākou life, describing potato plots and cabbages, turnips and lettuce grown by Māori women and the taverns selling "the vilest of liquor" at a "high figure".
This was on March 30, 1840. D’Urville doesn’t mention whether Potiki was there at the time, but on April 3, D’Urville crossed the bar "under the direction of a local pilot" and sailed for Akaroa.
Did the "local pilot" hitch a lift north? We don’t know, but by May 4, 1840, Potiki was at Queen Charlotte Sound, where he signed a copy of te Tiriti o Waitangi with other Kāi Tahu chiefs.
On July 31, 1844, the Kāi Tahu tribe sold the Ōtākou Block of about 160,000ha reaching from the Otago Harbour to Nugget Point, to the New Zealand Company for £2400.
The deed was signed by 25 chiefs, but not before a promise was made that a tenth of the land sold would be held by the company in trust for the future welfare of the tribe, as had been the case in other purchases by the New Zealand Company.
The instructions as to "tenths" by Captain J J Symonds, lands purchase officer, conveniently disappeared.
Of the vendors who signed, Pohatu (Kingi Ruru Pohatu) was the father of my grandmother and Wiremu Potiki was my grandmother’s great grandfather.
The rate of payment, one and a-half pence per acre, represents $2.80 per hectare in 2023 money. The petitioning of Parliament for redress has continued to no avail, even though royal commissions have reported in favour of the natives.
On the other hand, at the time of the sale of the Ōtākou Block — as they allege in their petitions to Parliament in the years 1874 and 1875 — the sellers urged Messrs Wakefield and Symonds to pay them a large price for their land. Wakefield was not willing to do so, and the tribe then proposed to drop the sale.
Wakefield continued to urge them and, thinking that it was likely that he would not be able to obtain that land, he proposed that there should be one piece for the Maoris and one piece for the Europeans, besides the lands set aside for the Maoris alone. Wakefield and his companions explained this to the tribespeople, and further explained it while they were talking by making a drawing upon paper to make it clear: "1 2 3 4 — Number 1 is a piece for the Europeans, number 2 for the Maoris, number 3 for the Europeans, number 4 for the Maoris," and so on until the whole of the Ōtākou Block was taken up.
This narrative implies that rather than "tenths", the negotiators were at one stage discussing "halvesies" for the sharing of land. That would have had an interesting outcome.
The New Zealand Company received full title in 1847, paving the way for the Dunedin colony to be founded in 1848.
Potiki’s role in the huge influx of organised European settlement was instrumental: he was the first pilot on the Otago Harbour. He guided the settler ships over the treacherous Otago bar, through huge waves and tricky currents before the days of moles and lighthouses.
H.O. Bowman, in Port Chalmers, Gateway to Otago, writes: "The Maoris were certainly well acquainted with the intricacies of the harbour channels, and one of them named Potiki was for many years the recognised pilot at the heads before the days of Driver.".
Potiki’s name carries on in the name of Port Otago’s pilot boat.
Kāi Tahu people were to be marginalised once European settlement became a bit more established, with conflicting messages from two conflicting administrations in their own power struggle: the mainly English central government of Governor George Grey and the Scots administration of the Otago provincial settlement led by Captain William Cargill.
From Cargill, from the New Zealand Company, from the Government’s South Island land purchase agent Walter Baldock Durant Mantell, from the Anglican Church and the Presbyterian Church — Ōtākou Māori were repeatedly given the expectation of accommodation and an area of reserved land to trade in Dunedin which was never fulfilled at all.
— Marlene McDonald (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Huirapa ki Arowhenua, Kāti Taoka) is a Dunedin mana whenua local government representative.
