Human Conflict Project

All events · Empire, Clearance and Removal

The Ploughing Campaign and the Invasion of Parihaka

1879–1881 · Oceania

Displacement Territory Seized Sexual Violence
Displaced
1,600
New Zealand government records and the Waitangi Tribunal's Taranaki inquiry document several hundred ploughmen and fence-builders arrested from 1879 and held without trial in South Island gaols under special legislation; about 1,600 Armed Constabulary and volunteers entered Parihaka on 5 November 1881, and most of the settlement's residents, numbering roughly 1,500-2,000, were dispersed to other districts under a pass system, with houses and cultivations destroyed.
Share of the population affected
80%
of the residents of Parihaka at the time of the November 1881 invasion, 1881

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What happened

At Parihaka in Taranaki, Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi built a community that resisted the survey and sale of confiscated land by non-violent means: from 1879 their followers ploughed settlers' paddocks and rebuilt fences across surveyed lines. The government responded by arresting several hundred men and holding them without trial in South Island prisons under successive Maori Prisoners Acts, where some died. On 5 November 1881 about 1,600 Armed Constabulary and volunteers marched on the settlement, met by children singing and by people sitting silently on the marae; the leaders were arrested and tried, houses were demolished, crops and livestock destroyed and most residents were dispersed, with those permitted to return required to carry passes. Evidence presented to the Waitangi Tribunal's Taranaki inquiry, whose report was published in 1996, included accounts of rapes committed during the occupation. In 2017 the Crown signed Te Kawenata o Rongo with the people of Parihaka, apologising formally for the invasion and its consequences and providing a reconciliation package, later given legislative form.

Parties

The New Zealand government imprisoned Maori protesters without trial and invaded the pacifist settlement of Parihaka in Taranaki

Disputed

Nineteenth-century official accounts presented the invasion as the peaceful enforcement of law; the Waitangi Tribunal and the 2017 Crown apology accept that it involved unlawful imprisonment, destruction of property and serious abuses.

The denominator

Parihaka was the largest Maori settlement in the country, with a resident population usually put at 1,500-2,000 and several thousand present on the day of the invasion. About 1,600 armed constabulary and volunteers entered on 5 November 1881; most residents were dispersed to their home districts, houses were destroyed and cultivations laid waste, and hundreds of ploughmen and fencers had already been arrested and held without trial in South Island jails.

The figure of about 1,600 is used in the sources both for the constabulary force that entered Parihaka and for the residents dispersed, so numerator and denominator here are close by coincidence as much as by measurement.

Where the baseline comes from

On the death toll

There was no mass killing: the settlement did not resist. Some of the ploughmen imprisoned without trial in South Island gaols died in custody, a number not precisely recorded, and deaths followed from the destitution caused by the destruction of homes and crops.

Documented forms of violence

Arbitrary DetentionDestruction of PropertySexual Violence

The Waitangi Tribunal's Taranaki inquiry and the 2017 Crown apology record imprisonment without trial, the destruction of houses and cultivations, and evidence of rapes during the occupation.

Formal findings

Movements mapped

Countries touched, on present-day borders

New Zealand

Sources

← EarlierThe Famines of British India, 1876-1902 Later →The Putumayo Rubber Atrocities