Hariata Rongomai

Hariata Hongi, lived part of her life at Tautoro, the heart of Sadler’s, and Ngāpuhi’s, world, and another part at Kaikohe, only a short distance away, in northern New Zealand. She was of particular significance in the Ngāpuhi political realm of the nineteenth century, but her role as a wahine toa, a warrior woman, has received little or no acknowledgement.... Hōne Heke and Hariata were both active political figures in northern New Zealand during the 1840s; their networks encompassed traditional iwi communities, as well as governors, administrators and missionaries. While Hōne Heke’s letters to governors FitzRoy and Grey, along with other officials and settlers, have been quoted and used by historians throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, research demonstrates that Hariata contributed to these and may have been solely responsible for some, as she herself stated... Hariata Hongi’s life spanned almost the length of the nineteenth century. She was the daughter of two significant Ngāpuhi leaders, the chief Hongi Hika and his primary wife, Turikatuku. Matenga (Marsden) was her first given name, noting the presence of Samuel Marsden, the founder of the first Church Missionary Society (CMS) mission to New Zealand, at the pā where she was born on either 9 or 10 January 1815; another of Hariata’s names was Rongo. Her mana, inherited from both her parents, was greater than that of either of her husbands, Hōne Heke and Arama Karaka Pī.7 Sir George Grey considered that ‘it was from her rank that Heke had, in a great measure, derived his influence.’ Source: Portions from The ‘Illustrious’ Hariata Hongi and the Authorship of Hōne Heke’s Letters by Angela Middleton, published in the New Zealand Journal of History, 52, 2 (2018).