86 Maranga Mai! of water and food. (Riseborough, 2002, p. 172; Binney, 2011). In less than three weeks, the Police destroyed Parihaka (Scott, 1984, p. 130). The leaders, Te Whiti and Tohu were arrested and held without trial until 1883 (Binney, 2011). Extended detention without charge or trial was a breach of habeas corpus, so the Crown passed special legislation to allow for their indefinite imprisonment on the basis of preventing them from doing harm (Binney, 2011; see also Scott, 1984, p. 64). The government awarded some of the Taranaki confiscated lands, including around Parihaka, to individuals within the constabulary itself, transforming more than a few into landed gentry: My great-grandfather and his wife eventually controlled 412 acres of Taranaki land. The three farms they acquired allowed my greatgrandparents to transform themselves from poor Irish migrants into settler landowners. This extraordinary economic and social transformation in a single generation was based upon land that the colonial state had taken from other people (Shaw, 2021). The wider history of the seizure of land and suppression of rangatiratanga Māori in Taranaki disturbingly includes, not only scorched earth tactics and land taking, but also payment for bounties on Māori heads, torture and rape. To prevent these matters from being raised against the Crown, Parliament passed the Indemnity Act (1882) retrospectively granting “immunity from prosecution for any Pākehā who engaged in preserving peace or had committed any ‘unexpected act’ on the West Coast of Taranaki” (Smith, 2021). Dick Scott published the first accounts of these atrocities in The Parihaka Story in the mid-1950s, the predecessor to his later work, Ask That Mountain (Scott, 1984). Fearing that “…sympathy from Pākehā for the struggles of Māori might prolong Māori organisation rather than work towards its disappearance”, the Crown actively sought to discredit his work. (Hill, 2009, p. 29). Minister of Māori Affairs, Ernest Corbett, himself a farmer on lands confiscated in Taranaki, instructed the Department of Māori Affairs to find factual errors to discredit the book (Hill, 2009, p. 29): This was white supremacy in action; a white man ordering the whitewashing erasure of an act of white violence from which the white man enjoyed a position of white privilege both on the land and in the white government now protected from the non-white gaze of others (Taonui, 2021). Maungapōhatu (1916) Huge tracts of Tūhoe’s most fertile lands were seized as punishment in 1866 (New Zealand Gazette, in Binney, 2009, p. 102). Tūhoe argued the confiscations were punitive, designed both to severely impair their Tūhoe economy, and subjugate Te Urewera to Crown authority (Waitangi Tribunal, 2009, pp. 162-3). The prophet Rua Kēnana Hepetipa emerged in this context. He established a community of followers at Maungapōhatu promoting Tūhoe self-determination (Binney, Chaplin, and Wallace, 1996; Derby, 2009). Kēnana opposed Crown intrusions into Tūhoe affairs and homeland, especially the government’s “aggressive” purchase of land in Te Urewera and under the Urewera District Native Reserve Act (1896), which facilitated an exclusive Crown right to alienate Tūhoe lands (Binney, 2009, pp. 399, 579). Frustrated at Kēnana blockading government attempts to purchase land , in 1916 the government fabricated a case against him to force an arrest (Binney, 2009, pp. 579–80; Derby, 2009, pp. 76–7). What followed was a massive police assault on Maungapōhatu on 2 April 1916, when 57 armed militia invaded the small community to arrest Kēnana (Derby, 2009, p. 79; Binney, Chaplin & Wallace, 1996, p. 93). In the frenzy that unfolded, Kēnana’s son, Toko, was killed by one of the commanding officers and the village was plundered (Binney, 2009, pp. 587–9). Following his arrest and removal, the Crown forced the wholesale purchase of Tūhoe land. The assault at Maungapōhatu was one of several examples where the government employed over-policing to force injustice and alienation of land on Māori (see Aikman, 2020).