Mark Adams

“This stark monument, completed in 1899, stands by the remains of the southern battlements of the great Kaiapoi pa. […] The pa was founded about the year AD1700 by Tuahuriri’s son Turakautahi, who predicted that the natural local food supply of eels and waterfowl could be successfully augmented by food ‘swung in’ from the surrounding countryside. Hence the pa was called Kai-a-poi. The control of West Coast pounamu by Ngai Tuahuriri’s close relatives the Poutini Ngai Tahu soon made Kaiapoi the greatest pounamu-trading centre in the land. The pa was surrounded on three sides by deep swamp, giving canoe access to a hapua (lagoon) on the Rakahuri (Ashley) River. Only the southern defences of the pa faced dry land. […] The pa was destroyed by Te Rauparaha’s forces after a long siege in 1832.” The name Kaiapohia (meaning ‘bodies piled up’) was used by Te Rauparaha’s iwi Ngāti Toa to refer to Kaiapoi. Author and Anglican missioner James Stack, believing this to be the original and proper Ngāi Tahu name for Kaiapoi, used it in his 1893 history ‘Kaiapohia: The Story of a Siege’. “[Stack] urged his readers to adopt Kaiapohia in preference to Kaiapoi, which he said was ‘unmusical’. However, no one before Stack had reported Kaiapohia being used by Ngai Tahu, and the name was ridiculed by Ngai Tahu elders. Teone Taare Tikao in Tikao Talks (1939) said that ‘the name was never Kaiapohia’. It was a purely North Island invention, said Tikao, and ‘no self-respecting South Islander’ would ever use it. […] In 1898 Stack organised the erection of the monument on the old Kaiapoi pa site [and] had the name Kaiapohia engraved in the inscription. Thus the North Island curse coined in 1832 came to rest on the sacred mound of Ngai Tuahuriri.” Quoted text by Harry Evison from ‘Land of Memories—A Contemporary View of Places of Historical Significance in the South Island of New Zealand’, Tandem Press, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, 1993.

(He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil, 2025)