My brother Steve and I have been going through our family history with Karen, our mother. These are some of the stories we are finding together.
Among the names in the whakapapa manuscript she holds is William Keenan.
We first followed him in a story called "One of the Eight", about the trader-whalers who helped defend a pā at Ngāmotu. John Love and Richard Barrett are the names most often remembered. Keenan was there too.
That earlier story followed him into his later life at Te Awaiti, and his connection with Takune Hika Mapu.
But before that later life, there was a community fighting to survive. Looking more closely at the man brought us back to the people around him, and to a part of their story that does not end with a victory.
They defended their home.
Then many of them left it.
In December 1831, Pukerangiora, a Te Āti Awa stronghold in Taranaki, fell to Waikato and Ngāti Maniapoto forces. Early the following year, the invading force reached Ngāmotu, where New Plymouth stands today.
At Ōtaka were people of Ngāti Te Whiti, Ngāti Tawhirikura and Te Matehou.
The traders were already living among them. Love and Barrett had established a trading station at Ngāmotu after arriving aboard the Adventure in 1828. Their story there had begun with trade, before the siege brought them into the defence of the pā.
Keenan appears among the traders named in the early published histories of that defence.
These men are part of what happened. So are the Te Āti Awa communities whose home it was, and whose history cannot be told through the traders alone.
The people of the pā, aided by the traders, repelled the attack.
Ōtaka held.
There is a plan of the pā preserved in a history published in 1910, now reproduced by Te Ara. It gives this story a place you can look at. There is a link below, for anyone who wants to see its layout.
But no plan can show what it meant to survive there and then face the question of what came next.
We often tell a battle as though the withdrawal of an attacking force settles everything. There is a defence, an outcome, a date.
Then we turn the page.
The people in that history still had lives to live.
In 1832, many Te Āti Awa people went south towards their relations in the Wellington region. Their migration became known as Te Heke Tamateuaua.
Te Ara names Te Puponga, William Keenan, among those who went.
A name in the manuscript Karen holds appears again in the published history of a much larger movement of people.
That gives us somewhere solid to follow. The precise line connecting our own family to Keenan is still being traced. We can tell what the records establish without pretending the missing pieces are already there.
In Morris Love's account of the migration, there is a short sentence worth stopping at.
"Not everyone left."
Some remained on their ancestral land, despite the risk that the attackers would return.
Those people belong in the story too.
A map can show the route taken by a migration. It is less able to show what it meant to stay.
A place can be dangerous and still be home.
For those who went south, relationships helped shape what happened next.
The Ngāmotu people settled first at Waikanae. At Pito-one, now Petone, Te Mana of Ngāti Mutunga were already living. They invited the Ngāmotu chiefs Te Puni, Te Wharepōuri, Te Matangi and his son Te Manihera Te Toru to settle with them because they were close kin.
That invitation is a small part of the written account, but it carries something large.
The journey was more than a line running down a map. It led towards people who knew how they belonged to one another.
That did not make the years ahead peaceful. There were further conflicts over land and resources. But the relationship between those people mattered. It helped determine where lives could be made.
The story also takes us towards familiar water.
Many Te Āti Awa people and the traders settled in the Cook Strait area after the siege. In 1839, Barrett returned to Ngāmotu with Love, Keenan and others to establish a short-lived shore whaling station.
Leaving had not ended every connection with the place.
When I wrote about our grandfather Ossie at Fishing Bay, the story belonged to a much later chapter of Cook Strait whaling.
This is part of the earlier history of that world. It does not prove a line of descent between every person in these stories. It begins to show how much history lies behind a place we know through one grandfather, one photograph, one family memory.
The Sounds were never separate from what happened across the water.
Neither were the lives made there.
That is why the story of Ōtaka needs to continue beyond the moment the attackers withdrew.
Some people stayed on their ancestral land.
Others went south towards their relations and made lives elsewhere.
Neither group disappears when the battle ends.
The pā held.
Then came the rest of their lives.
Does your whānau hold a story of Ōtaka, the migration south, or the people who stayed? We would love to hear the names and accounts you have kept.
LOOK CLOSER
See the layout of Ōtaka Pā. This plan was published in 1910, not drawn during the siege.
https://teara.govt.nz/en/artwork/3800/otaka-pa
Find Te Puponga, William Keenan, in Te Ara's account of the migration.
https://teara.govt.nz/en/te-ati-awa-of-wellington/page-3
Follow the journey to Waikanae and the invitation to settle at Pito-one.
https://teara.govt.nz/en/te-ati-awa-of-wellington/page-4
Read about the traders and their movement between Ngāmotu and Cook Strait. See the section headed Pākehā traders.
https://teara.govt.nz/en/taranaki-region/page-6
A note on our earlier title: "One of the Eight" followed the family account. W. H. Skinner's introduction in Robert McNab's The Old Whaling Days, published in 1913, lists nine men on page 41. The headcount is not settled here; Keenan's name appears in that list.
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