Her name means the sacred fire ceremony.
Not a fire. The ceremony. The rite where the flame is called up out of nothing by a person who knows how, and the whole thing hangs on their hands not shaking. That is what her people called her, and they called her sister the many signs of the sacred fire, and the man who wrote this manuscript translated both names himself on the first page of his history, before he had told anybody a single thing that happened.
He wanted you to know what you were dealing with before he started.
She was born somewhere before about 1823, at a moment when everything her family had was moving.
Her father was Tama Ewa. Her mother was Haumarewa, whose own full name was Takune Te Haumarewa, so the name came down mother to daughter the way names do. Her grandmother was Hine Te Wawani, a woman of rank of the Ngāti Kekerewai hapū of Ngāti Mutunga, sister to the head chief of that hapū at the Chatham Islands.
There are chiefs on the women's side of this family. That needs saying, because it is not how these stories are usually told.
Her grand-uncle Puanaki was paramount chief of all Ngāti Mutunga and lost an eye to the man who became the first Māori King. Her mother's sister Kahutaiki married Te Rauparaha. Her step-father Te Poki named a valley in Wellington after his own child's throat. Her cousin named a hill after his belly. Her cousin Te Rōpū shouted at Te Rauparaha in the middle of a battle. Her half-brother Wharepa got a tribe onto a ship by praying over them.
She grew up inside all of that. It was not history to her. It was the dinner table.
Then a whaler came.
His name was William Keenan and he was Irish, out of County Cork, and he had been at the Battle of Nga-Motu in 1832 as one of the eight, and he ended up at the whaling station at Te Awaiti on Tory Channel where the world came to a point.
The manuscript does not describe this as a colonisation. It describes it as something happening to two people. The compiler's own words, about her and her sister:
> "Ancestors whose wistful maiden charms would kindle the flames of passion within the breasts of two > Irish adventurers."
He wrote that about his own great-great-grandmother. In a genealogy. With a straight face.
She was baptised Katarina, which means somewhere there is a church register with a date in it, and a priest's handwriting, and her name written down by a man who had come a very long way to write it.
Now the land.
The Otonga Block on the Chatham Islands, forty thousand three hundred and seven acres on Plan Number 1436, was claimed in the Native Land Court in 1870 by Ihakara Ngapuke and the co-claimants named with him. Among the papers the compiler filed with his manuscript are later survey plans of parts of that block, one of them drawn in 1930, and on one of them he wrote her name.
The court’s own records point to a share of it, about two hundred and seven acres.
The Māori Land Court’s succession schedule for Otonga 1A, a block of 36,808 acres at one share to the acre, records a succession order of 3 November 1903 for the interest of the late Takune Hikinapu, as near as the handwriting can be read. The court’s ownership list for the same block, compiled as at 7 June 1919, still includes an owner entered simply as Takune with 206.7 shares. The records alone do not confirm that either entry is her, or that the two are the same person, and the 1903 order itself has not yet been read. A share like this was held in common with the other owners, not a fenced piece of land.
Where the land came from is a story on its own, and it was only found this week.
Her half-brother Wharepa owned a canoe called Rangi Auria, and in November 1835 it was the first canoe to reach Whare Kauri. The Chatham Islands minute book says he had the mana nui to the land, the others under him, and it was through owning the waka that he was allotted the first place.
And then: "but the others assisted to take the canoe to Otonga."
That is it. That is the sentence. A canoe going round a coastline in 1835, and ninety-five years later the name Otonga on a surveyor's plan.
There may be land in the Sounds as well. A note in the compiler's own hand under a printed Crown deed says that in 1865 and 1870 the government granted Crown Grants in Te Awaiti to the nearest relatives, and the last legible words of it read Hikamapu-K, for Keenan. The page edge cuts the rest off.
If that reading holds, she held land at Te Awaiti by Crown Grant.
She died at Te Awaiti in July 1894.
A woman named for the ceremony that calls up fire, who married an Irishman from Cork, who was baptised Katarina by somebody. What the record says of her last days, and of the court that heard about her will in 1899, is in part four of the Norton stories.
Her son was William Henry Keenan. His son was Rewai Levi Keenan. His daughter was Ngāwai Matie Keenan. Her son was the man who sat down years later and wrote sixty-four pages by hand so that none of this would be lost, and put a note on one of them saying he could assure you that all of these people were your ancestors, but that showing them all would make the folio nine times the size.
And then, more than a century after she died, a woman named Karen sat down at Waikawa with paper brought from Sydney and wrote the whole line out again by hand. Sixty feet long. Five feet high. Four solid weeks.
The sacred fire ceremony is the one where somebody has to keep the flame going.
They have never once let it out.
Where this comes from
The name translations are the compiler's own, on page 10 of the sixty-four page whakapapa manuscript held by Karen Philips. The baptismal name Katarina and the fuller name are drawn on the tap-root chart, page 9. Takune Te Haumarewa and Hika Mapu Takune are written together on page 181. Hine Te Wawani's rank and hapū are recorded in the archive's own folio on her, read 18 July 2026.
Born before about 1823 is from the family’s own research records. Her death at Te Awaiti in July 1894 is from the compiler’s Keenan folio, as part four sets out. The Otonga Block’s 40,307 acres and Plan No. 1436 are from the compiler’s longhand copy of Chatham Islands Minute Book 1 folio 43, the 1870 claim to the whole block by Ihakara Ngapuke and his co-claimants. The 1930 survey plans filed with it, W.D. 4150, cover later subdivisions of the block, not the whole of it. The share is from the Māori Land Court’s public records, read on 9 October 2026: the Otonga 1A historic ownership schedule, compiled list (Document 1531966), and the Otonga 1A succession order schedule, 1894 to 1919 (Document 1532008). The 1903 succession order itself, folio 27, and the orders behind the 1919 list have not yet been read. The family folio also holds copied Otonga No. 1 succession minutes from 1894, not yet read closely.
The canoe to Otonga is quoted from page 219, which quotes Chatham Islands Minute Book 1 folio 298. The Te Awaiti Crown Grant note is handwritten beneath a printed Crown deed on page 213, and its final words are cut by the page edge. That last reading is not confirmed and should not be stated as fact until the Crown Grant itself is requested.
The sixty feet of handwriting is recorded in the Huntley Aldridge reunion book, which names Karen as the person who wrote it.
Correction, 8 October 2026. This story first said a 1930 government survey recorded her as sole owner of the whole Otonga Block, 40,307 acres, with her succession in the Native Land Court. That was wrong. The acreage and plan number belong to the whole block and its 1870 claim, and the note naming her on a later plan is the compiler’s own, not the government’s. Her name is now spelled Hikimapu, the form the Te Ātiawa pānui uses. Our family papers carry it more than one way. Updated 9 October 2026: the court’s own records point to a share in Otonga 1A of about two hundred and seven acres, as set out above.
One honest line, kept on every story in this folder. This is the whakapapa Karen holds and it names her people. Our own line comes through Thomas William Norton. Hikimapu is not our direct ancestor. She belongs to our wider whanaungatanga through her daughter Anne's marriage to James Norton, Thomas William's brother.
◆