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Concept
Tainui
Summary
Tainui is a tribal waka confederation of New Zealand Māori iwi. The Tainui confederation comprises four principal related Māori iwi of the central North Island of New Zealand: Hauraki, Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Raukawa and Waikato.
There are other Tainui iwi whose tribal areas lay outside the traditional Tainui boundaries – Ngāi Tai in the Auckland area, Ngāti Raukawa ki Te Tonga and Ngāti Toa in the Horowhenua, Kāpiti region, and Ngāti Rārua and Ngāti Koata in the northern South Island.
The Tainui iwi share a common ancestry from Polynesian migrants who arrived in New Zealand on the Tainui waka, which voyaged across the Pacific Ocean from Hawaiki to Aotearoa (North Island) approximately 800 years ago. According to Pei Te Hurinui Jones, the Tainui historian, Tainui first entered the Waikato about 1400 bringing with them kumara plants. By about 1450 they had conquered the last of the indigenous people in a battle at Ātiamuri.
During the late 1840s and early 1850s European missionaries introduced Tainui to modern inventions such as the water mill and gave then instruction in how to raise various European crops: potatoes were particularly widely planted. They set up a trade school in Te Awamutu to educate young Tainui so they became literate and taught the basics of numeracy and farming skills. Two mills were built to grind the wheat into flour – one near Cambridge on a stream leading to the Waikato River, parts of the mill being still visible. Later in the 1850s six others were built in the general area. Produce was exported as far as Victoria and California.
The relationship was far from one-sided. The Tainui tribe provided food to the European settlers, and "the present European population...would have been literally starved out of the country but for the extraordinary exertions made by the aboriginal inhabitants to supply them with cheap provisions", as the Southern Cross newspaper reported in 1844.
Official source
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