 We begin part five of our series on political thought, on the just rebellion, with those words from the Maori general Rewi Manga Maniapoto in 1864. When he said those words he was on the verge of defeat. Defeat at the hands of a much, much larger European army with much heavier artillery than he could muster for the defense of his fortifications. For many days he and his fighters had been under siege by the European army and despite being under siege, despite running out of ammunition, still his men would creep out into no man's land to rescue wounded European soldiers and return them to their own lines. This chivalry so impressed the European commander that he offered honourable surrender. On hearing the author, the Maori general stood up and said those words ka fai fai tonu ake ake ake. We will resist you forever and ever and ever. He was part of a movement to create a Maori state in the face of European depredations and particularly in face of European seizures of land. And this kind of heroic stand, even a last stand, this kind of chivalry, very very much entered Victorian British folklore. So the whole idea of the noble savage, which was very very much an image that was perpetrated in what they called penny dreadful novels at the time of Dickens, for instance. These were cheap paperbacks that you literally bought for a penny. These were stories of adventures in the South Sea islands in which the noble savage was a figure drawn from the Maori warrior. And it was true to type in a way, at the same time this kind of romanticism obscured the fact that White Settledon was confiscating the land of an entire nation. It wasn't meant to be like that. In 1840, when the first official British presence touched down in New Zealand, it was led by a very idealistic young naval captain, Captain Hobson. And he gathered together representatives of most of the tribes in New Zealand. And at the Treaty of Waitangi, he agreed that there should be certain rights that would be inherent within the Maori nation if they pledged allegiance to Queen Victoria. It didn't take long before the legacy of the idealistic young naval captain was overturned by rapacious settlers who came in his wake. And the Maoris decided that they were going to resist this constant encroachment. Hobson had put forth the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. By the 1850s, and particularly by the 1860s, war had begun. And it was an interesting series of wars fought in the Waikato, fought in Taranaki, at first fought by isolated figures, but then gradually these isolated figures and their peoples were brought together into a confederation. They called their country the King Country, the country of the King in the center of the North Island. They were named the Kingites, the followers of the King. And they thought that they had better organized themselves. So they had their own parliament, they had their own offices of the government, they had their own bank, they had their own standing army. So that a very great deal of the wars that followed were fought by standing armies. And it could be said that the Maori armies were defeated in the end by a combination of greater numbers on the part of the Europeans. But also as I said earlier, greater artillery power on the part of the Europeans. What happened, however, was a succession of conflicts led by very, very notable Maori generals, but also people who were leaders who infused in their resistance a very curious form of thought. Maori thought, up to that point in time, had not been able to be written down. It was a very oral culture. Maori carving expressed in pictorial terms, in totems, as it were, in carvings of pillars, not unlike those of the American Indians, the legends of the tribe. But these legends could not articulate new forms of government and new forms of resistance. The ideology of resistance was certainly built around the recapture of land that had been stolen. It was also based on trying to make some kind of fusion of Maori thought and the new European thought, just as the king movement tried to adopt the trappings and the institutions of government of the Europeans. And what you had were a succession of prophets who combined Christianity, or forms of Christianity, with forms of Maori spiritual belief. And these combined forms of thought inspired their armies, inspired the followers of the prophets, the followers of the Maori generals, to resist fiercely. This kind of fusion thought gave rise to an entire literature of songs of poetry. Judith Binney, the famous historian in New Zealand of the Maori resistance, wrote a beautiful book called The Songs of Resistance. And it was very much a poetic rebellion anchored in thought that was oratorical and at the same time highly poetic. Figures like Te Kuti left behind a legacy of written works which tried to describe the belief systems that he himself helped to inculcate in his followers for the sake of resistance. The legacy of this, the legacy of this fusion, married still to the desire to be able to own land led to two things in New Zealand. One was the agreement of the courts that the Treaty of Waitangi was justiciable. So Maori tribes were able to bring lawsuits underneath the treaty for restitution of lands or for compensation. And this was a first movement of that sort in the world of colonized peoples. The second thing was this notwithstanding. The resurgence of Maori pride, a renaissance in Maori self-belief, and a replaying of the new kinds of fusion introduced by Te Kuti began to infuse radical elements in modern Maori society. So as recently as 2007 the descendants of Te Kuti in the Urawera Mountains, the Tuhoe people, launched a rebellion. They tried to occupy land. They tried to re-establish their own nation. Of course this was a movement doomed to failure. But the romanticism, the poetry, the fusion of thought, and to a very large extent the fighting spirit of the original rebellion of the Maori people against the white settlers still lingers far away in the land of New Zealand.