Ngāti Hotu was a Māori tribe that, according to tradition, lived in the central North Island of New Zealand in the area surrounding southern Lake Taupō, where the Ngāti Tūwharetoa tribe now resides.
Ngāti Hotu were believed to have been part of the Tini o Toi Tribes of the Bay of Plenty and tradition describes them as 'a very fierce and warlike people' whom it took many generations of warfare to destroy, beginning from around the year 1450. Other traditions describe them as spirit people, which as is typical in Māori tradition, with reddish hair and pale white skin, symbolising their tapu nature (tapu means “holy” or “sacred”, involving rules and prohibition. The word taboo comes from this term).
Please note this Wikipedia page I just quoted doesn’t mention when the Ngāti Hotu arrived to New Zealand and this is part of the problem. In fact, according to “official” historiography, the first Maori arrived in New Zealand in 1280 AD and found the land uninhabited, which means that Ngāti Hotu must have arrived after 1280.
Kehu is the term for red and associated fair-haired individuals throughout Polynesia, where it becomes urukehu among the New Zealand Maori. The folklorist James Cowan considered the Maori folktales to have had a basis in reality, of peoples who left a strain of urukehu in most ancient tribes. He portrays a picture of a girl in his 1930 book The Maori: Yesterday and Today, with the caption: “Urukehu girl, of the Urewera tribe at Mataatua (Ruatahuna). This is the ancient fair-haired type, pure Maori.” (photo below)
The painter George French Angas also reproduced in his book The New Zealanders a painting entitled "Children of the boiling springs by Taupo Lake.” The painting depicts three Maori children, the centre boy having blond hair. Angas wrote of this painting: “In the very heart of the interior, light or golden coloured hair may occasionally be observed, though it is by no means a circumstance of common occurrence; the boy whose portrait is given in the centre figure of the annexed group is the son of one of the chiefs of Tukanu, a settlement close to the boiling springs near Taupo Lake, where no mixture with European races could have taken place; the natives regard the boy with considerable pride, and he is known by the appellation of "Ko Tiki," which means an heirloom or treasure." (Angas, 1847, Plate 22, 54)
The fair-haired boy is on the right (source)
Here you can read more excerpts about the urukehu from Cowan’s book (which is downloadable here free of charge), plus two more accounts about people living in New Zealand before the Maori arrived. The article also features photos of red-haired mummified heads. Another book by James Cowan with accounts of the urukeu is The Maoris of New Zealand (1910).
Physical evidence for the urukehu existed and was once on public display, but apparently is no longer to be found. Sir Peter Buck, the celebrated Maori anthropologist, in his study on “Maori somatology,” commented on several braids of reddish hair that were at the time exhibited at the Auckland Museum. In recent years enquiries regarding the exhibits of braided hair mentioned by Dr Buck have been met with incomprehension by Auckland Museum staff. Apparently they are not even indexed in archives.
The Ngāti Hotu are described not simply as manifesting the urukehu strain of red or fair hair, but as being an urukehu folk per se and they are now regarded as extinct as a distinct people. Because of the conflict between the Ngāti Hotu and Te Arawa, the Ngāti Hotu were reduced from inhabiting the entire central North Island from coast to coast to their virtual extinction, as they were progressively driven south-westward.
The last stand of the Ngāti Hotu took place at Kakahi, in the Whanganui district, during the 14th century, known as the Battle of the Five Forts, as they had constructed five pa (Maori fort) around Kakahi, where the Whakapapa and Whanganui rivers join. The pa were captured one by one and the final battle was fought on the flats between Kakahi and the Whangauni River.
Mākereti Papakura, a celebrated Maori guide, author and folklorist, believed that the urukehu were the result of intermixture between Maori and the mysterious fey-like Patupaiarehe.
Patupaiarehe are supernatural beings in Maori mythology that are described as pale to fair-skinned, with blonde or red hair, usually having the same stature as ordinary people, and never tattooed. They can draw mist to themselves, but tend to be nocturnal or active on misty or foggy days, as direct sunlight can be fatal to them. They prefer raw food and have an aversion to steam and fire.
Patupaiarehe can be hostile to humans, especially those who intrude on their lands. They are believed to live in deep forests and hilly or mountainous regions, in large guarded communities, though their buildings and structures are invisible to human eyes.
Patupaiarehe men were also said to have abducted unwary young Taranaki and Ngāti Ruanui Maori women, and those who eventually escaped back to their own people brought with them the arts of weaving and net-making.
It has been suggested that such stories may have been invented by infatuated young women or unfaithful wives on their overdue return home after an illicit passionate encounter with a lad from the next village. Be that as it may, it is interesting to note that, while most Polynesian cultures had some form of cloth-making, Maori were the only Polynesians to weave in precisely the same manner as early European cultures.
While they did not use a loom, the cords were woven together to form a fine cloth very like ancient Irish linen. This was long before any known European arrivals in New Zealand.
Captain Cook, on his first visit to New Zealand in 1769 also noted that "the natives used nets woven exactly like our own".
In her book The Old-Time Maori, Mākereti Papakura also mentions the so-called whaka blondes, that is, blond-haired Maori. Her best friend Puti Puti Tonihi had blond hair.
Extinct or not?
As I said previously, the Ngāti Hotu were thought to have vanished from history, until a Ngāti Hotu matriarch, Monica Matamua, travelled to object to this at the Waitangi Tribunal in the 1990s. Today the Tribe consists of around 2000 registered members.
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| Monica Matamua |
I won't go into the details of Monica's story, otherwise this post would become too long. If you’re interested in, her story if featured in the video Skeletons in the Cupboard – The Redheads, which is the first episode of a trilogy about the hidden history of New Zealand. The other two are Under the Carpet and Cousins Across the Sea .
You can also read her story in the three-part article DNA to Rock the Nation: first part, second part, third part.
Monica and her family lost their land (Te Rena on the banks of the Whanganui River) to the courts in 1998 and since then Monica has fought to get the land back under the Treaty of Waitangi. During the hearings, Monica stated that the area surrounding her home was once populated by Ngāti Hotu, “who descend from the Urukehu, a people renowned for their fair skin, green eyes and red hair.” (Matamua, Wai 903, no. 19, paragraph 36, 5).
She claims that her tribe arrived to New Zealand more than 2000 years ago, long before the first Polynesians (whose date of arrival is considered 1280 AD., as we said before), so that would make Ngāti Hotu the real “people of the land”, the real founder settlers of New Zealand.
As far as I could understand reading about this story, Monica’s claims have been met with scepticism and annoyance not so much because she says the Ngāti Hotu are still alive, but because she says: 1) the Ngāti Hotu are the real indigenous people of New Zealand and 2) the Ngāti Hotu were (and are) white.
As you can see in the photo above, Monica has red hair. In all her interviews, she says her grandmother Te Oti Mihiterina too had red hair and green eyes, while one of Te Oti’s sisters, Tamara, had very blond hair and blue eyes. One of Monica’s daughter Janet, also has red hair and green eyes, while in the video you can see that in her family there are many blonds (children and grandchildren).
In 2013, Monica decided to take a DNA test, to determine the origins of her family, but while reading the article with the results of the test I noticed something strange. I quote: “Information about paternal lineage is determined from a series of markers on the Y-chromosome, something that only men genetically carry. Therefore, her paternal line could not be mapped.” Now, it is true that women don’t have Y-chromosome, but this doesn’t mean women don’t have their father’s DNA! They receive an X chromosome from their father, so in the DNA of every human being there is half DNA from the father and half from the mother. When you take a DNA test, you can’t tell the paternal DNA from the maternal one, unless you test your parents as well. But we will come back to this later.
Here are Monica’s results:
28% NORTHEAST ASIAN: it is found at highest frequencies in the populations of northeast Asia (people from Japan, China and Mongolia). It is also found at lower frequencies in southeast Asia and India.
20% SOUTHEAST ASIAN: it is found in southeast Asia and India, particularly in the northeast Indian and Vietnamese populations.. It is also found at lower frequency in populations from Oceania.
18% OCEANIAN: it is found in Near Oceania (people from Papua New Guinea and Melanesia).
12% NORTHERN EUROPEAN: it is found in the UK, Denmark, Finland, Russia and Germany.
12% MEDITERRANEAN: it is found in southern Europe and the Levant (people from Sardinia, Italy, Greece, Lebanon, Egypt and Tunisia).
6% SUB SAHARAN AFRICAN: it is found in people of sub-Saharan Africa, particularly among those speaking Bantu languages such as the Yoruba and Luhya.
4% SOUTHWEST ASIAN: it is found in India and neighboring populations, including Tajikistan and Iran. It is also found at lower frequencies in Europe and North Africa.
According to the stories passed on from generation to generation in Monica’s family, their tribe would come from modern-day Iran and the test seems to confirm this.
However, I came across this study published in 2024 about “Indigenous Identity Appropriation in Aotearoa New Zealand” which mentions Monica’s story as well. Basically, the author says that Monica and her family are just Maori pretending to be indigenous whites. I don’t like very much the overall tone of the study, because it sounds like the usual rant againts whites being “racist” and people don’t believing the “experts” and the author seems annoyed by Monica only because, were her story true, Maori wouldn’t be anymore the actual indigenous in New Zealand. Anyway, on page 12 we read “The booklet DNA to Rock the Nation also appears to misunderstand the nature of nuclear DNA, claiming that, as Matamua had no Y-chromosome, “Monica’s paternal line could not be mapped” (but it was “mapped”, as Matamua’s father of course gave her an X-chromosome).”
The author also writes “For one of Matamua’s grandfathers, on her paternal side, was Joseph Ham (1860–1915), an immigrant from Cornwall, England. Joseph Ham was the descendant of several generations of Cornish people. Therefore, Matamua is 25% Cornish, a figure that fully accounts for her 24% European–Mediterranean DNA.”
As a matter of fact, in the documentary, while Monica is showing the photos of her parents and grandparents, she says her father’s name was James Ham and only mentions the name of his mother, a blue-eyed Maori. So, that would dismiss completely Monica’s claims and expose her as a cheater. However, both in the video and in the interviews, she says that in her maternal line there were red- and blond-haired people (as I said before, her grandmother was red-haired). We know that red hair is a recessive trait, which means that it shows up only if both your parents carry the genes for it. And blond hair and blue eyes are recessive to more darker traits. So, if in her maternal side they were all Maori, who did they get such fair traits from?
We have seen previously that many historians and anthropologists gave accounts of fair-haired indigenous people in New Zealand and we also know that Te Whatuiāpiti , a Māori chieftain, had red hair. Who did they get these fair traits from?
You can make a comparison by reading this article about redheads on the Easter Island, the place where, according to the documentary, the New Zealander redheads come from (the photos in this article are also featured in the documentary The Redheads).
Possible evidence
Here’s some possible evidence that New Zealand was inhabited prior 1280 AD.
Maori historian and leader Sir John Te Herekiekie Grace in his book Tuwharetoa. A History of the Maori People of the Taupo District (1959), writes:
Ngāti Tuwharetoa was a tribe that originally settled on the Bay of Plenty coast and during the 16th century found its way into Taupo. It found these tribes in occupation of the district, but by gradual absorption, diplomatic alliances and aggressive warfare, finally took complete possession of the land. The original occupants of the land were a tribe of the fair skinned and flaxen haired people called Ngāti Hotu. They lived by the lake in company with another fair skinned tribe, Ngāti Ruakopiri. The third tribe was Ngāti Kurapoto.
Also, in the book Kakahi (1972), artist and author Peter McIntyre writes:
The original people living in Kakahi were the Ngāti-Hotu, a tribe of the Tangata Whenua, who had been discovered by the Arawas living around Taupo and Roto-Aira… It has been claimed that the Ngāti Hotu were pre-historic or pre-Maori people. Maori tradition says they were fair-skinned with reddish-golden hair. In describing them the great Maori chief Te Heu Heu Tukino used the words Kiriwhero, meaning reddish skin, and Urukehu, meaning reddish golden hair.
In this article there is the photo of a 1920s tourist map of Lake Taupo, stating that the original inhabitants of the Taupo region were called, by Maori, Ngāti Hotu.
There is also the mistery of the kiore, or Polyneasian rat. Palaeontologist Richard Holdaway found. in the late 1990s, fossil kiore remains, which he carbon-dated as about 2000 years old. Kiore are poor swimmers and could only have travelled from the Pacific to New Zealand with people aboard some canoe or ship (so, before the official arrival of Polynesians to New Zealand). However, here’s a quote from Wikipedia:
Although remains of the Polynesian rat in New Zealand were dated to over 2,000 years old during the 1990s, which was much earlier than the accepted dates for Polynesian migrations to New Zealand, this finding has been challenged by later research showing the rat was introduced to both the country's main islands circa 1280.
Basically, since the first dating didn’t coincide with the arrival of first settlers to New Zealand, they changed the dating. Here for more information about the clashes on the dating of the kiore’s fossils and the subject is also treated in the documentary Under the Carpet.
In the article I linked before you can see photos of skeletons found in a Maori burial cave on the Wanganui river in 1919 (this is 50-miles further into the interior from where the last of the Ngāti Hotu tribe were defeated). They were photographed and then re-interred, without analysing them. The skulls look Caucasoid.
This story is featured in the documentary as well, where they also talk of another strange incident with skeletons (towards the end of the documentary). An excavator driver found several skeletons while digging in Northland. He called the Auckland museum, but was told that the local iwi (tribe) had no interest in those skeletons, because they were not of their clan, and the museum could do nothing about them. So, the skeletons were just digged over. The same happenend with more skeletons found in another location. The documentary presenter says that clearly there’s something going on, because in any normal society disposing of unidentified skeletons can entail a fine or even a prison sentence.
(As for the iwi, I quote from Wikipedia: “In modern-day New Zealand, iwi can exercise significant political power in the management of land and other assets.”)
In my opinion, the idea that prior 1280 New Zealand was completely uninhabited is rather naive. After all, we’re not talking of a small island in the middle of nowhere (New Zealand is 263,310 km2, or101,660 sq mi). If you watch all the three documentaries you’ll see plenty of evidence about New Zealand having been inhabited for millennia before 1280.
Conclusions
I quote again from the 2024 study:
Yet her [Monica’s] claim to represent the remnant of the only true Indigenous people of Aotearoa has had a significant detrimental outcome; it provides pseudo-scientific grounds to deny the Indigenous status of all Maori. Matamua’s identification as Indigenous White Hotu, furthermore, demonizes all Maori as violent colonizers of the true Indigenous people. Matamua’s appropriation of White Indigeneity in effect replaces the colonizing British with Maori as the people that dispossessed the Indigenous people of Aotearoa. This implication is made explicit by Matamua, who states, “Thank God the European came when he did. If the British hadn’t come here there would have been none of us [Hotu] left”
I think now everything’s clear. If the “violent colonizers” are the Europeans, that’s ok, but if anyone dares to even hypothesize that the violent colonizers are an indigenous people, and the Europenas are the good ones… that’s not ok! With such biased "experts", no wonder the truth about Ngāti Hotu, the history of New Zealand and anything else is so difficult to ascertain. However, you see that what goes around comes around and those who like throwing accusations of “violent colonizing” should be ready to see the same accusation applied to anyone.
In any case, it seems the average people are smarter than the “experts”. I keep quoting:
The centrality of DNA evidence to Matamua’s claims has convinced a great number of New Zealanders that pre-Polynesian settlement theories are correct. DNA results have more impact than other evidence, given the high epistemic authority accorded to scientific proof. Matamua has thus emboldened a very large number of New Zealanders to deny Maori their Indigenous status. According to a 2022 survey (=1010), 39% of New Zealanders now deny that Maori were the first people to settle in Aotearoa, while only 22% affirm Maori as the first settlers (39% either have no opinion or are unsure).
As for the conclusion of Monica’s story, I’m not sure about it. The study I quoted above states (page 11) “It was not until 2021 that her family’s legal claim to the land was eventually recognized.” So, it would seem that eventually they have been given the land they were asking.
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