Unlike the situation with regard to the tuku of Harataunga land to the Ngati Porou hapu, we have not heard any issues of claim relating to the tuku of lands at Manaia to Ngati Pukenga. In this case, the details of the tuku are set out here (as they were presented to us) to provide a context for the Ngati Pukenga claims relating to Manaia.

2.2.6 Native Land Court awards and ‘mana whenua’

We note that considerable shifts in the pattern of inter-tribal rights and relationships were occurring both before and after 1840, when the Treaty was signed. These relationships were affected by such factors as the advent of European traders and Christian missions, the Crown’s efforts to establish the pax Britannica, the politics and warfare of the 1860s and Crown and private negotiations for land. Inter-tribal rights and relationships were imprecise and shifting in many parts of Hauraki even as the Native Land Court began to hear applications for ‘title’ and ‘ownership’ of land after 1865. We shall return in due course to the procedures of the Native Land Court, but it should perhaps be noted here that in some cases at least the court recognised land rights as they had evolved after 1840. In other words, its awards were not simply a ‘snapshot’ of rights as they stood in 1840.

It was clearly no easy task to disentangle the land rights of the intermingled iwi and hapu, before or after 1840. Dr Ballara uses the evidence of Hauraki minute books to show that:

The lands of a major hapu were, typically, far from being one continuous territory. Cultivations for crops were only a small part of the total resources which might be used by any one hapu, and the areas they made use of might be widely separated and interspersed by the rights of other hapu. For example, about 1800, Ngati Naunau (or Ngaungau), a major hapu of Ngati Maru (often described as a tribe in the land court), lived and cultivated sometimes at Poihakena (Port Jackson) at the northern end of the Coromandel peninsula, sometimes at Tangiaro near Umangawha (Colville Bay) where they had a pa called Motukahakaha, and sometimes at Te Mata near Manaia, south of the Coromandel Harbour; part of Ngati Naunau had claims as far south as Te Puru and Taruru, a short distance north of Thames. They lived on Great Barrier Island for periods until threatened by Nga Puhi in the early 19th century; they went there at the season for catching tawatawa (mackerel). In between their settlements, cultivations and resource areas were those of the myriad of small and large hapu, some of Ngati Maru iwi, some of Ngati Tamatera, and others the surviving groups of earlier tangata whenua such as Ngati Mahanga and Ngati Huarere. By the 18th century, through generations of intermarriage, these interspersed hapu had lines of descent from all of these iwi sources.¹⁴⁷

147. Ballara, pp 197-198