Hopelessly enmeshed in a tangle of perplexity, the Hauraki tribe Ngati Hako have defied all the recognised historical precepts which have enabled them to preserve their existence through moo years of vicissitude and adversity. They have no vestige of a beginning nor any evidence of an end.
Acknowledged as being the earliest of the Hauraki settlement tribes, their origins have never been maintained nor promoted in the manner of other tribes who took up later occupation. Ngati Hako are an enigma among their peers and will remain so forever. The confusion was not of their own making but was enforced by the pressures and demands imposed by latter-day settlement tribes.
Hauraki tribal references find it difficult to deny Ngati Hako their origins as descendants of Toi-te-Huatahi, the intrepid Polynesian voyager who established his presence in Aotearoa following the initial discovery by Kupe. Most tribes are able to qualify their identity through waka connection and ancestral whakapapa which enable them to calculate, with some degree of accuracy, the time of their occurrence. Ngati Hako do not relate to fleet waka. The eponymous figure of Hako heads the genealogical tables without reference to any other ancestors, and indeed his appearance is a belated one. He surfaces some six generations after the Tainui waka landing and a further six before the incursion of their domains by Marutuahu. Various attempts have been made to establish other ancestors pre-dating Hako, but these have become mired down in a complexity of conjecture and incongruity. The probability is that they were once known but have foundered in the cultural upheaval wrought by the destructive events in their history yet to be related.
This is no reflection upon the integrity of the tribe as far as their past history is recorded, it is rather the story of a persistent stand in the face of the many tribulations imposed upon them during the past 500 years of adverse occupation by the more dominant tribes. In order to examine some of the background it would be reasonable to look briefly at various aspects of past events which lead down to the present.
There are many tribal whakapapa which relate back to Toi-Te-Huatahi or, as he became latterly known, Toi-Kairakau. Some do indeed pierce the gloom of mistiness and trace back to the intrepid discoverer, Kupe. By doing so there is a supposed status accorded them that supersedes the more common descent from the later journeyers of the fleet migration.
