district’, which has been the term used to describe it since 1865. Within the confiscation district there are four different categories of land:

► the ‘confiscated block’, which comprises 50,000 acres of land centred on the Te Papa Peninsula and retained by the Crown as confiscated land;

► the two ‘cms blocks’, which total approximately 1300 acres of land on the Te Papa Peninsula that were, originally purchased by the Church Missionary Society in 1838 and 1839 but are located within the confiscated block;

► the ‘Te Puna–Katikati blocks’, which cover some 93,000 acres of land that were ‘purchased’ by the Crown between the Te Puna Stream and the western edge of the inquiry district; and

► the ‘remainder lands’, which comprise the remainder of the confiscation district, including the islands, that was returned to some of its customary owners.

1.3 The History of the Inquiry

At Owae Marae at Waitara in June 1990, the chairperson of the Tribunal announced that inquiries into the raupatu claims would begin as soon as was practicable and would start with Taranaki and follow the sequence of the wars of the 1860s through the Waikato to the Bay of Plenty and the East Coast. For various reasons, notably the decision of Waikato–Tainui to forgo a Tribunal inquiry and settle directly with the Crown, this schedule was not strictly followed, but the Tribunal has now reported on the Taranaki and Ngati Awa confiscations. Throughout our report, we draw on and refer to these earlier reports – as well as to the Waikato-Tainui settlement – where relevant. Next, we outline the history of our own inquiry, which commenced with preliminary moves to inquire into Tauranga raupatu claims in 1990.

1.3.1 Background to this inquiry

Our inquiry is not the first to investigate the circumstances of the Tauranga raupatu. We briefly describe these earlier inquiries here, and examine them in detail in chapter 12. Chief among those earlier inquiries was the one carried out by the Royal Commission on Confiscated Lands and Other Grievances, otherwise known as the Sim commission, in 1927. That commission was required to report on all of the main confiscations, including Tauranga, and on various petitions relating to the confiscations and other land issues, including three that related to the Tauranga raupatu.

The Sim commission’s terms of reference were limited. Amongst other things, it could not examine the validity of the confiscation, and the commissioners were instructed to disregard the petitions of Maori who had ‘denied the sovereignty of Her then Majesty’ but claimed ‘the