Wiremu Kīngi

Wiremu Kīngi (born c. 1795, Manukorihi, New Zealand—died January 13, 1882, Kaingaru) was a Māori chief whose opposition to the colonial government’s purchase of tribal lands led to the First Taranaki War (1860–61) and inspired the Māori resistance throughout the 1860s to European colonization of New Zealand’s fertile North Island.

After leading his Te Atiawa tribe from its native North Island province of Taranaki to a place near Wellington in 1833, Kīngi was converted to Christianity by the English missionary Octavius Hadfield and was initially friendly toward Europeans. He supported Hadfield against the aggressive Māori chiefs Te Rauparaha and Te Rangihaeata. In 1847, however, Kīngi refused to abandon his land claims in the Waitara district of Taranaki province to the governor, Sir George Grey, and led his people back to settle on their ancestral lands. War broke out in Taranaki in 1860, when Gov. Gore Browne purchased the tribal Waitara land block over Kīngi’s objection and in ignorance of Māori land customs. Kīngi aligned himself with Potatau I (Te Wherowhero), leader of the militant Māori King Movement (a loose federation of tribes opposed to further land sales to colonists), and, in the course of the fighting, withdrew to the Waikato, the movement’s heartland.

Kīngi led his people in the Waikato War (1863–64) with colonial troops and did not submit to colonial authority until 1872. The legitimacy of Kīngi’s Waitara land claims was recognized in 1863, and in 1926 the New Zealand government awarded the Taranaki tribes an annual grant of £5,000 in compensation for their confiscated lands.