Pareraututu: Her Cloak of Pain

Ngāti Rangitihi

Te Kahumamae o Pareraututu, or the ‘Cloak of pain of Pareraututu’ is a very special taonga made by Pareraututu to honour the deaths of her whānau in a battle with Tūhoe. Pareraututu was part Tūhoe, but she also had many Ngāti Rangitihi relatives, so she was devastated when so many of them were killed by Tūhoe warriors.

As a way of showing her sadness, she gathered together the skins of the dogs owned by her fallen family members and wove them into a cloak. Wearing the cloak, Pareraututu travelled to the Waikato to plead with the famous leader Tukorehu to help her gain justice for the deaths.

When she arrived at Tukorehu’s marae, she didn’t say a thing. Instead, she sat wearing the cloak and refused to take any of the food offered to her. Tukorehu could not help but be impressed by her silent protest and, after a number of days, he agreed to help her. The way he showed this was to approach her and gently take the cloak from Pareraututu’s shoulders and wrap it around himself.

Not long after this happened, peace was created between Tūhoe and Ngāti Rangitihi, and the heads of the dead Rangitihi chiefs were returned to their whānau to be laid to rest in their homeland. After her death, Pareraututu’s bones were laid on Wahanga, a peak of the mountain many of us know as Tarawera, until the Tarawera eruption in 1886. They were lost in that great explosion.

This story comes from the original Great Te Arawa Stories website created by Ngā Pūmanawa e Waru (NPeW) Education Trust in 2018. To ensure consistency, minimal updates were made to the text before it was transferred to this new site.