KEY POINTS:
Hone Heke Ngapua - the great-nephew of the Ngapuhi chief Hone Heke (of felled flagpole fame), and for 15 years the member in the House of Representatives for the Northern Maori seat - died in Wellington of tuberculosis on February 9, 1909, aged 39.
A century later, his dilapidated grave in the grounds of the Aperehama Church, on the outskirts of Kaikohe, attests to how far his reputation has slipped from prominence.
It was his younger successors - Ngata, Buck and Pomare - who were destined to become feted leaders of their people, while the immense good that Ngapua had achieved for the country was interred with his bones.
In 1892, he made his first political speech, delivered in solemn tones - free from the flamboyant rhetoric fashionable at the time. In this providential address, he made reference to the need for tribal identities to be respected, but not at the expense of Maori unity, and warned politicians that as a result of their land policies, there was a "smouldering feeling of resentment left in the native breast".
His solution was for a separate parliament to be established so that Maori could manage their own future. These were words designed to uplift the wounded body of Maori society, at a time when the imminent "extinction of the Maori race" (as contemporaries put it) was widely considered a foregone conclusion.
From a career as a law clerk, he turned to politics, entering Parliament in 1893 at the age of 24, and still committed to achieving nothing less than the establishment of a separate system of government for Maori.
The Native Rights Bill, which he introduced the following year to effect this vision, was rejected by politicians deliberately leaving the debating chamber before the bill could be voted on.
Yet, Ngapua was as far away as it was possible to get from an incensed radical, intent on overthrowing the Government. More often than not, he worked with the senior politicians of the day - particularly Seddon - to avoid threats to national stability.
In 1895, he entered Tuhoe territory to disarm a group of local Maori who were on the verge of taking up arms against the Crown for incursions into their lands by Government surveyors. And just three years later, he rushed to the Waima Valley to extinguish the potentially incendiary Dog Tax War.
All other appeals to local rebel leader Hone Toia had failed, but when Ngapua instructed Toia's followers to lay down their arms, they acceded. Two serious crises, both involving armed Maori threatening to fire on government troops, were thus averted due to Ngapua's highly prized diplomatic skills.
Probably no other Maori possessed his mana. Despite his youth, senior chiefs from other tribes took his counsel. He was the last of the rangatira members of Parliament, and in a time when this mattered, he garnered huge respect from leaders of other iwi.
Many of Ngapua's ideas that were dismissed at the time as being "fanciful" or "whimsical" are now familiar and ordinary to us. Ideas ranging from a tribunal to investigate and settle Treaty grievances, through to relocating endangered birds to pest-free islands.
He was an advocate of hydro electricity, and suggested that the future of New Zealand's tourism industry lay in exciting activities as much as just sightseeing.
Ngapua was at his most articulate and impassioned, though, on issues affecting Maori. He demanded that Maori fishing rights guaranteed under the Treaty be returned to tribal control, and that Maori place-names around the country be maintained.
There was no time for marriage or offspring in such a busy and often punishing career. Ngapua had made it known privately that he would have liked a family, but in the flush of youthful enthusiasm for his political career, he opted to forgo these for the benefit of his people - which he most emphatically insisted were not just Ngapuhi, but all Maori.
Ngapua may have lacked James Carroll's guile, or Ngata's impressive inventory of achievements, but no other Maori leader before or since has achieved his level of popularity. As a tangible testament to this, 8000 people converged on Kaikohe for his tangi, at a time when the country's population had just passed one million. In real terms, it remains the largest tangi in New Zealand.
Even before Ngapua was buried, Carroll had arrived in Kaikohe to install Peter Buck in the freshly vacant seat. The machinations of the Young Maori Party leadership, including Ngata - who though on holiday claimed he was too busy to attend the tangi - ensured that an end was put to the sort of Maori independence, and the great plans for redevelopment, that Ngapua strove for.
It would take the best part of a century for many of his initiatives to gain widespread acceptance by which time there were many others queuing up to take the credit.
* Dr Paul Moon is Professor of History at AUT University, and author of Ngapua: The Political Life of Hone Heke Ngapua, MHR.
