KEY POINTS:
Parata came here from Hawaiki back in the mists of time. He married Kahutianui and Ngati Kahu of the Far North were born. They thrived. Seven hundred years later a young mother of five is surveying the scene from her front yard.
"Come and have a look at this," she says. The woman from the hapu Te Whanau Moana - the people of the sea - is friendly, if a little wary of the Pakeha visitor from the city.
From the clifftop, the Pacific is a dazzling deep blue in the brilliant sunshine. Below are pristine white-sand beaches. Dolphins sometimes come close to shore to play. The beaches curve away in lazy arcs into the distance on this hot summer's day.
Behind is the woman's impoverished house. It's rundown and tiny for a family of seven, but in better shape than some of the others nestled in the bush on this piece of Ngati Kahu land at the tip of the Karikari Peninsula. This is poverty with a view.
There are other pockets of Ngati Kahu land left on the peninsula. But not much. Most is owned by the somewhat wealthy and the mega-wealthy, or is in the control of the Government.
A little further down the coast from the Maori land an American millionaire merchant banker has built an exclusive golfcourse and resort for the seriously rich.
Ngati Kahu begged former Waitangi Treaty negotiations minister Doug Graham for this land to be returned to them but they say he refused and it passed into foreign ownership.
Five-star accommodation on the resort faces the stunning water's edge where ancient burial sites are hidden in the dunes. And on the hillside above, the American has built a vineyard.
All around the peninsula "for sale" signs are studded in empty sections alongside the flash holiday homes. Big subdivisions are mapped out with roads and cul-de-sacs, but as yet have no houses.
When the baches are built the subdivisions will become small villages. Values in the area will rocket even further, pricing the remnants of an already scattered tribe out of their own backyard.
Further up the coast, at a place called Rangiputa, Ngati Kahu have drawn a line in the sand.
They will lose no more land, they vow.
Little did they know when they moved into an empty house on a Landcorp farm under claim by the tribe - part of which the Crown-owed company had put up for sale - there would be such a dramatic reaction.
Hauraki Maori soon followed and occupied land on the Coromandel, also put up for sale by Landcorp and also under claim.
This week, the Maori Party called for Maori throughout the country to occupy tribal land under claim, culminating in a retreat by the Government on Wednesday.
State Owned Enterprise Minister Trevor Mallard called a halt to the sales while the sale process is reviewed.
It is positive news, but neither Hauraki nor Ngati Kahu are packing up. Neither totally trust that the land won't be sold.
In the Far North, claim negotiations have been going for more than two decades, but recently broke down. When Ngati Kahu occupied the farmhouse we travelled north to find out why.
What we found was a fragmented tribe desperately trying to hold on to what is left of their land on a peninsula undergoing radical change.
The sale by Landcorp of 9ha of prime coastal land on a much larger block, which the Waitangi Tribunal has indicated should be returned, was a step too far.
Under such sales the land comes with a warning in small print that it carries a 27b memorial, meaning whoever buys it could find the Government buying it back to return to the claimants.
The reality is that the memorial allows land to be sold and resold but the Government rarely buys it back.
Once built on, the value skyrockets to an amount the Government is not prepared to pay. And the land becomes bogged down in private title issues. In the complicated bureaucracy of treaty claims, the Office of Treaty Settlements (OTS), which negotiates on behalf of the Crown, could have bought the Ngati Kahu land. Landcorp offered it for the Treaty claim landbank, which is land set aside for possible use in Treaty settlements. But OTS said it did not need it so Landcorp put it on the market.
For Hauraki, the issues are similar. The Coromandel land is culturally significant to the iwi and also among the few remaining sizeable pieces of land able to provide an economic base to move people out of poverty.
In the north this week, Ngati Kahu were forced to put in a last-minute tender for their own land, and were fearing having to go overseas to raise the millions required.
Even Pakeha living on the Peninsula say the land is Ngati Kahu's and question why they should have to buy it back.
The Landcorp farm under occupation is land gifted to the early missionaries to use in the 1830s. This type of gifting, known as tuku whenua, was in effect a loan. When no longer needed for the church, the land was supposed to return to Ngati Kahu. But in 1859 it was obtained by the Crown.
Landcorp's sale of the coastal land is seen as theft of the land all over again. When a Bayley's "for tender" sign - advertising beach reserve frontage, classic white sand and a choice of elevated sites to build on - appeared at the boundary next to the privately owned Reef Lodge Motel, Ngati Kahu removed the sign and moved into the farmhouse.
They have been peaceful but are firm. They will not leave, they say. They plan to put down vegetable gardens and live here.
At the end of the peninsula, as the young mother gazes across the sea from her clifftop to North Cape - near Cape Reinga, where spirits are believed to return to Hawaiki - she, too, says that enough is enough.
No more land will go. Children are told they must never do anything which could jeopardise what is left of their land.
"This is home for me," the woman says. "This is where I originate from. People will pay megabucks for what we've got. We're not going to sell it. Never."
It is Margaret Mutu who has brought me here to meet the woman on the clifftop.
Mutu is Professor of Maori Studies at Auckland University and head researcher and negotiator for Ngati Kahu's claims against the Crown. Mutu, too, traces her ancestry back to Parata and Kahutianui. Her late husband also came from here.
She had said earlier that this fight was not about Maori whinging and being greedy. It was about the huge injustice which had sent Ngati Kahu into poverty. When asked: "Are people really living in poverty?", she said, "I'll show you poverty."
Mutu lives in Auckland but comes regularly to her small house on this clifftop. She has already fought and won battles over this remaining piece of land. There are no paved roads here and no services.
The dirt tracks which pass for roads sometimes get so bogged that people who live further along leave their cars at Mutu's place and ride horses home. The people were nearly forced off this piece of land in the 1970s, Mutu tells me. The council bumped up the rates to match the inflated rates of coastal areas - which Maori could not pay - then threatened to take the land.
A distress call was sent to Mutu, then 20 and newly graduated with a maths degree. She explains how she was singled out early on, as a feisty little girl, by kaumatua and trained to fight for her people.
Eventually, the Maori Land Court told the council it was rating ancestral Maori land for its tourist potential and the rate demand process was illegal.
Now there is an impasse. The people do not pay the rates and the council cannot take the land. But neither do they get any services.
Mutu does not usually bring Pakeha to this remote coast in the Far North. Pakeha see with different eyes, she says: "They see only dollar signs."
She agreed because she wants people to understand why Ngati Kahu moved into the farmhouse.
To understand, they need to know what has happened on this peninsula. Mutu is not just talking about the 1800s. She is talking about the 1930s on.
First, disease ravaged the population. Then came farm development schemes.
Ngati Kahu rue the day these schemes came to the peninsula - the large community of Maori living on their own land, saw it turned into individual farms on soil unsuited for dairying.
Only one nuclear family was allowed on each farm. Huge loans and debts were loaded onto the farms and communication between farms was forbidden. "Yes, really," says Mutu. The aim was to stamp out communal living. Ngati Kahu also believe the aim was to obtain land.
People could not pay back the loans and debts. Some of the land was repossessed.
Other land was sold to try to save what was left. Many people were forced to leave. Ngati Kahu were scattered in the wind.
Many would now like to return, but they cannot afford to build. Some of the holidaymakers in the developed part of the peninsula say they cannot understand why Maori want the land back anyway because it just sits there, overgrown in scrub. Mutu says it is not just that people cannot afford to develop the land. They are scared to develop it.
To do so would mean taking out a loan or mortgage. The history of loans here is of land being confiscated.
The young mother says her family tried living in the city but wanted to come home to live on the land left for them by their ancestors.
As we leave, she will carry on wringing out the clothes she has washed in the old agitator machine which runs on generator power.
She used to go down to the beach to do the washing but Housing New Zealand helped the family to get a water tank, so she got the old washing-machine.
She still wrings out the clothes by hand. Her husband goes fishing nearly every day to feed his family.
Her children are healthier living here, she says. They have no PlayStations or X-boxes to sit glued to. Instead, they spend their time outdoors - diving and fishing, slashing down gorse, cleaning up the section, taking the pigs for a walk.
The woman says that although her faded little house is a far cry from the flash baches springing up all over the peninsula, she doesn't care.
Out here, away from the world, living below the poverty line, she is happy.
Back in the four-wheel-drive, Mutu points out what was once a huge communal garden which used to provide vegetables for the whole peninsula. This, too, was a victim of the farm schemes and the banning of working communally. The garden lies in ruins.
In the late 1990s, when five Northland tribes banded together to take what was known as the Muriwhenua claims to the Waitangi Tribunal, a historic ruling was made. The claim over 174,000ha of the Far North was upheld.
The Tribunal found that the people had been marginalised and had suffered physical deprivation, poverty, social dislocation and loss of status.
Redress should be substantial and soon, it said. The tribunal went as far as to make - for the first time - binding recommendations, and sent the tribes back to negotiate with the Crown. Mutu said in the Herald in 1997: "The settlement of our claims will give us an economic base so we will be less dependent on the state, which is good for the whole country." Ngati Kahu are tired of waiting.
Before dawn, Mutu and I had headed up to Puwheke, a sacred mountain overlooking Rangiputa and the peninsula. Puwheke means the head of the octopus, she explained. When her people first came to the peninsula they found the Ranganau Harbour blocked by a huge octopus.
The octopus became Puwheke. From the air you can see its eight tentacles stretching out. "And at the front of it there are sort of areas where the vegetation doesn't grow, so it's got two eyes and an ink sac." Puwheke is extremely important to Ngati Kahu, but is under Crown control.
Mutu drives as far as she can before the hill becomes too steep.
Then we're puffing and panting. The 10-minute climb to the top makes the lungs scream.
A small group of people are gathered for a dawn karakia. They are giving strength to a relay of runners heading into Kaitaia 40km away for a hikoi protesting at Landcorp's plan.
Later, at the Landcorp house, Maori independence flags flying high, a shirtless Richard Lawrence is happy. The hikoi was really about unifying a tribe which had become fragmented, he says. Like many, Lawrence says Ngati Kahu does not want money: "We just want the land."
Further inland, at a place called Whatuwhiwhi where the subdivisions are, former Aucklander John McMahon, a Pakeha, owns the general store. He donated the water for the run.
The Rangiputa case is black and white, he says. "Get Peter Garrett out from Midnight Oil and just give it back, for God's sake.
"It is not fair or reasonable that during negotiations and before settlement you take what is being claimed and has been acknowledged as rightfully claimed and try to flog it with the understanding that you know, you'll get the money anyway if the claim comes through.
"What is that? That's a complete lack of understanding of the value of whenua outside of money."
And outside the general store, a meeting with Pereniki Tauhara, one of the other organisers of the occupation and a priest from a long line of priests.
He, too, is shirtless. It's hot. He sits on a little bench and chooses words thoughtfully, delivering them softly. Ngati Kahui have got to listen to the pitter-patter of their mokopuna, he says: "We're trying to set the precedent for them for the future of us as an iwi and a hapu."
When asked what it would mean to lose land to more holiday homes, he pauses, then says, heartfelt, "Oh, what a devastation.
"I would call that a genocide. If we don't put a tap on things and hold firm to who we are, then that is going to be a genocide for Ngati Kahu.
"We're people of nature, if I can say that, we're people of nature where the sea and the land is an everyday living thing to us. And so that connection that we have, it's a little bit different from others, but it's a part of who we are."
A high class and a low class has developed on the peninsula, and the high class is already taking Karikari for granted. And so we have things like fishing competitions where they're fishing during the spawning of the snapper. You don't do that.
"Every week we see them holding up these huge snappers and most of them are female snappers which really are not the sweet eating ones but they think, oh yeah, the biggest snapper is what they'll get the prize for. They don't really know that what they're doing, it's a real threat to us."
Tauhara is not totally against development, but thinks the people of the land should play a big part in directing that development. Instead, they play no part.
On his arm, Tauhara has a tattoo of Jesus on the Cross, and the words mum and dad, then Parata and Kahutianui. He does not like what the church has done to his people in terms of the history of their claim. The tattoo is a reminder of his love for God. He doesn't blame God, he says, because this wasn't his mess.
