The history of the Canterbury Region of the South Island of New Zealand dates back to settlement by Māori people in about the 14th century.
Pre-1840 Māori period Probably no more than 500 Māori were living in Canterbury by the time European settlement began in the 1840s. They were members of the Ngāi Tahu tribe, which occupied much of the South Island, remnants of a population that may have numbered between 3,000 and 4,000 people at the beginning of the 19th century. Decimated by civil war from 1810 to 1815, they were almost exterminated between 1830 and 1832 in attacks by the northern Ngāti Toa, led by Te Rauparaha.
Early Moa-hunters The earliest settlers of Canterbury appear to have been the people called the Moa-hunters, arriving in about the 14th century near the time of the traditional discovery of the South Island by Rākaihautū. Traces of the presence of these people are found in camp and burial sites near river mouths, the northern valleys of Banks Peninsula and on Hikuraki Bay. The burial sites of the Moa-hunters containing moa eggs, ornamental artifacts and whale tooth pendants show that their culture differed from that of the later Māori.
South Island tradition however gives no account of the Moa-hunters. There is the legend of a shadowy aboriginal people known as "Te Kahui Tipua", or 'the band of ogres', who were destroyed by later arrivals called Te Rapuwai.
Archaic Māori period In the time of Te Rapuwai, the forests of Canterbury were said to have been burned and the moa exterminated. The Waitaha followed them, occupying the eastern districts of the South Island. These appear to have been a numerous people, with a large pā near Mairangi and Kapukariki and other settlements on the banks of the Rakaia River. One of them, Te Hau, is credited with having destroyed a large bird of prey that nested on one of the large spurs of the Torlesse Range. The reference to this bird is interpreted as being a composite memory of the extinct New Zealand swan and the extinct Haast's eagle (Hieraeetus moorei), which were contemporaries of the moa.
In North Canterbury and Banks Peninsula, the Waitaha found an abundance of food. On the plains and foothills the finest sort of flax root and cabbage trees grew, and kiore (rats) and weka swarmed in the open country. The woods were full of kākā, pigeons and other birds suitable for food. Lakes were covered with water fowl and teemed with eels, silveries and whitebait, and along the coast was an abundance of fish as well as birds of every sort.
Classical Māori period Abundance of food, however, eventually proved to be the undoing of the Waitaha, for it attracted other invaders to dispute their possession. About the year 1500 they were destroyed or absorbed by invaders from the East Coast of the North Island, the Ngāti Mamoe tribe. Within 125 years, they occupied the whole east coast of the South Island, including Otago and Southland, where they drove the Waitaha into the back country of the lake district.
After holding the land for four or five generations the Ngāti Mamoe in their turn were attacked and finally subjugated by another wave of invaders from the north. These were the Ngāi Tahu, who, although originally settling in the Poverty Bay district on their arrival in canoes, had subsequently moved southwards.
In 1627, the Ngāi Tahu had their chief settlement on the shores of Wellington harbour at Hataitai, but began to move over the northern parts of the South Island, which was then the territory of the Ngāti Mamoe. Although there was some small-scale fighting at times, in the first years of the migration, the Ngāi Tahu lived at peace with the Ngāti Mamoe of the Wairau district and intermarried freely with them. Inter-tribal jealousies led in the end, however, to a major battle at Pakihi, just north of the Conway River, in which the Ngāti Mamoe were routed.
Thereafter the Ngāi Tahu moved steadily southwards in a campaign of conquest, until after a little more than a generation they had subjugated the Ngāti Mamoe in most of the country of the east coast, as far south as Lake Waihola, south of the Otago peninsula. During this period, when many of the Ngāti Mamoe were a hunted people, some groups of them lived in the caves of the river gorges, as at Weka Pass, Opihi Gorge, and the Upper Waitaki. Drawings on the walls of these 'rock shelters' suggest their occupation. Nevertheless, there appears to have been considerable intermingling of the two tribes so that in later years, the Ngāti Mamoe lost their identity as a separate people.
Ngāi Tahu were led in the later stages of their campaigns against the Ngāti Mamoe by the sons of the chief Tu Rakautahi. It was he who in the early years of the 18th century fixed the headquarters of the tribe at Kaiapoi Pā (near present-day Kaiapoi), choosing the site mainly for its good defensive position on a promontory of dry land almost entirely surrounded by swamps. There he built a pā that became famous throughout the South Island for its strength and size, and the wealth of its people. The timber for the construction of the pa came from the forests from Woodend to Rangiora. "The fortifications consisted of earthworks surrounded by strong palisades. The defences on the land side were strengthened by a broad ditch which extended across the entire front of the pa. Behind the wall of earth was a double row of strong palisades.". The posts of this palisade were as thick as the mainmast of a ship.
Under Tu Rakautahi, the Māori of North Canterbury developed a system of food gathering and barter necessitated by the fact that they could not survive upon the produce of their local cultivations. Abundant food was obtainable in their territory, but much had to be sought much further afield and brought to the centre – at one season from Te Waihora, at others from the Torlesse range, from the lakes of the interior, from Banks Peninsula, or from the open plains. In some of these out-districts the people occupied partly fortified pas, in others they lived on open kainga of a few huts without fortification, and in still others they had no more than camping shelters. But their base was Kaiapoi, which, with a population of at least 1000 people, was a considerable Māori town, and the permanent home of the most important chiefly families of the Ngāi Tahu. These people were in constant communication with their still numerous kinsmen in the north at Kaikōura (which had an even larger population than Kaiapoi) and also with the large body of the Ngāi Tahu who had gone further south to settle in Otakou.
With these more distant districts there developed a system of interchange of gifts of food, which was really a form of trading. From the far south came preserved muttonbirds and dried fish, the canoes or carriers returning from Kaiapoi with loads of kūmara; while to Kaikōura went part of the store of southern muttonbirds in exchange for potted pigeons. A survival of this traffic was seen by Europeans as late as 1844.
Kaiapoi was known to the Māori of other parts of New Zealand as the home of a people who had both an abundance of food, and an exceptional wealth of the highly prized pounamu. In the eyes of the Māori, this hard and tenacious nephrite jade was the nearest equivalent to metal itself, and a tool or weapon made of it was considered a prized possession. Ownership of greenstone was a mania of the Māori, driving them to endure unimaginable hardships to obtain it. The main greenstone source was in the Taramakau and Arahura Rivers on the West Coast, roughly opposite Kaiapoi.
Until the Ngāti Wairangi of the West Coast were conquered about the year 1800, the expeditions sent across the ranges by Ngāi Tahu were war-parties, equipped to fight for the greenstone they wanted. The Ngāi Tahu used eight routes across the ranges, those from Canterbury and its immediate northern district being up the Rakaia River and over the Whitcombe or Browning passes to the Hokitika river; up the Waimakariri River and over Arthur's Pass to the Taramakau; up the Waipara and the Hurunui Rivers by Lake Sumner to Harper pass and the Taramakau; and (from Kaikōura) up the Waiau-uha and thence by either the Amuri pass to the Ahaura River and on to the Grey River, or by the Lewis Saddle down the Cannibal Gorge directly to the Grey River.
Kai Huānga feud Even within the Ngāi Tahu tribe there were feuds and rivalries that led to bloodshed, and even open warfare. The most important of these outbreaks – a bloody feud that developed into civil war – began between 1810 and 1815, about the time of the first contacts of European flax-traders with the Māori of Banks Peninsula. This was known as the Kai Huānga or 'eating of relations' feud, which, by destroying the Ngāi Tahu in Canterbury, effectively prepared the way for their conquest in 1832 by Te Rauparaha.
The leading character in this feud was Tama-i-hara-nui, principal chief of the Ngāi Tahu, who appears to have lived both at Kaiapoi pa and at Takapūneke near present-day Akaroa. Of Tama-i-hara-nui's character Stack (in his book Kaiapohia: The Story of a Siege) says: "Unlike most Maori chiefs of exalted rank he was cowardly, cruel and capricious." The Kai Huānga feud began when Murihake, a woman at Waikakahi on the eastern shores of Te Waihora, happened to put on a dog-skin cloak left in the village by Tama-i-hara-nui, who was then absent at Kaikōura. This sacrilegious action required that the chief, or his relations on his behalf, should immediately take utu (or payment in revenge). But instead of taking revenge on the woman herself, the chief's relations ambushed and killed a slave belonging to one of her relations. In revenge for the death of the slave, the woman's relations went to a village near Tai Tapu and killed a man named Hape, who was related to those who had killed the slave. But it also happened that Hape's wife was the sister of the principal chief of Taumutu. At this stage Tama-i-hara-nui returned from Kaikōura. Telling the people of Kaiapoi, who had ties with both sides, to stay out of the fight, he went on to Takapūneke and then to Wairewa (Little River), where he gathered a war party. From Wairewa an attack was launched on Taumutu, in which many of the people of that village were killed, including some Kaiapoi women married to men of Taumutu.
In the next stage of the feud the people of Taumutu were joined by reinforcements from Otago under the chief Taiaroa, and also, in spite of Tama-i-hara-nui's order, by about 100 men from Kaiapoi, who wished to avenge the death of the Taumutu women. This force then proceeded to attack Wairewa, led by two men with muskets – the first of these weapons to be carried by a war party in Canterbury. They found the pā empty, however, chiefly because Taiaroa, whose real purpose was to try to end the feud, had warned the people of Wairewa of the approach of the war party. On their way home, the Kaiapoi men fell upon and killed a nephew of the important chief Taununu, whose pā was at Ripapa Island. Instead of taking his reprisal by attacking Kaiapoi – probably because of the strength of that fortress – Tanunu attacked Whakaepa (Coalgate), a small but populous offshoot of Kaiapoi, and killed all its people.