1.    Kahikātoa - kahika-ā-toa, the hardwood-of-warriors, is mānuka. See below. 2.   'The ill-winds that blow from the sea' is a metaphor for the war-parties from coastal tribes. 3.   'A totally desolate land...' She could see the future. 45 years later the Colonial govermenent .      paid 5000 Pounds to warriors from coastal tribes to destroy her village. Kaore Te Hou Mihi-ki-te-kapua Born at Ruatāhuna in the 1790s, the daughter of Te Aihurangi and Tamakaimoana, Mihi Kitekapua or Mihi-ki-te-kapua was the greatest composer of the Tuhoe and Mataatua peoples. She married Hikawai, the eldest son of Pourangahua and Te Hinewhe, and they had several children. In the 1820s she was present when Nga Puhi and Ngati Pukeko made attacks on Tuhoe. Her husband Hikuwai was killed in the battle of Te Rahui o Mahia. The Tuhoe people took over the care of the Waikaremoana area in the 1820s, and pa were set up at various points around the lake in order to hold the lake's mana. Mihi-ki-te-kapua was one of the women who went to live at Te Matuahu on the northern side of the lake. It was there that her fame as a composer began to grow. She was living alone: all her children had grown up and gone away and her husband had died. Most of her songs expressed the yearning arising from the deep loneliness she felt, unable to turn to family for relief from the oppression of her solitary environment. When her kinfolk were driven out of Te Matuahu by governent forces in 1870, she wrote her last and greatest waiata tangi, Engari Te Tītī. Kahikātoa (mānuka) The warrior husband who protected the poet has been killed, and so she collects his array of mānuka weapons, calling them kahik-ā-toa, the hardwood-of-warriors, to remind her of his strength and courage. Nuka was the old Malay word for wound, which was probably why the weapon-grade and wound-healing aromatic hardwood mytle tree in East Polynesia, Decaspermum fruticosum, was called Nukanuka. When voyagers from those tropical islands arrived in Aotearoa in the 13th century, they found two similar myrtle trees thriving in the colder climate here, mānuka and kānuka. 1. Mānuka ("related to"-nuka) is the common name for the red-wood Leptospermum scoparium in most of Aotearoa. The East Polynesian and Maori word for troubled is also Mānuka or Mānukanuka. Nuka, wound => nukanuka, a tree with wood that inflicts wounds => mānukanuka, the state of mind resulting from psychological wounding. In Northland, and in poetry, Mānuka is refered to as Kahik-ā-toa, the hardwood-of-warriors. Kahika, the hardwood myrtle Syzygium malaccense, called Kafika in its Indonesian/Philippines/Malaysian homelands, was one of the useful plants carried by Polynesians all across the Pacific where it has a varety of similar names. I first tasted delicious big mountain apples the Fijian boys with me called "Kavika" in the highlands of Viti Levu. In New Zealand I have also enjoyed the smaller, but equally delicious, fruit of the white pine, Kahika-tea. 2. Kānuka (burning-nuka) made great firewood. It is the common name in most of Aotearoa for Kunzea ericoides with its hard white wood. Kānuka was also an old Tahitian name for weapons-grade wood, but Kunzea is called Mārū (shady) on the East Coast, and Mānuka north of Auckland, hinting that the first inhabitants of the East Coast and Northland may not have come from Tahiti. My thanks to the Benton family for their wonderful Te Māra Reo website, which provided most of this information about plant-names. Maori songs - Kiwi songs - Home Webpage put onto folksong.org.nz website October 2018.