NZ Folk Song * Taku Toki

Raureka took Ngati Wairangi's greenstone axe
technology to the Ngai Tahu on the east coast.

Whaka-atu1 ra e taku toki
Ki te kauru2.
Koia pā-nuku-nuku,
E ra e hine,
I a pakurangi, e tama,
Nā te hiahia,
Nā te koroka, e tama,
I a Tane, e tama,
Tane i ruka3,
Tane i raro.

Ka rere te maramara;
Ka huaki ki waho;
Ka tipu4 mai i uta,
Ka takoto mai i waho,
E hura ki te ata,
Ko te ata o Tane.5

I stretch forth my axe
To the head of the tree(?)
How it moves up and down,
All day, oh ladies,
Resounding through the air, oh lads!
Because of my desire
For the mantle - oh lads!
- of Tane, oh lads!
Tane, high above me
then Tane down at my feet.

See the woodchips flying from my axe.
opening up the forest to the outside light.
That which was once growing up in the interior,
is now lying outside
laid bare to the morning light,
to the light of Tane's day.

1. Whakaatu is pronounced whaka-atu, with doubled short "a" sounds.
It is not whakātu, with one long "a" sound.

2. Kauru is either the "head" of any tree, or the sugar-filled root of a cabbage tree.
I think the first meaning is meant here, as the song tells of opening up a forest.

2. "Ruka" is the southern dialect variant of "runga" - "up high"...

3. ...and "tipu" is is the eastern variant of "tupu" - "growing up."

4. Tane is the forest deity, and the trees are Tane personified.
But Tane is also the lord of day, the sun: it is the light and the
warmth of the sun that cause the growth of Tane’s forest trees.

Raureka's alpine crossing

James Cowan was given this song and its story by some old Ngati Wairangi people at Arahura, on the West Coast of the South Island, inland from today's Hokitika. They told him that Raureka was a Ngati Wairangi woman who had lived at Arahura until she quarrelled with her people and left the West Coast. They said she was the first person to cross the Southern Alps.

Accompanied by a slave, she wandered up into the mountains at the head of Lake Kanieri, she discovered the pass now known as Browning’s Pass. After climbing the cliff at the end of the valley, she rossed the divide and travelled down the Rakaia Valley into the plains of what is now Canterbury.

She was given food by a party of Ngai Tahu men. They were building a canoe and she noticed the bluntness of their tools, so she showed them a sharp pounamu adze she had with her.

She then recited a song which was chanted when these axes were used in timber-felling and other woodman’s work.

Greenstone, nephrite or pounamu, was then quite unknown to the East Coast people, and the little axe was a wonderful treasure. Later on, Raureka guided a party of Ngai Tahu across the Alps by the way she had come, and so Ngai Tahu discovered Arahura, the river with the pounamu reef in it.

Over time the Ngai Tahu went to war with Ngati Wairangi and wrested control of the resource from them. The West Coast section of Ngai Tahu (Poutini Ngi Tahu) supplied their eastern relations, and Kaiapoi became a focus of pounamu trading. Te Rauparaha invaded Kaiapoi in the 1830s to get the pounamu which carried such status.

Toki

Early toki used by 13th century Polynesian arrivals to Aotearoa were chipped from stone (argillite was preferred) but apparently they had no tang (The tang is a shoulder to allow the bindings to hold more tightly).

When Turi arrived in the Aotea in the 15th century, he brought Awhiorangi, his great-grandfather's 450 mm x 150 mm tanged toki, chipped from the shell of a giant clam. This was the prototype of tanged toki in Aotearoa. (Awhiorangi was handed down to Turi's grandson who placed inside a hollow puketea tree at Moerangi, behind Okotuku Pa near today's Waverley, and the area was declared sacred. The old adze was located again in 1887, carefully described, and kept at Nukumaru until it disappeared again in 1937.)

The greenstone was discovered by Ngati Wairangi who came from Poverty Bay to Blind Bay in Nelson. Finding the Waitaha Tribe already there they moved over to West Whanganui, and eventually occupied the whole of the West Coast.

To work the greenstone, they had to learn a whole new technique. It could not be roughly shaped by chipping, and had to be sawn with sandstone knives.

Kauru

Edward Tregear (1904) explains that the tap-root (kauru or mauku) of the cabbage-tree (ti: Cordyline sp.) was dug up at particular seasons then split and cooked. The plants were dug up, stacked in piles, and dried in the sun, and the fibrous side-roots removed. The roots were then scraped and slowly baked for from 12 to 18 hours.

The sweet roots were either chewed at once, or else pounded, washed and squeezed to extract the sugar which was contained in great quantity, partially crystalised among the fibres of the root. The sugar was eaten as a relish with fern-root.

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