Ᾱwhina was well cared for at the Costley Home, but it became apparent that the disease would take its usual course and her care was palliative. She received regular visits from Rāwiri and the family and occasionally from some of the whānau from Te Kuiti. Kelly and Annie also visited, Kelly more often, and he preferred to come with Rāwiri or Wiremu, as Ᾱwhina often reverted to speaking te reo Māori. Kelly had acquired only a little of the reo and needed an interpreter.
Ᾱwhina was not always fully conscious and lucid because of the medications she was taking, particularly the laudanum, which seemed to induce a dream-like state. On one occasion, when Kelly and Rāwiri entered Ᾱwhina’s open air courtyard ward, they found her singing:
Tiwha tiwha te pō.
Ko te Pakerewhā
Ko Arikirangi tenei ra te haere nei.
Rāwiri listened pensively and translated for Kelly:
Dark, dark is the night.
There is the Pakerewhā
There is Arikirangi to come.
Ᾱwhina continued singing the same refrain.
“It’s a prophecy about the coming of Arikirangi Te Tūruki,” Rāwiri explained. “You would know him as Te Kooti. That was the name he took when he was baptised, from the Pākehā name Coates. The prophecy came from Te Kooti’s grandfather.”
“Who is the Pakerewhā?”
“The Pakerewhā are strangers with white skin or red skin.”
“The Pākehā?”
“Yes, and this was before the coming of the Pākehā. The grandfather, Toiroa Ikariki, was a matakite, a visionary, a seer. He foresaw the coming of the Europeans three years before the arrival of Captain Cook. He drew images in sand and made models of what he saw: wheeled carts, horses, hats, trousers, pipes, things never seen before in New Zealand.”
“Really? I’ve never heard this before.”
Kelly was more incredulous when Rāwiri added, “He said of the white men who would come, the name of their god will be Tama-i-rorokutia, the son who was killed, a good god; however the people will still be oppressed.”
“Their God will be the son who was killed,” Kelly repeated, absorbing the gravity of the statement. “Te Kooti was a notorious outlaw, but who was he really? You say he was baptised. Was he a Christian? Did Ᾱwhina know him?”
“Ae, Te Kooti Arikirangi. Te Kooti Tawhaki” Ᾱwhina said, and then lapsed back into a stupor.
“Yes, she knew him well,” Rāwiri said. “I met him too. He lived in Te Kuiti for ten years. He was a Christian, an Anglican in fact, and a Bible scholar, but then he founded his own sect, the Ringatu. His followers called him Te Kooti Tawhaki, Te Kooti the Twice-born, because he had tuberculosis and he recovered from it. It was when he was banished to the Chatham Islands. The prisoners on the Chathams suffered from the cold and the harsh conditions. Te Kooti got sick, and in a fever, he saw visions. They say he was visited by the archangel Michael.”
“Te Kooti led the escape of the prisoners from the Chathams, by seizing a government supply ship. There were about three hundred prisoners in all, men, women and children, and they became his followers. He wasn’t a chief, but there were many chiefs among his followers. He became their prophet. He had many enemies, both Māori and Pākehā and he was on the run and causing a lot of trouble. He couldn’t find refuge anywhere.”
“Why did he go to Te Kuiti? Was he a Kingite?”
“No, in fact he was going to challenge Tāwhiao as the spiritual leader of Māori. Of course Tāwhiao and Rewi Maniapoto rejected him, even when he became a pacifist, but he finally made peace with Tāwhiao, and Tāwhiao granted him refuge in Te Kuiti.”
*
On another occasion when Kelly visited Ᾱwhina with Wiremu, she was sitting up in bed reading and she was quite lucid, except that she thought Wiremu was her mokopuna. She greeted him with, “Kia ora taku moko. Kei te pēhea tōu mahi?”
And Wiremu responded, “Kia ora, Whaea. E pai ana te mahi. Still challenging the government in the courts.”
Ᾱwhina talked about the raupatu, the Māori land issues, protecting the Rohe Pōtae, and commended Wiremu for continuing the struggle for justice, for mastering the Pākehā Law, pursuing the way of the Law. She spoke of Te Kooti again: “Te Kooti ceased fighting, and at the end, he said, “The canoe for you to paddle after me is the Law. Only the Law can be set against the Law.””
To Kelly she said, “Kei te pēhea tou whānau, e Tama?”
Kelly knew enough to say, “Kei te pai, Whaea.”
After a few minutes, Ᾱwhina lay back and drifted off into a reverie and chanted:
Kei muri i te awe kapara
He tangata kē
Mana i te ao
He mā.
Kelly looked to Wiremu for a translation.
“It’s an old pre European prophecy,” he said.
Shadowed behind the tattooed face
A Stranger stands
He who owns the world
And he is White.
*
While Kelly, Annie and Rāwiri were visiting Ᾱwhina, they spoke to her doctor about what they perceived to be her worsening condition. The doctor confirmed that indeed she was deteriorating and he had prescribed an increase in her medication, ‘to keep her as comfortable as possible’. He reported also that she was experiencing episodes of what he called ‘dissociation’, and she was praying aloud and chanting in Māori.
“The chanting is mōteatea,” Rāwiri said. “It’s a lament, like a tribal song. And she’s always been in the habit of praying.”
The doctor went about his rounds and left Kelly, Annie and Rāwiri at her bedside. Ᾱwhina was sitting up in her bed with her eyes closed, unaware of her visitors, and quietly chanting, just as the doctor had said, in te reo Māori, interspersed with some English, some unintelligible, but she quite clearly recited:
And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
“She’s quoting from Kubla Khan,” Annie said. It’s a poem by Coleridge. They say he wrote it under the influence of opium.”
Rāwiri called out to Ᾱwhina as if to bring her back from some distant place and he spoke to her both in English and te reo Māori, but she made no response.
Ᾱwhina uttered more mōteatea and then in English: “Ngātapa. Men shot like dogs and thrown down the cliff. Passchendaele. Men lie dead in the mud.”
“Do you know what she’s talking about?” Kelly asked Rāwiri.
“Ngātapa. It’s a pā in Tairawhiti, Poverty Bay, on a steep hill. Many of Te Kooti’s men were captured and executed there and their bodies thrown off the cliff.”
“What about Passiondale?”
“Never heard of it. Maybe something she’s dreamed up.”
It was sad to see Whaea Ᾱwhina in this state, apparently oppressed by memories of war and by “the rulers of the darkness of this age, the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places,” as she said, when she was praying aloud and quoting from the Bible. But there was at least a glimmer of light and hope at the end, as she continued with, “…and behold the darkness shall cover the earth and deep darkness the people; but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and His glory will be seen upon thee.”