Kia Ora

Kia Ora! This means wishing you well from my 3 times great-grandmother Kotiro Hinerangi of Ngati Ruanui iwi from Taranaki. Here I am I standing with Sandy, a local Maori elder outside our Marae near Howera in the North Island. Kotiro had an adventurous life, even by today's standards! Her father was a chief who was beheaded by a raiding party, then she was taken and given to Hone Heke as a Slave.He then gifted her to the first white setler in Kororareka,Alexander Gray,a gunsmith.In 1830 at the Paihai Church they were married by William Williams.They had four children together,and when Alexander Gray died in 1839 she married William Lord,a shopkeeper with whom she had a daughter, Lucy. Kotiro didn't like Hone Heke and contemptuously refered to him as a "upoko poaka"(pigs head).This caused Hone Heke and his Tua Muru of 150 men to break into William Lord's shop, carry her off and then set about ransacking Kororareka then cutting down the flag pole, thus starting the first Mauri War. Her two eldest surviving children Alexander Gray and Margaret Elizabeth Maria Gray were taken by The Rev Samuel Marsden to Sydney and this is the next installment of her story...............

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