HAUHAU

member of Pai Marire (Maori: Good and Peaceful Religion) any of a religio-military cult among the Maori of New Zealand, arising during the Maori Wars of the 1860s. The movement was founded in 1864 by Te Ua Haumene, who claimed to have been visited by the angel Gabriel (in 1862) and to have been moved by the experience to kill his child in repentance for the straying of the Maori people. Using a mixture of Jewish, Christian, and Maori religious tenets, the cult held that the Maori were a new chosen people. Their immediate task was to drive the Europeans from New Zealand and to recover their ancestral lands. The adherents of Pai Marire were assured by their leader that shouting the words Pai Marire, hau, hau! (or hapa, hapa!) in battle would protect them from European bullets. The cry provided the members with their popular name, and belief in the effectiveness of the cry accounted for the daring in battle that allowed the Hauhau warriors to raise the hopes of the Maori. In 186465, as the Hauhau took the field, most Maori forces were going down in defeat; immediate and large-scale European confiscation of Maori land, however, drove many Maori into the ranks of armed dissidents, and Hauhau remained a common label for these people. Fighting continued until 1872. By then Pai Marire itself had dwindled, but similar patterns of religious belief have continued strong among the Maori, Mormonism among them.