Quote by Papahurihia: “The tapu of the land is the tapu of the people.”

In Māori understanding, tapu means something like sacred restriction or spiritual protection. This says that the sanctity of the land and the sanctity of the people are the same thing — inseparable. To violate the land is to violate the people, and to honour the people is to honour the land.

Papahurihia preached in the 1830s as the Treaty of Waitangi was approaching and British settlement of New Zealand was intensifying. Māori communities were responding to missionary Christianity by creating new syncretic religious movements that drew on both traditions to make sense of the colonial encounter and protect their world.

Māori tohupu (religious leader and prophet) active in northern New Zealand in the 1830s who founded the Pai Mārire precursor movement and blended Christian and traditional Māori beliefs into a new religious and political tradition. He was among the earliest Māori voices to articulate a theology of indigenous land sovereignty against European settlement.