Wiremu Neera Te Awaitaia

rdf:langString Wiremu Neera Te Awaitaia

rdf:langString Wiremu Neera Te Awaitaia (c.1796 – 27 April 1866) was a Māori chief in New Zealand during first contact with European traders, the 1820s Musket Wars up to the 1860s New Zealand Wars. Born in or around 1796 into the Waikato Tribe of Ngāti Māhanga, he has been described as a "friend of Pākehā and a Chief of great influence" in the region of Raglan, New Zealand. He witnessed the coming of Christianity to Māoridom (specifically the Wesleyan missionaries to Raglan, James and Mary Wallis) in the mid-1830s, the sale of native land to the first European settlers, and the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in the 1840s. Te Awaitaia also witnessed the Māori King Movement in the 1850s, and the New Zealand Wars in the 1860s. He died on 27 April 1866. The name "Wiremu Neera" is the Maori phonetic rendering of the English name "William Naylor", which Te Awaitaia (his original name) took for himself to mark his conversion to Christianity in 1836. The monument that stands in Raglan, erected in his honor (on the western side of the harbour by the camping ground), spells his name as "Wiremu Nero Te Awaitaia" – other renderings of Naylor are Near, and Naera.