The Taranaki confiscations of the 1860s took more than a million acres from tribes described as being in rebellion, including land belonging to people who had not fought. Much of it was not immediately occupied. When surveyors moved onto it in the late 1870s to cut it into farms, the question of what could be done about it became urgent.
Te Whiti and Tohu Kakahi had built at Parihaka, under the mountain, a settlement with a reputation for order, prosperity and hospitality, and they had been holding monthly meetings there since 1866. Their answer to the surveys was a campaign of deliberate obstruction with an equally deliberate refusal of violence. In 1879 parties of ploughmen went out and ploughed land that had been taken, working steadily and submitting to arrest when the police came. When those men were taken, others went. Other parties erected fences across surveyed roads and pulled out survey pegs.
The arrests ran into the hundreds, and the government passed legislation allowing the men to be held without trial. Many were shipped to the South Island and imprisoned in Dunedin and Hokitika, where a number died. Throughout, the discipline held: no ploughman resisted arrest.
The campaign was designed to make the confiscation visible as an act requiring force, and it succeeded. It also drew the government into exactly the response it had been designed to provoke.