Parihaka is a community in the Taranaki region of New Zealand, located between Mount Taranaki and the Tasman Sea. In the 1870s and 1880s the settlement, then reputed to be the largest Māori village in New Zealand, became the centre of a major campaign of non-violent resistance to European occupation of confiscated land in the area. Armed soldiers were sent in and arrested the peaceful resistance leaders and many of the Maori residents, often holding them in jail for months without trials. The village was founded about 1866 by Māori chiefs Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi on land seized by the government during the post-New Zealand Wars land confiscations of the 1860s. The population of the village grew to more than 2,000, attracting Māori who had been dispossessed of their land by confiscations and impressing European visitors with its cleanliness and industry, and its extensive cultivations producing cash crops as well as food sufficient to feed its inhabitants. When an influx of European settlers in Taranaki created a demand for farmland that outstripped the availability, the Grey government stepped up efforts to secure title to land it had confiscated but subsequently not taken up for settlement. From 1876 some Māori in Taranaki accepted "no fault" payments called takoha compensation, while some hapū, or sub-tribal groups, outside the confiscation zone took the government's payments to allow surveying and settlement. Māori near Parihaka and the Waimate Plains rejected the payments, however, the government responded by drawing up plans to take the land by force. In late 1878 the government began surveying the land and offering it for sale. Te Whiti and Tohu responded with a series of non-violent campaigns in which they first ploughed settlers' farmland and later erected fences across roadways to impress upon the government their right to occupy the confiscated land to which they believed they still had rights, given the government's failure to provide the reserves it had promised. The campaigns sparked a series of arrests, resulting in more than 400 Māori being jailed in the South Island, where they remained without trial for as long as 16 months with the aid of a series of new repressive laws. As fears grew among white settlers that the resistance campaign was a prelude to renewed armed conflict, the Hall government began planning a military assault at Parihaka to close it down. Pressured by Native Minister John Bryce,