Ask that mountain : the story of Parihaka / Dick Scott.

Label mounted on title page: Available from International Publications Service Collings, New York.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Fire and sword -- Village of peace -- Smoothing the pillow -- Challenge of the ploughmen -- Battle of the fences -- Rising storm -- Smite the shepherd, scatter his flock -- Prison and exile -- Pass laws and pilgrimages -- The liberal embrace -- Preposterous ghosts -- Portraits of Te Whiti -- Taranaki drink trade -- Hiroki's last letter.

Parihaka has become a byword for Maori refusal to yield land, culture and dignity to New Zealand's colonial government. Well after the end of the New Zealand Wars, the people of this small settlement at the foot of Mt Taranaki held out against the encroachments of Pakeha settlers in a struggle that swapped the weapons of war for the weapons of peace. Taking as their symbol the white feather, the chiefs Te Whiti and Tohu led Parihaka in one of the world's first-recorded campaigns of passive resistance. Maori ploughmen wrote its message across the settlers' pastures, and Maori fencers underlined the point by throwing barriers across the queen's highways. Withstanding repeated military action, the spirit of resistance born at Parihaka kept alive the flame of that supposedly 'dying race', the Maori. Ask That Mountain draws on official papers, settler manuscripts and oral history to give the first complete account of what took place at Parihaka. Now in its ninth edition, this seminal work was in 1995 named by the Sunday Star-Times as one of the ten most important books published in New Zealand.