Eva Rickard and the Raglan golf course

Te Kōpua, at Whāingaroa (Raglan), was the papakāinga (home base) of the Tainui hapū of Whāingaroa, known during the later land struggle as Tainui Āwhiro. In September 1941, during the Second World War, the government took 88 acres of their land for use as an emergency airfield. The community was displaced from its homes, which were destroyed along with the wharenui (meeting house) Miria Te Kakara. Te Ara notes that Māori land was often taken for public works in preference to other land, partly because Māori were less able to put political pressure on local and central government. After the war the land was not returned to its Māori owners. Instead the government vested it in the Raglan County Council (Wikipedia dates the transfer to 1953), which leased it to the Raglan Golf Club as a nine-hole course. NZHistory dates the golf course to 1969; Wikipedia's article on Raglan gives 1968.

Tuaiwa (Eva) Rickard was born at Te Kōpua on 19 April 1925 and watched her community being displaced in 1941. The loss of the land became the catalyst for her land rights campaigns of later decades. She clashed with the Raglan County Council over Māori land, rates and environmental issues, including a wastewater treatment pond built on a wāhi tapu (sacred site) near the marae. In 1972 she began petitioning the government for the return of Te Kōpua, which was supposed to have been returned when it was no longer needed as an airstrip. She had joined the golf club and set up the Raglan Māori golf tournament, while opposing the expansion of the course over ancestral burial grounds. Her early efforts went largely unheeded by the government, but they brought her into the public spotlight as a land rights activist. She joined the Māori land march in 1975. In 1976 she, members of Tainui Āwhiro and Te Matakite o Aotearoa fenced off the urupā (burial ground) on the golf course and performed karakia to protest the desecration of tapu.

In 1978 Rickard invited tohunga and supporters from across the country to gather at the Te Kōpua urupā, where a ceremony would be performed on the day of the golf club's annual tournament. Before the ceremony could take place, the protesters were arrested for trespass on the ninth hole of the golf course. Rickard's biography in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography says she and 16 others were arrested; Wikipedia gives 20 arrests. Television images of her arrest were a defining moment in the struggle. Like the occupation of Bastion Point in Auckland, the protest took place during the first phase of the Waitangi Tribunal, when the tribunal could investigate only present-day claims. Rickard's activism widened. In July 1981 she was one of the protesters who invaded Rugby Park in Hamilton to stop the Springboks' match against Waikato, and in 1984 she led a hīkoi of about 2,000 people to Waitangi.

On 30 November 1983, after numerous court cases and negotiations, Te Kōpua, excluding the airfield itself, was returned with conditions. Rickard refused to compromise and settle, but in 1991, when the Crown withdrew its demand for payment for the land, the property was finally vested in the Te Kōpua Trust. The golf course became a farm, with a marae and training centre. According to NZHistory, the Raglan protest and the occupation of Bastion Point helped to change land legislation, so that if land taken for public works is no longer needed, the government is now required to return it to the original owners. In 1993 Rickard founded the Mana Māori Movement, which never won a seat in Parliament. She told the negotiators of the 1995 Waikato raupatu settlement that the Tainui hapū of Whāingaroa stood outside the deal, and in 1996 she proclaimed the land at Whāingaroa an independent state. She died on 6 December 1997 and was buried at Te Kōpua, in the urupā where she had once been arrested. In the reading of her biographers, Angeline and Hineitimoana Greensill, her success in having Te Kōpua returned helped raise government awareness of Māori concerns and created a precedent for Māori assets being returned as part of treaty settlements.