They believe as aboriginal people, they are considered a parent tribe predating the arrival of Toi aboard Te Paepae-ki-Rarotonga, with lineage tracing back to Ruatipua and Mouruuru.
Ngāti Tūwharetoa were then resident at Kawerau and associated with Te Arawa iwi which today occupies the area from the Bay of Plenty coastline to the Lake Taupō district.
The Ngāti Hotu set up a ring of five forts around Kakahi which the Whanganui Māori attacked and took one by one until finally the last two, Otutaarua and Arikipakewa, fell.
The final, brutal episode of the battle was played out on the flats between Kakahi and the Whanganui river when the now, effectively victorious Whanganui Māori hung the legs of fallen Ngāti Hotu warriors from poles mounted in the forks of trees - a gesture at which their remaining enemies broke and fled off into the depths of the King Country and were thought to have vanished from history, until a Ngati Hotu Matriarch, Monica Matamua, travelled to object to this at the Waitangi Tribunal in the 1990s.
[5] The battle is estimated to have occurred circa 1450 and its story has since been handed down through 15 generations to the Whanganui kaumatua Takiwa Tauarua, who related it to prominent New Zealand artist Peter McIntyre in the 1960s.