[2] Waitaha's earliest ancestors are traditionally traced as arrivals from Te Patunui-o-āio[a] in Eastern Polynesia aboard the Uruaokapuarangi canoe (waka), of which Rākaihautū had been the captain.
[8] When genealogies are interpreted with 25–30 years' worth of lifespan for at least 34 generations,[9] these people are calculated to have lived in or around the 9th century at the latest,[10] but this is not an entirely reliable way to trace earlier occupants of New Zealand.
[7] The party then moved back northwards to live at Banks Peninsula, where Rākaihautū renamed Tūwhakarōria to Tuhiraki, thrusting it into a hill called Pūhai where it turned into the rocky peak known to Pākehā today as Mount Bossu.
[12] According to Sir Āpirana Ngata, it is "very doubtful" that Rākaihautū went south at all, saying specifically in an audio recording with John Te Herekiekie Grace:[13] He landed in the north.
[11] In 1995, a book by controversial author Barry Brailsford, Song of Waitaha: The Histories of a Nation, claimed that the ancestors of a "Nation of Waitaha" were the first inhabitants of New Zealand, three groups of people of different races, two of light complexion and one of dark complexion, who had arrived in New Zealand from an unspecified location in the Pacific Ocean, 67 generations before the book appeared.
Historian Michael King noted: "There was not a skerrick of evidence – linguistic, artifactual, genetic; no datable carbon or pollen remains, nothing – that the story had any basis in fact.