Wiremu Neera Te Awaitaia

He witnessed the coming of Christianity to Māoridom (specifically the Wesleyan missionaries to Raglan, James and Mary Wallis) in the mid-1830s, the sale of native land to the first European settlers, and the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in the 1840s.

The name "Wiremu Neera"[2] is the Māori phonetic rendering of the English name "William Naylor", which Te Awaitaia (his original name)[3] took for himself to mark his conversion to Christianity in 1836.

The monument that stands in Raglan, erected in his honor (on the western side of the harbour by the camping ground), spells his name as "Wiremu Nero Te Awaitaia" – other renderings of Naylor are Near, and Naera.

After this, the N Mahanga tribe became a member of the Waikato confederacy,[5] which had been formed in response to the increasing influence and aggression of Ngāti Toa of Kawhia,[6] which was led by the famous Chief of notorious and violent reputation, Te Rauparaha.

Te Rauparaha was driven south away from his lands by the Waikato Confederacy and subsequently took control of much of the lower North Island of New Zealand and also carried out various other infamous invasions.