Tuhoe activist, Tame Iti, listens as the judge delivers his sentence. Picture / Alan Gibson

Tuhoe activist, Tame Iti, listens as the judge delivers his sentence. Picture / Alan Gibson

Most people will not have made the trip to Ruatoki or Taneatua, deep in Tuhoe country in the Bay of Plenty. It's not that these small towns, with their backdrop of the rugged Ureweras, are hard to get to.

Taneatua is just 13km from Whakatane, and if you carry on another 9km you reach Ruatoki. Both are little rural towns where horses graze in backyards, towns with longstanding reputations as hotbeds of Maori rebellion.

Ruatoki once had shops but Taneatua is now the hub with two dairies, a couple of takeaways, a police station and a pub.

If you did make it to Taneatua, possibly to take the turn to Opotiki and Gisborne, you would not have seen the nub of the matter.

Further along, you drive over some faded white paint. It is the outlines of bodies with hair tied back, hands holding mere. Splashes of red paint represent blood.

You will also drive over some words: CONFISCATION LINE and STOLEN LANDS.

It was here early last year that Tuhoe put on a powerful re-enactment of their past, the theft of their land and the burning of their homes and crops in the 1860s and 1870s.

It was during that re-enactment that one of Tuhoe's best-known sons landed in trouble with the law yet again, this time for firing a shotgun.

Tame Iti's now infamous shooting of the New Zealand flag caused much controversy. Amid cries of treason, however, he was only charged with brandishing and firing a shotgun.

He defended himself by saying the shooting took place behind the confiscation line on Tuhoe land and he was acting within Tuhoe custom, but was yesterday found guilty.

For several weeks it looked like he would not be charged at all, until politicians saw the incident on television.

But even former Act MP Stephen Franks, who lobbied hardest to get Iti arrested, says his pursuing Iti was incidental to another political point he wanted made.

Iti, and others in Tuhoe, say shooting the flag diverted the focus of what was really going on that day, but that in the end the case turned into something bigger.

They say that the charge against Iti by the Crown ties into the Tuhoe struggle for sovereignty, something that has been going on since the land confiscations and wars of the 1800s. Tuhoe, many will proudly point out, never signed the Treaty of Waitangi, never gave away their autonomy. Iti's case, they say, is history repeating itself.