In the Hokianga, settlers now match Māori in number, and the Treaty that chief Tahana once urged his people to trust has become the instrument taking their land. When the chiefs turn on him, Tahana answers with the hardest thing he holds: "We send one inside. I send my very breath. I will send Petera." At the water's edge he presses his koro's patu into his son's hands — "so you do not forget who you are, when they tell you who you will become" — and lets him go, to Rome, with the French Bishop Pompallier, to be made a priest.
Petera is fifteen, a warrior in training who has picked up Latin just by standing near the priests at Mass. He crosses the world on a French whaling ship and arrives a barefoot stranger among the seminarians of the Collegio Urbano. And he is brilliant — telling his professors that if God is infinite, God was in Aotearoa long before the ships. But the Church does not want his mind; it wants his surrender. They rename him Peter Waka. He answers: "Father, I am Petera."
They make him kneel on stone to break him. He takes his vows anyway — and something in him leaves as he says the words. Then word comes that his koro has died, and grief, a world from home, gives him back his language and his spine. For three mornings he kneels in silence at the chapel door. "He does not refuse. He does not comply." And that cannot continue.
He comes home — not a priest, but something the Church never imagined it could produce. On the marae his father gives back the patu, receives the rosary, and finally names him: Chief. Petera went to Rome to become what others wanted. He returns as himself — not Catholic Māori, but Māori Catholic.