by Michael King
This saga with its lurid allegations of Moriori physical and mental ‘inferiority’ was assembled from contaminated and unrelated fragments of so-called Maori tradition. It had no basis in history or ethnology. Yet it was, as noted previously, published in the Department of Education’s School Journal and distributed to every primary school classroom in the country. This action, supported by subsequent publications which repeated the story, coloured public perception of the indigenous Chatham Islanders for the next three generations.
Condemned by a late twentieth-century ethnologist as a ‘virulent myth’, the construct was a consequence of social Darwinist ideas current at the time of its invention. It explained the plight and demoralisation of Moriori in the nineteenth century as evidence that they were an ‘inferior’ people unable to adapt either to the neolithic world in which they had previously lived or to the ‘modern’ age of European colonisation. If they were, ipso facto, inferior to Maori – who had flourished in their pre-European society and showed signs of being able to negotiate the effects of colonisation, even to assert themselves in the face of it – then the explanation must lie in Melanesian ancestry. This conclusion followed because it was believed that Melanesian skin colouring (the basis for the origin of that designation), hair texture and physical features all indicated a lower order of human evolution than that displayed by the more ‘Aryan-looking’ Maori.
Further, the very notion that Maori had displaced and colonised a more primitive people was both evidence of their superiority and an implicit justification for what Europeans, representatives of a still higher order of civilisation, had done to Maori in turn (‘in colonising you and your country we did no more than that which you had already done to Moriori’). All the pleasing and convenient resonances of the Moriori myth ensured that it enjoyed a popular currency among Pakeha New Zealanders, and among many Maori, long after it had been disproved by the Dunedin ethnologist Henry Skinner in the 1920s.
After the ‘virulent myth’ had been further demolished in more public arenas by a television programme in 1980 and a professionally written history of Moriori published in 1989, another story, equally erroneous and equally innocent of evidential connections, arose phoenix-like from the ashes to take its place in the public mind. This new myth, seized on uncritically by the popular press, generated more reverberations that a new generation of New Zealanders in turn would find comforting. It was yet another variation on the notion that the ancestors of the Maori had not been the discoverers and first inhabitants of New Zealand.
This time it was alleged that the honour and distinction of first landfall and footfall had gone to a group known as Waitaha (or, more grandly, ‘the Nation of Waitaha’). The ancestors of these people had allegedly sailed into the Pacific not simply from Asia, but also from Africa and South America. In a kind of cultural version of the geologists’ Gondwana scenario, proponents of Waitaha said that the ancestral groups had brought with them concepts and technologies apparent in the earlier human histories of all those continents. The eventual discoverers of New Zealand had sailed there from Easter Island more than 2000 years before Polynesians arrived. They were a peacable people, in harmony with the land and the sea. Their secret history, ‘hidden … in the trees and in the stones’ and withheld from Pakeha scholars for 200 years, would be published in 1995 as Song of Waitaha: the Histories of a Nation.
The Waitaha myth presented a range of difficulties for historians and prehistorians. There was not a skerrick of evidence – linguistic, artefactual, genetic; no datable carbon or pollen remains; nothing – that the story had any basis in fact. Which would make Waitaha the first people on Earth to live in a country for several millennia and leave no trace of their occupation. This lack of evidence, the story’s proponents would claim, was because Waitaha stone structures had been mistaken for natural formations or Maori artefacts, and because their history had been kept ‘secret’ from both Maori and Pakeha scholars. And, to confuse the picture further, elements of the story did have a basis in Maori tradition: there had been tribes in both the North and South Islands who used the name Waitaha.
In the South Island, some of those genuinely descended from the Maori Waitaha people and the tribes which had subsumed them, Ngati Mamoe and Ngai Tahu, embraced with enthusiasm a scenario which made them far more than one Maori tribe among many: a pre-Polynesian civilisation which could be said to have prior rights over Maori. Some Maori from other regions who saw similar political and ideological advantage in the Waitaha myth also abandoned their previous and authentic tribal affiliations to become, instead, descendants of and spokespeople for the Nation of Waitaha.
For Pakeha supporters, and they outnumbered Maori, the story had multiple appeal. It carried on the popular Victorian notion of cultural diffusion, which held that any cultural innovation displayed by a ‘primitive’ people, such as the moai statues on Easter Island, had to have come from a more ‘highly civilised’ people elsewhere. It incorporated the neo-Darwinist conviction that the representatives of ‘higher civilisations’ were pale-skinned, as some of the ancestors of Waitaha were said to be. It supported New Age beliefs about the desirability of living in a sacramental relationship with the natural environment, the energies of stones and crystals, and abilities to derive information from ‘cosmic consiousness’, ley-lines and the ‘earth’s harmonics’. And it completely undercut contemporary Maori resource claims against the Crown by arguing that Maori were not in fact descended from the first inhabitants of New Zealand, unless they also found and acknowledged Waitaha ancestry. In this last instance, the Waitaha myth became a neat substitution for that of Moriori: ‘Maori did to Waitaha what Pakeha did to Maori; therefore Maori have no legal or moral high ground from which to argue for compensation for the effects of colonisation.’
Not a single scholar, Maori or Pakeha, accepted the validity of the Waitaha Nation scenario, and standard histories of New Zealand failed to dignify it even with a mention. But that in no way diminished its popular appeal. Media interest in freakish stories ensured that the public appetite for such stories was sustained. And to the myth of the ‘secretness’ of Waitaha traditions could be added the allegation that reputable scholars sought to ‘suppress’ the Waitaha story because it conflicted with paradigms on which their careers and employment depended. And so, for the initiates, the myth of the Nation of Waitaha was sustained by a self-reinforcing circle of argument and delusion, of misperception and misrepresentation, that permitted no admission of evidence or common sense from outside the circle.
[1] The suggestion that kiore were in New Zealand earlier than the thirteenth century AD (see Chapter 1) is merely evidence of a possible Polynesian landing on the New Zealand coast; coinciding evidence of settlement is conspicuously absent. Other problems too about the early dates for kiore bones (such as the fact that they appear to precede even the human settlement of East Polynesia) have yet to be resolved.
Chapter 5
First Colonisation
The land that the ancestors of the Maori settled was unlike any they had encountered in their remembered island past. To begin with it was enormous – 1600 km from the northern tip of Maui’s Fish to the base of Aoraki’s Canoe, with 18,000 km of coastline. The landscapes ranged from coastal beach and broadleaf coastal forest to estuarine swamps, enormous inland plains, podocarp-covered hills, sub-alpine ranges and mountains capped with snow – to which the formerly tropical Polynesians, having never seen such a substance previously, gave the name huka or foam. There were thermal regions and at least six active, or soon-to-be-active, volcanoes. Compared with the dimensions of Polynesia’s basalt islands and coral atolls, the resources of this new country – its minerals, its forests and the big-game food provided by giant birds and seals – would have seemed vast and inexhaustible. Even the days themselves were longer in summer and therefore fuller than in equatorial regions.
Second, New Zealand’s temperatures and climates varied beyond Polynesian knowledge and expectation: sub-tropical i
n the north, temperate in the central region and cold beyond anything they could have imagined in the south. This factor would influence which of the crops they brought with them could grow, and where, and which they would have to discard. Climate would also determine what garments they would need to wear in different parts of the country, what natural materials they would choose to make them, what technical skills they would have to invent in order to make use of such new materials, and what kinds of houses they would need to build for shelter and warmth.
It was the adaptation to the new environment of the concepts and practices they brought with them, and the new skills and practices they developed to meet unfamiliar environmental challenges, that transformed East Polynesian island culture into that of New Zealand Maori. And that transformation occurred over at least three identifiable stages, which historians have termed colonial, transitional and tribal.
The Maori colonial era began the moment East Polynesian migrants stepped ashore and continued through the first phase of settlement and adjustment. It is the period formerly referred to as ‘Archaic Maori’ or, in Roger Duff’s famous phrase, ‘the Moa Hunter period of Maori culture’. Duff, fresh from the excitement and revelations of his excavations on the Wairau Bar at the head of the South Island, was right to highlight the role of moa in the economy and material culture of early settlers in that part of the country. But his phrase suggests an overly simplistic understanding of what was happening to early Maori in that era throughout New Zealand.
Archaeological investigation of the earliest habitation sites shows that moa were a major source of protein – and in some cases the major source – for settlers in some parts of the country, especially the east coast of the South Island (estimates of the number of birds killed, or at least cut up, at the mouth of the Waitaki River range from 29,000 to 90,000; and further south, at the Shag River mouth, at least 6000 moa were slaughtered over a relatively short period of occupation). Given the size of the largest birds, the enormous amount of meat they carried (drumsticks alone the size of a leg of beef) and the relative ease with which, having no ingrained fear of ground-based predators, they would have been caught in coastal shrubland and on inland plains, the reliance of many colonial Maori on this food source is no surprise. Even the smaller ‘bush moa’ had a body mass comparable with that of turkeys. The Wairau Bar excavations also revealed that early Maori used moa eggshells the size of rugby balls as water carriers, and moa bone for the manufacture of fishhooks, harpoon heads and ornaments.
Other factors too were important to the economy, material culture and lifestyle of early Maori, however. The ‘resource islands’ which made up what may have been the regions of first settlement – the east coast of the Far North and Coromandel Peninsula, Cook Strait, and the south-east coast of the South Island – also provided access to seals, to minerals for tool-making and, in all but the southernmost sites, suitable areas for the cultivation of some of the plants the colonists had brought with them: kumara, yam, taro, ti, gourd and paper mulberry (of the eight possible root crops and eleven tree crops cultivated in tropical Polynesia, only six would grow in New Zealand).
So moa were a significant source of protein, of bones for ornament and fishhook manufacture, and, possibly, of feathers for use in cloaks. But other large birds were slaughtered – the flightless goose, an enormous rail now known as the adzebill, swans and pelicans, all of them, like the moa, exploited to the point of extinction after little more than 100 years. The fur seal, sealion and elephant seal were also killed and eaten in such large quantities that, after just over a century, their formerly crowded rookeries were deserted everywhere but in Foveaux Strait and Fiordland. Other sea mammals such as dolphin and pilot whales were also taken by harpooning. And in each resource area heavy use was made of local minerals for the manufacture of flake knives and adzes – obsidian from Mayor Island, basalt from Coromandel, greywacke from the Hauraki Gulf, argillite and serpentine from the Nelson region, and chert and silcrete from Otago. Further, the movement of some of these materials, especially Mayor Island obsidian, shows that settlers in the three or four principal regions of early settlement were in communication with one another and either traded or exchanged goods or made minerals available to one another by allowing freedom of movement throughout the country as a whole.
While the main emphasis for the first century or so of settlement was on locating resources, hunting, and to a lesser extent on foraging for shellfish and fish, it is a mistake to portray these early peoples, as some writers have done, solely as hunter-gatherers. The fact that six of the plants they brought from tropical Polynesia survived shows that from the outset, at least in the more northerly settlements, attention was given to planting, nurturing and harvesting them. They were cultivated throughout the period of Maori colonial settlement so as to be available to play a more important role in post-colonial Maori life, when the big game was gone. Continued gardening, in other words, constituted a dietary insurance policy.
The disposition of early settlement sites, and their size and character, point to an important conclusion. The lifestyle of these people was, if not quite nomadic, certainly mobile. They would occupy a home base, probably the place where gardening and tool-making took place, and a constellation of ‘stations’ for activities appropriate to certain times of the year – hunting moa or seals, foraging for seafood, collecting minerals. It is probable that whole communities took part in these activities as they moved from place to place and that there was less specialisation than in the later and more stationary tribal era.
Louise Furey has described one base settlement in Northland occupied in the early fourteenth century.
In total, 3200 objects are known from Houhora. These include adzes, ornaments, fishing gear, bone harpoon points, bone needles, tattoo chisels, bone chisels and awls, and manufacturing tools such as stone drillpoints, hammerstones, sandstone files and scrapers. These … show that there was a full range of activities taking place at Houhora. The people were engaged in everyday activities to procure food, to manufacture … objects in wood, stone and bone, and … participating in other activities encompassing the social dimension, for example competitive sports such as dart throwing, or tattooing …
Snapper was the dominant [food] species … followed by seals. But in terms of calorific value seals exceeded all other species. The moa were probably caught some distance away from the village and brought back as dismembered carcasses … Seals were brought back to the site whole if pups and lighter juveniles, but adults are only represented by bones which were attached to large muscles … Dolphins were hunted using small bone harpoons. The meat was cut up and cooked in an umu, mandibles used to make fishhooks and teeth drilled and strung as necklaces … [The] significant lack of vertebrae for the number of fish represented … evidence of fish drying in the summer and of storage for later use … [There is also] evidence of preserving birds. These people in the early fourteenth century were already following a seasonal round of food procuring, preservation and storage which persisted for hundreds of years.
Significantly, skeletal remains from early settlement sites show the inhabitants to have been well nourished and healthy, even though they seldom lived beyond their late 30s. Historians have speculated that one consequence of this health, itself a result largely of the high-protein diet available to the first generations of settlers, would have been a high rate of fertility. Skeletal remains again reveal that women may have borne as many as four or five children, and this would have led to a rapid population increase – and therefore to additional pressure on food resources in the first two or three generations of settlement.
As a determinant of culture and lifestyle, the Maori colonial period appears to have lasted between 100 and 150 years. After that relatively short period, the big game was all but exhausted. The northern seal rookeries were deserted, in part because hunters had killed mothers and pups along with adult males. Moa became extinct because of the profligate manner in which this resource too was
exploited (a process the Australian ecological historian Tim Flannery would refer to as ‘future-eating’). With the moa had disappeared a range of other birds, mostly flightless, some of them humanly hunted to extinction, others pursued and killed at the egg, fledgling or adult stage by the rats and dogs which the East Polynesians had brought with them. Most mainland sources of shearwaters and petrels, which nested in burrows, would also have disappeared from a combination of intensive hunting and rat and dog predation.
Another factor which accelerated the extinctions was destruction of habitat. Pollen and charcoal cores in swamps reveal that for whatever reason a series of major fires occurred in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, destroying forests especially in Hawke’s Bay and down the east coast of the South Island, but also in inland areas of the North Island and on parts of the Northland and Coromandel peninsulas. The period of the fires coincided with the spectacular decline in the numbers of moa and other large, hunted birds. It is possible that fires began as an effort to clear open living spaces and, later, to drive surviving moa and other ground birds out of their places of hiding. Once started, many fires may have flared out of control. Another theory is that they represent an effort to encourage the growth of bracken fern, which in the Maori tribal era became an important food source. There may be some truth in this, but it is scarcely adequate to explain the full extent of deforestation. The hypothesis that links this with a more desperate and reckless phase of hunting is more plausible.
Who were the people of this era? That is a difficult, if not impossible, question to answer historically. Maori whakapapa offer names without remains – that is, stories without evidence – while archaeology offers remains without names – evidence without stories.