by Michael King
Maori oral tradition has much to say about the voyages of respective canoes to New Zealand, but little about how people lived in the period of initial settlement. The exception is the large number of stories about ancestors naming geographical features – important markers in tribal tradition that validated occupation and mana whenua, the right of the descendants of discoverers to hold authority over such places. The very absence of other kinds of stories, of how people became established in a strange land, has led to speculation that some canoe traditions may refer to internal migration within New Zealand rather than voyages from Island Polynesia. The point of oral tradition, however, was that it recorded what people needed to know to understand and justify present circumstances, not ‘domestic’ detail about how people lived and worked in an earlier era. In most parts of the country, even knowledge of the moa itself, that considerable contributor to the health and well-being of colonial Maori, had dropped out of remembered tradition by the time of European settlement. With moa gone, there was no reason to recall them down succeeding generations.
Roger Duff’s description of the boulder bank separating the estuary of the Wairau River from the sea in the north of the South Island is, however, sufficient to conjure up some of the activities of early Maori who lived there. In some ways these are similar to and in others different from their contemporaries in Houhora. This site was almost certainly a seasonally occupied hunting camp rather than a village home-base.
[The] boulder bank would prove the most suitable site for their fishing and fowling economy, and the northern tip of it the obvious spot to settle on. Here the river mouth gave access to the sea, for fish and trading expeditions, while along the sea beach accumulated the large quantities of firewood necessary in a treeless spot. The whitebait and kahawai ran seasonally into the river and lagoon; herrings, eels and flounders formed a more permanent population; and banks of edible shellfish thrived at the entrance …
In addition the extinct swan flourished in this favourable estuary … as well as great numbers of [duck] … Finally … the site was well placed for hunting the large numbers of moas whose bones are spread today over the 15 to 20 acres of the main occupation site … [Perhaps] they were rounded up in the Wairau plain or driven down from the Vernon hills, and in either case herded round the base of the Mataora lagoon and then driven along the trap of the boulder bank to the cul de sac provided by its northern end … [Another] possibility is that these birds were hunted some distance inland and brought by canoe or raft down the Wairau River to the camp site. Of the methods of taking the swan and other water-fowl we may be reasonably sure … [Advantage] would be taken of the annual moult when the birds were unable to fly, and could be rounded up …
[The] first signs of Moa-hunter occupation occur on the inner slope of the main ridge … which occupies a halfway line between the sea beach and the lagoon. The signs here are most obvious and include a line of pits or ovens, surrounded by masses of midden refuse … [It] would appear to have been the main cooking area of the settlement and situated for convenience some three chains from the main habitation site. This latter hut area … carries extensive though not obtrusive signs of long continued occupation. The most important burial area … occurred on the outer fringes of it … Bones of moas, dogs, seals, birds, fish etc. are found evenly distributed everywhere, but [moa] eggshell is more common in the hut area.
Helen Leach and Philip Houghton have reconstructed a more specific account of the living circumstances of a 35- to 40-year-old woman whose remains were excavated in Palliser Bay on the northern side of Cook Strait. This community, perhaps transitional rather than early colonial, was one that did not rely on moa for protein or raw materials.
In life she stood 162.6 cm tall … , was fairly robust and right-handed. She had given birth to between two and four children. By the time of her death she was suffering from quite severe wear [and abscessing] on her teeth … Evidence of arthritis in the spine may be linked to the deterioration in health that accompanied these infections. Her diet (or the sand that blew into her food) was clearly very abrasive.
[The] small community in which she lived occupied a group of sleeping huts and cooking sheds on the north bank of the ponded mouth of the Makotukutuku River … Although seasonal trips were made to catch birds such as tuis and parakeets and to gather berries from the forested valleys of the Aorangi mountains … , the coastal village was permanently occupied because of proximity to its gardens and seafood resources. The gardens were located on the old raised beach ridges and swales just behind the village. Their shallow stony soils which had formed under coastal scrub had been cleared by fire … Of the tropical crops introduced by her ancestors, this woman grew mainly the kumara and gourd, best suited to the harsher climate and light soils of the area. In autumn the kumara harvest was carefully stored within enclosed pits close to the cooking sheds.
When not occupied by gardening, she gathered seafood from the intertidal platform, especially paua, topshells, limpets, and crayfish. Some of the fish eaten at the village were caught inshore using circular hooks of bone and shell, but when sea conditions were suitable the men caught fish such as barracouta and kahawai by trolling lures behind canoes. Rats and eels were trapped close to the village and domestic dogs were killed to supplement the meat of sea mammals such as dolphins and seals.
During the summer months, food gathering included items for preservation. The long hours of daylight were fully occupied with the splitting of eels and other oily fish for drying, and the weaving of kete for storage … [Her] heavy work-load in summer and autumn would have slackened in winter and she was fortunate to have fresh water and firewood close at hand throughout the year. Her death, in her fourth decade, would not have been unexpected since few adults survived long, given their physically demanding life-style. She was buried in the vicinity of several family members and a pet dog …
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with the demise of big game, early Maori were required to make major adjustments in their culture and lifestyle in order to survive. They did so by extending and intensifying their remaining sources of food production and foraging.
Gardening would have become increasingly important; in all but the lower half of the South Island, it may eventually have been responsible for up to half the total food requirement. Foraging too would have remained a large part of the routine of daily life: of food sources that had had some significance previously, especially salt and freshwater fish and shellfish, and of the raw foods of the forest (hearts of nikau palm and cabbage tree, berries and drupes when seasonally available, especially the kernel of the karaka berry). It may have been around this time that ‘wild’ plants such as karaka, cabbage tree and bracken fern began to be semi-cultivated. And birds which had been ignored in the era of big-game hunting would now become an important food source: weka, pigeon, kiwi, tui and others. The flighted bush birds would always be difficult to catch, however, and would never be taken in large numbers because Maori lacked adequate projectile weapons. Spears were difficult to use in thick forest, and snaring became the preferred option. It is probable that the experience and the penalties of pursuing larger game to extinction would have led to the development of more sustainable practices in the hunting of remaining birds of the forest and sea.
The period of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has been termed transitional for two other reasons. One is a gradual alteration in art forms, from the unequivocally East Polynesian shapes and motifs of the earliest settlers towards those that came to be associated with classic Maori culture; these alterations were especially noticeable in wood carving and items of personal ornamentation such as hei tiki. This period was also the phase in which Maori groups became less nomadic, more settled in defined territories, and began to form those larger associations based partly on kin and partly on areas of occupation that would be the major social characteristic of the tribal era.
Several factors contributed to the concentration of activities on more res
tricted areas of occupation. First, the demise of big game and the growth of population gave communities less incentive and opportunity to roam over large areas of the country. A diminution in the use of the original ocean-going canoes and their eventual obsolescence might have been another factor in this lifestyle change. Second, the very concentration on the more efficient exploitation of other food sources, especially gardening, required communities to become more ‘sedentary’ and more disciplined in the focus of their activities. Third, the practice that developed of preserving kumara tubers in storage pits (a process that had been unnecessary in a tropical climate) meant that communities had to remain with those pits, particularly in an era of larger population when competition for resources meant that less well-provisioned neighbours might be tempted to raid your larder. This last factor more than any other gave impetus to the rise and spread, from north to south, of fortified hilltops which came to be known as pa. They probably originated from a need to protect kumara tubers; but they persisted and became more important when population growth, competition for all resources, the pursuit of mana or authority for one’s own group, and a generally more martial culture meant that communities increasingly had to protect themselves from immediate neighbours or from marauding enemies from further afield.
It was a combination of all these factors – but especially the growth of population and increased competition for resources which that growth brought – that favoured the growth of tribal organisation and culture through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This development was not consistent throughout the country. In the south of the South Island, for example, because of smaller populations and less competition for resources, people remained more nomadic for longer and may eventually have become tribal largely because of absorption by peoples who had migrated from the North Island, where they had already developed the characteristics and patterns of tribal culture. Even in the north, however, the archaeological record shows that some groups would retain something closer to a hunter-gatherer culture at the same time as near-neighbours were becoming more settled and more tribally organised. The record also suggests that those who retained some of the features of Maori colonial life longer than other groups eventually fell victim to the larger-scale organisation of purpose and resources which tribal culture allowed. In other words, in the North Island and top of the South Island, in order to retain congenial places in which to live and proximity to food and mineral resources, there would have been strong incentives to become part of larger groupings of people and to develop tribal structures. This in turn created a concomitant ability to call upon larger and more organised groups for such co-ordinated activities as gardening and net fishing, and fighting in attack or defence.
Through the transitional to tribal phases of New Zealand Maori culture another development also occurred. Whatever their reasons for emigrating, the first settlers, the colonists, would have been intensely conscious of the cultural and physical landscapes they were leaving behind in Island Polynesia. It is probable, too, that they would have had to abandon kinsfolk, whose absence would have been mourned. They would have continued to tell the accumulated stories of those places to themselves, and to children and grandchildren, all with a view to – as had become customary in Polynesian cultures – keeping alive the names and deeds of recent ancestors.
As generation followed generation in the new land, however, and as the more recent experience of a migratory voyage and the measures needed to ensure survival in what was initially an unfamiliar environment generated another cycle of sagas for oral tradition, awareness of and concern for the places of origin would have diminished. Those places would have receded to the status of a kind of Arthurian world which was eventually little more than a hazy background to the history and experience steadily and vividly accumulating on Te Ika a Maui or Te Waka a Aoraki. They would never be entirely forgotten or unacknowledged; they would continue to be recalled in such ritual phrases as ‘Hawaiiki-nui, Hawaiiki-roa, Hawaiiki-pamamao’ (Hawaiiki being the traditional word for homeland). But they would ebb further away from remembered human experience and into the realm of mythology.
At the same time many of the placenames and stories which had been carried from the homelands were localised and transplanted. New Zealand acquired its quota of Hikurangis, Maunganuis and Motutapus and other names familiar throughout Polynesia. The existence of Ranginui and Papatuanuku and the doings of Tane Mahuta and Tangaroa and their siblings came to be seen as referents to the sky and soil and sea and fauna of New Zealand. Maui-tikitiki-a-Taranga became a local cultural hero in addition to being a Polynesia-wide one, and natural features in the landscape, including the North Island itself, came to be attributed to his doings.
In other words, over succeeding generations the cultural focus shifted steadily away from cultures of origin to a singular awareness of and commitment to the adopted homeland. At the same time new technologies and practices were tried for meeting new environmental challenges: different kinds of dwelling and clothing to keep warm, different ways of growing, gathering, preserving and storing food. New forms of carving and ornamentation reflected both different working mediums and shifting perceptions of cultural and spiritual realities. A new mineral such as pounamu (greenstone) allowed the development of more elaborate carving, and the fine fibres of New Zealand flax the weaving of more comfortable and more beautiful garments.
What all this added up to was the process by which an imported culture, that of East Polynesians, left to develop in isolation, became an indigenous one: Te Ao Maori. And that new culture would focus fully on the islands of New Zealand and its human, animal and botanic inhabitants. It would offer those human inhabitants a comprehensible place in the cosmos and a prospect of physical and spiritual security – or at least as much of those things as could be expected in a world where life was, if not invariably nasty, then sometimes brutish and short.
Chapter 6
Te Ao Maori
While the development had begun sporadically and proceeded at different rates in different parts of the country, the emergence of classic or tribal Maori society by the sixteenth century was close to being a nationwide phenomenon. (The major exception was the lower half of the South Island, where many Maori still lived largely nomadic lives and where an inability to grow kumara and a low population density had resulted in a near-absence of fortified pa.) While Maori life and customs would continue to change in response to new human and environmental challenges, the configurations of the tribal era could be seen as the accomplishment of successful colonisation of the country.
Like colonisers elsewhere, the East Polynesian ancestors and their immediate descendants had learned, by trial and error and committing some major mistakes, to turn New Zealand’s natural and environmental conditions to human advantage (how many people perished, one wonders, in the search for a safe way to prepare the otherwise poisonous kernel of the karaka berry for human consumption?). They learned too to attain bodily comfort and physical shelter in a range of climates and temperatures, and psychical and spiritual security by localising the presence of deities and the application of propitiatory ritual. They thus managed to survive as a viable population and, as we have seen, to convert an imported culture into a tangata whenua or indigenous one with recognisable antecedents in East Polynesia but now connected inextricably to the roots and soil of New Zealand.
What were some of the characteristics of this culture?
First, and perhaps most important, individuals found a place in it, and hence in the whole cosmography of Maori thought, through whakapapa or relationship. But they were not conscious of being Maori, nor would the word ‘Maori’ (meaning ‘ordinary’) have been used in this way. New Zealand Polynesians, long separated from other races and cultures, had no words for race or culture, not even to describe their own. Identity and worth were found in family and tribal connectedness, not in membership of a race or a people, nor in individual qualities or achievements. Membership of a tribe was based on descent f
rom a founding ancestor or, in some cases, a foundational canoe. Lines of descent formed the basis for tribal membership and association, just as they provided the major paradigm by which Maori defined the spiritual and natural worlds and their connection to them.
Identity was linked to both ancestry and place and was expressed through proverbs and waiata (songs) and patere (assertive chants) associated with one’s people and their rohe or tribal territory. Tuhoe people living at Maungapohatu in the Urewera, for example, would, in place of a surname, recite their whakapapa back to Huti, progenitor of the hapu Tamakaimoana. At the same time they would declare the tribally identifying proverb, ‘Tuhoe moumou kai, moumou taonga, moumou tangata ki te Po’ (Tuhoe extravagant with food, with precious things, and with human life).
Individuals from outside could marry into a tribe and become part of the network of kinship privileges and obligations. Indeed, such marriages knitted together alliances which often served as a basis for neighbourly or inter-tribal co-operation, or for settling what had previously been mutually damaging disputes. But it was only the descendants of such a marriage who could be considered to have full membership of the tribe and the ability to pass such membership on to their descendants in turn.
Several words were and are used to denote tribe. One is iwi (whose meaning is also ‘people’ or ‘bones’, both stressing intimate relationship and connectedness); another is hapu (which also means ‘pregnant’). In general usage, hapu came to refer to the smaller, more intimately related unit of tribe, and hence is sometimes translated as sub-tribe. And iwi referred more often to a wider unit, to which many hapu were related but among whose people they did not necessarily live. In the region south of Auckland, for example, Waikato would come to be identified as an iwi that took its name from the river that formed the valley in the centre of its rohe, whereas its many component tribes, such as Ngati Mahuta, Ngati Tipa, Ngati Whawhakia, who sometimes co-operated in common causes and sometimes fought one another, would be called hapu. Over them all, iwi and hapu, was the federal waka designation, which indicated that they were all descended from the crew of the Tainui canoe.