by Michael King
The reality of Maori life was scarcely ever as schematised or as ‘tidy’ as this model suggests, however. Individuals detached from their natural parents as a result of births from unsanctioned unions, bereavement, feuds or adoption might move between or among hapu and iwi. New hapu might form and find territory of their own as the existing group became too numerous for the home locality, or as individual rangatira quarrelled with relations and led their immediate followers to places where there was relative safety or less stress on food and material resources. Sometimes such migrations led nascent hapu to districts well away from those of the tribe’s previous habitation. A section of Ngapuhi in the far north of the country, for example, traced their descent from Mataatua tribes in the central Bay of Plenty.
There was social differentiation, and this may have become stronger over the time that Maori were isolated from their Polynesian kin, with whom they shared the notion that humankind could be divided into aristocrats (rangatira) and commoners (tutua). Rangatira had more mana – more ‘ancestral efficacy’ and the authority that accompanied it – than did commoners. That mana was to a large extent inherited and, if those who possessed it led socially responsible lives or accomplished memorable deeds, it was enlarged. The qualities of mana and tapu (personal ‘sacredness’ or ‘untouchability’) were regarded as manifest more intensely in those rangatira who possessed the status of ariki or paramount aristocrats. Such leaders, bound by all the spiritual complications that surrounded intensified tapu, most often ‘presided’ as focal points for community identity and loyalty rather than actively leading their people in war or peace. Their words would be influential in determining tribal strategies, however, for they were seen as potential intermediaries between deities and humankind and between ancestors and descendants.
These categories too were flexible rather than immutable. All commoners had rangatira links somewhere in their ancestry, and these could be activated by outstanding achievement in the arts of war or peace. Some members of rangatira families lost their status as a result of disregarding community responsibilities or severe social offending – mana was as easily diminished as it was aggregated. Defeated and captured rangatira became slaves, but they could regain their former status if they succeeded in escaping from their captors or eventually obtaining an honourable release. On the other hand, some who lost mana became so dispirited that they declined physically and psychically and died.
Another way that rangatira or tutua could enlarge their mana was by becoming tohunga or experts in activities of a physical, artistic or spiritual nature. The word itself meant ‘chosen’. Those who became tohunga did so not simply voluntarily, but because they displayed aptitudes at an early age which indicated to their elders that they had been chosen by deities to perform particular functions (perhaps fishing, carving, tattooing or genealogical recitation). The promising candidates were then, of course, chosen again by mentors who ensured that latent talent was enhanced by specific knowledge and training.
The country as a whole was divided into a notional network of rohe over which particular iwi and hapu held mana whenua or authority over the land and its resources. Such rohe were most often delineated by geographical features such as mountains, rivers and valleys, or by botanical markers such as forests or individually identified trees. Authority was established and consolidated by length of occupation, active exploitation of resources, and/or conquest of previous occupants. Those who did not belong to a particular district as a result of tribal membership or occupation needed permission to enter territory that was not their own and to make use of its food or mineral deposits. Failure to seek and obtain such authorisation within a context of reciprocity could provide a pretext for punishment of an individual or for inter-group warfare.
For all the differences of status within Te Ao Maori – between ariki and rangatira, between rangatira and commoner, between tohunga and those who were not so chosen, between slaves and everybody else, between tangata whenua (people of a particular place) and tau iwi (people from elsewhere), between men and women, adults and children – for all these differences, pre-European Maori society was relatively homogeneous. Despite tribalism and a strong sense of regional identity, the basic concepts and values of the culture were recognised and accepted from one end of the country to the other. The very language spoken was, despite regional and dialectal variations, the same everywhere. A person from Muriwhenua in the far north could, if necessary, make himself or herself understandable to people from Murihiku in the far south.
The twin dynamics driving this society were those that had contributed most to the formation of the tribal pattern: competition for resources and the pursuit of mana. When people lived in kinship-based communities with an ample sufficiency of resources to support life, then there was every prospect that life would be settled and secure – unless a competing neighbouring group coveted those resources or believed that they had a contestable right to gain access to them; or unless some members of the home group had diminished, or appeared to diminish, the mana of their neighbours. In either situation, violence might ensue as the party which viewed itself as wronged took combative action to correct an imbalance or to drive competitors off disputed territory.
The recognised mechanism for regulating such behaviour was the concept of utu – often translated into English as ‘revenge’, but more properly meaning ‘reciprocity’ or ‘balanced exchange’. Utu determined that relations among individuals, and between families, communities and tribes, were governed by mutual obligation and an implicit keeping of social accounts: a favour bestowed, which increased the mana of the donor, required an eventual favour in return from the recipient; and an insult by one, real or imagined, also activated an obligation to respond in kind.
In many respects, and in many places, ‘positive utu’ ensured social stability, particularly within the community or hapu: favours given led to favours returned; koha or gifts offered, to koha received; gifts of resources in which one group was rich, such as basalt or muttonbirds, to an acceptance of other resources within the gift of neighbours in which one was not rich. In this manifestation, utu laid the basis for co-operative and trading relationships. Where the equation embraced negatives, however – the unauthorised use of a section of forest for hunting, the passing of an insult, the rape of a female relation – then the response might be a martial one, depending on the wounded party’s view of damage to mana. As Angela Ballara has noted, warfare was a ‘learned, culturally determined [response] to offences against the rules of Maori society.’ In such circumstances utu was not an option – it was an obligation.
Because it was intimately connected with the quality of day-to-day life, and to all-important matters of individual and group mana, this process of social accounting engaged considerable attention in Maori communities. When the balance of generosity or power was in your favour, your own mana and that of your people was enlarged; when you were considered in debit to your neighbours, and knew that you were so considered, your mana was diminished. Living and planning for living was not simply a matter of ensuring that individuals and groups had access to sufficient food to physically nourish community life; it was also a matter of levelling any perceived imbalance of utu in your favour. Sometimes this required war with neighbours or more distant adversaries, and if you were successful in combat then you rectified what you had regarded as an imbalance. If your neighbours shared your view of the circumstances that led to conflict, you may also have rectified matters in their eyes too. If they did not, then the outcome of the most recent engagement became yet another wrong to be righted at some time in the future, possibly years or even generations distant (when Ngapuhi tribes came to possess muskets ahead of other Maori in the early nineteenth century, they set about settling scores that were in some instances many decades old).
So long as Maori possessed only hand-to-hand weapons and lacked large quantities of portable food, warfare was probably not endemic. It usually took place in the summer months, and ofte
n resulted in the deaths of no more than a handful of combatants (there were exceptions, such as the prolonged campaign of the Marutuahu federation of Tainui tribes for mana whenua over parts of the Coromandel Peninsula, and the Hingakaka or ‘fall of parrots’ battle between Waikato–Maniapoto and the west coast tribes of Tainui in the 1800s, in which thousands of men are said to have fought). Nor were all Maori forever at war with all other Maori. When James Cook encountered New Zealanders for the first time in the eighteenth century, he observed that some of them, at Anaura Bay on the East Coast of the North Island, for example, lived in ‘profound peace’, without fortifications of any kind; at other places, such as the eastern Bay of Plenty, he found the population clustered in fortified pa apparently in a state of constant readiness for war.
The need for such ‘readiness’, which could be a symptom of a current ‘active’ dispute or, in the case of Cook’s observations, a reaction to his presence, was unlikely to be continuous. The very existence of fortified pa was often a sign that those who lived near such complexes sought to discourage attack and wanted to make conflict less likely, not more so. In other words, there were times when tribes were at war – and almost every tribe that survived into the post-European era had traditions about past combat. But there were also periods, often lengthy, when communities lived without war, cultivating their gardens, foraging for seafood or bird meat, trading with their neighbours, making stone and bone artefacts, building or renovating houses and canoes.
These communities ranged from single extended families, to a handful of households, to quite large hapu groups of up to and over 500 people. Usually they were based close to water and food resources and to cultivations. Sometimes communities continued to move seasonally among hunting, foraging and gardening stations as they had in the Maori colonial era. Horeta Te Taniwha, who met James Cook in Mercury Bay in 1769, for example, was there because his relations came over the range each year from Coromandel Harbour to garden on the more favourable soils and sites on the eastern side of the peninsula.
While, as we have seen, warfare may not have been endemic, it was normal and prudent in the North Island for kainga or ‘living’ sites to be close to fortified hilltop pa sites to which communities could retreat in the event of combat or threat of combat. Many of these pa were elaborately constructed, with ditches, banks and palisades and an interior stronghold, and they often proved impregnable to sieges, which in any case rarely lasted long because of the shortage of easily portable and preserved food to support an invading party. Such man-made, or ‘man-modified’, defences were among the features of Maori life that evolved in a more extensive and more complex manner in New Zealand than elsewhere in Polynesia. Moreover, the intelligence, strategic sense and versatility they exemplified had consequences for Maori relations with European colonisers in the nineteenth century.
At times when warfare was absent, Maori life was organised predominantly around food growing, foraging, tool-making, and maintenance of dwellings, canoes and pa sites. Cultivation was carried out communally, with men most often responsible for clearing land and digging, and women for planting and weeding. Foraging too – fishing, shellfish gathering, birding and harvesting fern root (a primary source of starch, especially in southern areas where kumara could not be grown) – was most often performed communally and seasonally. The seasons were determined either by supply, as certain plants, birds and fish were available only at particular times of the year, or by the need to conserve supplies (Maori learned, after the disappearance of big-game birds and seals, to harvest remaining resources sustainably). When certain items became scarce, they were likely to have a rahui or prohibition placed on them by the priestly tohunga until the resource was replenished.
Such tohunga, or ‘chosen ones’, held high status as mediators between deities and humankind, and as the people who knew the incantations to propitiate the forces of nature, invoke protection, heal, and, in some instances, bring misfortune on others by the use of makutu or black magic. Other tohunga were able to achieve mana as specialists of other kinds. Carvers, for example, were greatly admired and valued. The skill of their work on wood – door lintels, house gables, canoe prows – increased the mana of the whole community and also enhanced protection by representing or further propitiating gods. This art form too, created entirely with stone tools until the late eighteenth century, reached heights of intricacy and delicacy seldom seen elsewhere in the Pacific. The ability to work stone and bone was also prized, for the production of essential tools such as adzes and fishhooks, and for the quality of ornaments such as pendants and hei tiki. New Zealand pounamu (jade or greenstone) was especially valued for the production of fine chisels and as a material for personal ornaments. Like Polynesians elsewhere, Maori had no access to metals prior to the eighteenth century.
Tattooing was another form of personal decoration that developed and became more elaborate with the passage of time. Men were marked, or more accurately incised, primarily on the face and buttocks, women largely on the face and breasts. Only in the Marquesas Islands did this practice achieve comparable intricacy, with patterns apparent in both positive and negative aspects. The Maori practice of the art was eventually distinguished by the use of a straight blade in preference to the serrated chisels which have been excavated from early Maori sites. The serrated blades injected pigment into the skin; the straight ones introduced the pigment but also left a grooved scar that was more like carving in appearance than it was like tattooing in other parts of the world. This was yet another instance of tribal Maori culture differing from both its culture of origin and Maori colonial usage.
Spiritual tohunga, carvers, canoe-builders and tattooists were, almost without exception, men. Women were believed to noa or contaminate the tapu that surrounded these activities. Gender distinctions were apparent also in the practice of another craft. Only women prepared flax for weaving – gathering leaves of the plant, stripping out the fibres, softening and colouring them – and wove it. While early Maori had brought paper mulberry with them to New Zealand, and it was still being cultivated in Mercury Bay when James Cook was there in 1769, the inadequacy of bark clothing in New Zealand conditions made the working of flax – and the making of garments worn as rapaki or kilts and as cloaks, and mats used to cover the floors of dwellings – of enormous importance to the culture, and the skills of women expert in the craft were highly valued.
On the whole, social mores gave greater weight to men’s roles than to women’s. In most places, leadership was based on male rather than female primogeniture. Both sexes could inherit rangatira status, mana and tapu from male and female antecedents, and among some tribes, such as those on the East Coast of the North Island, women were visible among the front ranks as tribal and community leaders and spokespersons. Exceptional women took such roles in other rohe, such as those of Ngapuhi and Tainui. Early European observers noted some mistreatment of Maori wives by husbands, but that may not have been a common social feature (and the wives concerned may have been taken from the ranks of slaves). Children were generally well treated and indeed indulged by their own relations. Outside this context, though, little more mercy was shown to women and children than to adult men in times of inter-group conflict. As Maori oral tradition recorded, and ancient burials have confirmed, elderly people, women and children, along with defeated male warriors, were periodic subjects for torture, killing and cannibalism.
One burial site confirming such practices was found in a rock cleft at Palliser Bay on the southern Wairarapa coast. The cleft held the remains of four small children and a man.
He was about 50 years old, regarded highly enough to have food especially prepared for him over the ten years since he lost his teeth … [Lines] in his bones show that he suffered famine for thirteen successive years in his childhood, but he survived to become a strong and active adult – a worker and a warrior. His arm bones were fractured three times, presumably by enemy weapons. The fact that he survived these fights may suggest that th
e enemies suffered even more.
But one day … the old warrior’s foes caught up with him. They seem to have raided his village while the fit adults were out fishing or foraging, and he was at home taking care of his grandchildren. A nine-month-old baby buried with him shows no evidence of illness; a two-year-old shows marks of violence; and we can guess that the four- and five-year-olds in the graves complete the list of victims. Their kin may have returned just too late to attempt a rescue. The two-year-old was mortally wounded, not killed outright, and might have survived long enough to die in its parents’ arms. The burials were hidden, perhaps from fear that the enemy might return and desecrate them. This tale is no less tragic or human for being told in bones.
In contexts such as this, life for Maori in the highly competitive tribal era was sometimes brutish. And it was also, by modern standards – but not by those of the time – short. The average life span was probably no more than 30, and skeletal remains reveal that, nationwide, few men or women lived beyond their late 30s. To be in one’s 40s was to acquire kaumatua (literally ‘no father’) or elder status. To reach 50 was exceptional. Such remains also reveal that quite a significant number of people suffered from malnutrition for parts of their lives, and that from their late 20s most would have been suffering from arthritis, and from infected gums and loss of teeth resulting from the staple diet of fern root and the residual sand in shellfish. The healthy-looking ‘elderly’ men James Cook commented on favourably in Queen Charlotte Sound in 1770 were probably only in their 40s.