by Michael King
Another factor promoting the enlargement of buildings was the availability of pit-sawn timber and European tools. The latter aided construction on a bigger scale and the evolution of increasingly elaborate styles of carving, especially on the East Coast of the North Island and in Te Arawa territory. A growing familiarity with European architecture also modified the styles of smaller buildings in some areas, even those where traditional building materials were still in use. Some dwellings, such as those in King Tawhiao’s settlement at Whatiwhatihoe, had doors at the side sheltered by verandahs.
In most districts, traditional building materials – raupo, muka, ponga, earth sods, bark, nikau branches – continued to be used into the 1880s. Houses were likely to have wooden frames, usually of manuka or tree-fern trunks, and wall material of reed or wood packed against them. Sod walls remained in favour in some South Island communities, partly because wood was not always available and partly because they gave better insulation in a colder climate. There were other marked regional differences. Ponga logs tended to be used vertically for house walls on the mainland and horizontally (a style known as wakawaka) on the Chatham Islands. Roofs were thatched with reed, nikau or tussock, or made from bark. Structures made from these materials were still visible in the early years of the twentieth century, though by then their use was in decline.
Generally, as pit-sawn timber and corrugated iron became available in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Maori were quick to use them where they could afford to. House styles changed in the process. Those of important or wealthy Maori – the Taiaroa family at Taumutu on Banks Peninsula, for example – became indistinguishable externally from those of comparably wealthy Pakeha rural families. Other Maori opted for rectangular huts and cottages with fireplaces and chimneys, and continued to use communal kauta for cooking and eating. Some Maori leading subsistence lives combined European and Maori building materials. Te Puea Herangi of Waikato, for example, used ponga walls and thatching for conventional cottages in her communities up to the 1930s. While people engaged in seasonal work or foraging activities – flax cutting, gum digging, muttonbirding and pigeon trapping, for example – continued to build traditional shelters and camp-sites, these should not be mistaken for so-called substandard permanent housing.
In Pakeha eyes, most Maori accommodation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was substandard. Indeed, the lack of toilet facilities, running water or ventilation, overcrowding in sleeping quarters and unhygienic conditions for the preparation of food – all these features were to be characteristic of Maori communities and individual dwellings until the 1930s, and they contributed to the Maori vulnerability to communicable diseases. ‘Maori housing’ in European usage was synonymous with poor housing. These features were the first to be criticised and then combated by Maori health authorities when they were appointed for the first time in the early 1900s. They were not self-evidently inimical to Maori lifestyles, however, and there was therefore little immediate incentive for communities to change them. Latrines tended to be built under the supervision of a visiting health officer and then abandoned when he left. But such conditions did contribute to the spread of tuberculosis, typhoid fever, dysentery and diarrhoeal and respiratory diseases, and generally made the outbreak of contagious illnesses more likely to affect whole families and communities. Inasmuch as sickness debilitated people or shortened their lives, then such conditions were a threat to the survival of Maori people and in part the source of the declining population statistics. Once Maori leaders made this cause-and-effect connection, they fought hard to change such conditions.
Some communities sought to anaesthetise themselves from health problems and from grief associated with resulting deaths by excessive use of alcohol – with the result that their members became even more susceptible to ill-health and less capable of coping with the crises that illness brought. In this way whole villages and hapu in some areas were prone to sink into sloughs of despondency from which it was difficult to emerge. Te Uira Te Heuheu, a Tuwharetoa woman who married into such a community in Waikato in 1913, was shocked. ‘There seemed to be no sense of direction,’ she wrote later. ‘Life just drifted by.’[1]
For a long time the official attitude to problems of Maori health and welfare was to ignore them. There were, in effect, two New Zealands at this time: the Pakeha one, served and serviced by national and local government administration systems; and Maori New Zealand, served by a native schools system and little else, but ignored except when national or local government wanted to appropriate land, income (dog taxes, for example) or manpower. Maori were unable to obtain housing finance until the 1930s. Maori owners in general were unable to borrow money for land development. Land taken from Maori for public works would not be returned when the public use was over. Few doctors saw Maori patients, hospitals rarely took them and most did not want to. The Auckland health officer, in whose district the bulk of the Maori population lived, stated in 1911 that Maori health should be of concern to Europeans – but only because the unchecked spread of Maori diseases could lead eventually to Europeans contracting them. ‘As matters stand,’ he wrote, ‘the Native race is a menace to the wellbeing of the European.’
Despite these fears of contamination, the Maori population was well insulated from non-Maori throughout the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. In 1900, 98 per cent of Maori lived in rural communities that were so scattered as to cause not only geographic separation of Maori from Pakeha, but also Maori from other Maori. The major concentrations were north of Whangarei, in South Auckland, Waikato, the King Country, the Bay of Plenty, inland Bay of Plenty, central North Island, Rangitikei, Whanganui and Taranaki. Families continued to live for the most part in kainga or small villages with a hapu base or, in more isolated districts, in individual family homes outside kainga. The South Island Maori population, numbering only 1400 in 1901 out of a national Maori total of 45,000, lived principally in half a dozen ‘kaiks’ (kainga in South Island dialect) close to but separate from European settlements in Canterbury, Otago and Westland, or in kainga close to Blenheim, Picton, Nelson and Motueka at the top of the island, which had been colonised by North Island tribes.
Life in such settlements tended to be oriented towards the family, community and hapu. On occasion this orientation would extend to wider tribal units, especially when land matters were being discussed or disputed, or even to waka federations such as Tainui, Te Arawa or Mataatua. The latter was especially likely when wider groupings such as the Kingitanga or Hahi Ringatu were involved, activating more extensive kinship networks and obligations. Effective leaders were kaumatua or family heads, while whole hapu would be spoken for at wider hui by rangatira who usually had a whakapapa claim to leadership, but whose acceptance depended also on retaining the confidence of their kaumatua.
Major decision-making on community matters was centred on consensus-forming discussion among family heads on local marae. In the South Island, kaika had established runanga or councils in which whole communities were likely to be involved, and which would be chaired and spoken for by upoko runaka or community leaders. In rare cases, such as Waikato–Maniapoto and Ngati Tuwharetoa, ariki or paramount chiefs would speak for federations of tribes, but more often tribal spokesmen would be rangatira dominant at a particular time or nominated by the rest of the tribe to represent them for a particular project. Only rarely were such spokespersons women. Male primogeniture was still the concept most often ratified by tikanga.
Within these defined but flexible structures communities organised their rounds of hui, tangihanga (funeral ceremonies) and church functions, arranged marriages to strengthen useful alliances among families and hapu, planned, constructed and maintained community facilities such as meeting houses and dining halls, dealt with local conflict and often resolved it, and discussed the perennial issues raised by prospects of land sales or public works in the vicinity of kainga. When some Maori groups sought greater degrees of rangatiratanga or a
utonomy in the early years of the twenty-first century, it was not only because they believed such a provision was embedded in the Treaty of Waitangi, but also because such autonomy had been the norm for many Maori communities – even if their exercise of it had been the result of official indifference rather than deliberate government and local government policies.
A few Maori groups were for a time spectacularly and successfully self-reliant, sustaining their members and protecting them from the effects of disease, alcohol and demoralisation felt elsewhere. Te Whiti-o-Rongomai’s community at Parihaka, with its largely Taranaki tribal base, was one such successful experiment. From the late 1880s it had its own slaughterhouse, bakery, bank and prison, and it generated electricity for lighting. A similar quest for Maori independence merging Western ideas and technology with Maori needs was launched by the Tuhoe prophet Rua Kenana at Maungapohatu in the Urewera from 1907. Other pa, such as Papawai near Greytown, were not as well equipped technologically as Parihaka had been but were able to nourish their inhabitants and provide lavish accommodation and hospitality for visitors, Maori and Pakeha.
Some communities, like those in the South Island close to European centres of population and mingling with Pakeha in work and sport, were by the beginning of the twentieth century almost indistinguishable in external appearance from a Pakeha village. Others, such as the settlements high up on the Whanganui River and the smaller Tuhoe villages in the Urewera, had changed very little in appearance since the wars of the 1860s.[2] In these respects as in others, Maori life was characterised by diversity.
Most Maori communities made a precarious living from mixed subsistence farming. The scale of Maori horticulture had diminished greatly from the great days of the 1840s and 1850s when the Waikato, Hauraki, Arawa and Bay of Plenty tribes had been the country’s major crop producers and exporters. Later in the century, with most of their good land bought or taken from them, denied access to the government assistance available to Pakeha farmers for land development, Maori in most parts of the country could barely produce sufficient meat, grain, vegetables and fruit to feed themselves. In some places, such as the Urewera, communities lived close to starvation. In other areas, such as Maketu in the Bay of Plenty, Maori labour and produce were plentiful.
Paritu, a village on the shore of Wharekawa estuary on the Coromandel Peninsula, was not untypical of turn-of-the-century Maori communities, though the people were of mixed tribal origins – some Arawa refugees from the catastrophic Tarawera eruption of 1886,[3] others from East Coast and Bay of Plenty tribes who had moved to the district for casual work in the forests, goldmines and gumfields, and still others Tainui people with links to those who had been tangata whenua in the region until scared away by Ngapuhi raids at the time of the musket wars. They grew extensive fruit and vegetable crops, kept some animals for milk and meat and chickens for eggs, and foraged for fish and shellfish, which were plentiful in and outside the estuary. When they needed cash for such groceries as flour, sugar and tea, they dug for kauri gum or took casual work with the timber company Leyland O’Brien, which was logging the Wharekawa watershed, or the Luck at Last Mine, which was extracting gold nearby. They bartered homegrown produce with one another. Community discussion took place around a house and kauta that served as a marae and, unusually, they had a church for Ringatu services. In 1907 a native school opened at Opoutere, a short distance away. Maori was the first language in the homes and Maori values and mores prevailed. Everyone involved in this community remembered it as a safe and satisfying place in which to grow up. There was little cash about and few luxuries, but the necessities of life were well provided.
At Paritu and elsewhere, when families were unable to be self-sufficient, Maori labourers would rely increasingly on income from seasonal work created by the expanding European rural economy. It was common for Maori gangs in country districts to do fencing, drain laying, shearing, crop harvesting, flax cutting and processing, and scrub cutting, or labouring on road and railways public works. Often whole families or hapu would specialise in specific jobs. In many areas such work was available from farmers or local bodies adjacent to hapu settlements. Where individuals left their own kainga in search of such work they tended to settle in other rural Maori communities, adopting the identity and kawa (protocols) of their hosts, or of the family or hapu into which they married. This served to mitigate the appearance and effects of detribalisation, which – while under way from the early years of the twentieth century – did not become apparent for another generation, as a result of migration for work and the demise of some small communities through depopulation.
A commitment to Maori values remained strong at this time, despite the fact that most Maori had nominally converted to Christianity (the largest number to the Anglican Church, the remainder to Roman Catholicism, Methodism, Mormonism and Presbyterianism, in that order). Mana and tapu were still decisive factors determining who led Maori communities, who deserved respect, and why. The principle of utu still determined what was done or not done. It was still widely believed that hara or faults in a Maori sense created chinks in an individual’s personal tapu, and that this in turn left the individual vulnerable to makutu (black magic), illness, madness or death; most instances of actual sickness or death were explained in these terms. Despite a sincere commitment to Christian values, tohunga continued to perform Maori karakia or religious rites and to practise folk medicine, sometimes with disastrous results when dealing with such ‘Pakeha’ illnesses as measles or influenza (immersion in water was a common feature of Maori ritual which, in the case of influenza, could lead to pneumonia).
In some instances Maori were ‘Christian’ in some contexts – a wedding or a church service, say – and ‘Maori’ in others, such as combating makutu or performing rituals prior to planting crops or felling trees. In the latter many Maori saw nothing incongruous about invoking the old gods Rongo and Tane alongside Te Atua, the God of the Bible. Some practised Christian and Maori religions simultaneously: many Waikato Maori adherents of the Kingitanga, for example, were followers of Pai Marire and baptised Methodists. This was not regarded as contradictory. Maori had come to view life in terms of taha Maori and taha Pakeha – the Maori and the Pakeha sides of themselves, and of life in general.
The focal point of Maori communal life was the hui. People who could no longer fight one another came together to compete in other ways: to surpass the hospitality of their previous hosts; to issue oratorical challenges and display astonishing feats of memory in the recitation of genealogy and tradition; to debate other people’s versions of genealogy and tradition; to display prowess in haka, action song, wielding the taiaha and handling canoes; to celebrate who and what they were.
Hui were an established tradition throughout the country. Ngai Tahu in the South Island kept their identity alive by meeting regularly and debating how to prosecute their claim against the Crown for unkept promises made at the time of land purchases. The people of Whanganui and the King Country met to debate Native Land Court questions, ownership and guardianship of the Whanganui River, where the main trunk railway line should be allowed to go, where roads should be laid, and the extent to which Maori communities should be relocated to take advantage of these new arteries of communication. Ngati Kahungunu hapu met to discuss the Repudiation Movement, which challenged Pakeha land purchases in Hawke’s Bay. Tuhoe met to consider whether they ought to allow surveying and gold prospecting in the Urewera. Tainui tribes came together interminably to discuss new proposals for political representation, the mana of the Kingitanga, and the pros and cons associated with the sale and lease of land.
In a sense, though, these were excuses for hui, not the causes. Essentially hui were occasions on which hapu and iwi could come together to renew old relationships, to sing, to dance, to tell stories, to listen to and argue in lengthy whaikorero. Increasingly in the later years of the nineteenth century these occasions were becoming inter-tribal ventures as leaders and followers felt impelled to address the
questions of the day. By the 1890s a feeling was coalescing that some form of ‘Maori’ rather than specifically tribal political activity should be attempted to promote common Maori causes, particularly in dealings with the national Parliament, whose Maori representatives had, on the whole, made little impact.
All such hui were conducted according to Maori kawa, though the details of such etiquette varied slightly from tribe to tribe and district to district. In some places the hosts spoke first during formal welcomes, in others the visitors; in some hosts and visitors alternated speakers, in others they followed one another until each group finished separately. Most tribes forbade women speaking on the marae, though some – such as those on the East Coast – tolerated it. All these customs had evolved and become fixed practices in the pre-1840 years when tribes were largely separated from one another. The general structure of rituals of encounter was recognisable throughout the country, however. Successive waves of visitors would be called onto the host marae, they would pause to tangi for the dead of both sides, they would be greeted by speeches and waiata that asserted the identity of the hosts, and they would reply in kind with speeches and songs of their own. Then they would hongi or press noses with the hosts to indicate that the tapu of visitor status had been removed through the ritual of welcome, and then they would be fed.
The hui ritual that remained most pervasive – and which some referred to as the heartbeat of Maori culture – was the tangihanga or mourning ceremony for the dead. The practice was modified slightly over the years to incorporate some Christian elements and to meet public health requirements. But the fundamental sequence and purpose changed little from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. When a person died the body was laid out on the marae of the family or hapu. It was exposed to view – at first on mats, later in open coffins – for days while mourners came to pay respects and to comfort the bereaved. The tupapaku or corpse was addressed in oratory and lament, as were the spirits of the relatives who had predeceased him or her. Fine mats, cloaks and heirlooms would also be on display, to demonstrate the mana of the hapu and to symbolically warm and protect the deceased. From the 1890s photographs were incorporated into the ritual to recall the presence of the dead. At about the same time portraits began to be placed on meeting-house walls, an extension of the concept which regarded such houses as representations of the genealogies of the hapu. This shift was also a striking example of the Maori genius for taking what was useful from Western technology to strengthen Maori concepts and practices.