by Michael King
The Young Maori Party was not, strictly speaking, a political party (and some would go further and argue that it was neither young nor, in its origin and orientation, especially ‘Maori’). It was an association of professional men that grew out of the education most of them had received at Te Aute College, an Anglican secondary school in Hawke’s Bay. In particular, it was a product of the activities of pupils and of the Te Aute Old Boys’ Association in the 1890s. The group was initially known by the cumbersome and pretentious title of the Association for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Maori Race. Members had come under the commanding influence of the school’s headmaster, the Revd John Thornton, who believed that ‘when a weaker nation lives side by side with a stronger one, the weaker, poorer and more ignorant one will die out if it does not emulate the stronger’. This was the ideal he imprinted on his Maori pupils: if the Maori were to survive, they would have to adopt the features of Western nations that had made the latter pre-eminent throughout the world and in particular dominant over indigenous peoples.
The more able and ambitious of Thornton’s pupils left Te Aute in the 1880s and 1890s determined to improve the health, literacy and technological progress of the Maori people. They tried to do this at first by holding consciousness-raising meetings among themselves, at which they discussed papers with such titles as ‘The decline of the Maori race: its causes and remedies’. These were full of Christian fervour and read like sermons. ‘To them Maori society was degraded, demoralised, irreligious, beset with antiquated, depressing and pernicious customs. Their task … was to reconstruct this society to make the race clean, industrious, sober and virtuous.’
While still being educated they went out into Maori communities to preach their message of survival through social and religious reform. Some of them devoted school and university vacations to walking tours that took them to rural villages and marae. On one such trip in June 1889, Maui Pomare, Reweti Kohere and Timutimu Tawhai visited a dozen Hawke’s Bay settlements over a month, where they led prayers and lectured elders on how to improve their spiritual welfare and material circumstances. Most prominent in the group were Apirana Ngata of Ngati Porou, Te Rangi Hiroa (Peter Buck) and Maui Pomare of Ngati Mutunga, Reweti Kohere and Tutere Wi Repa of Ngati Porou, Edward Pohua Ellison of Ngai Tahu and Frederick Bennett of Te Arawa (though Bennett went to St Stephen’s Native Boys’ School in Auckland, a brother college to Te Aute).
Ngata was ultimately the most successful of the Young Maori Party leaders. He was born near Te Araroa on the East Coast of the North Island in 1874. He was brought up in the household of his paternal great-uncle, the kupapa chief and fighter Ropata Wahawaha. At the age of ten he went to Te Aute, and from there won a scholarship to Canterbury College, where he came under the influence of the polymath professor John Macmillan Brown. In 1893 he became the first Maori to obtain a university degree when he graduated BA. Then he moved to Auckland, where he worked for a law firm and studied for an LLB, which he gained in 1897. Committed by this time to a crusade to save the Maori people, Ngata became full-time travelling secretary for the Young Maori Party. In particular he encouraged and supervised the setting up of Maori tribal committees under the Maori Councils Act of 1900 and he lobbied sympathetic Members of Parliament, especially James Carroll, who had devised the Act. In 1905 he himself would enter Parliament as member for Eastern Maori, a seat he would hold for the next 38 years.
Pomare and Buck, both from Taranaki, were early Maori medical graduates – the former from a Seventh-Day Adventist college in Michigan in 1899, the latter from Otago University in 1904. Both worked as native health officers before entering Parliament, Buck as member for Northern Maori in 1909, Pomare for Western Maori in 1911. Buck’s political career was brief. He contested a European seat unsuccessfully in 1914, then served overseas with the New Zealand Army for most of World War I. After the war he was appointed Director of Maori Hygiene, but his interests turned increasingly towards ethnology. He left the Health Department to work for the Bishop Museum in Honolulu in 1929, and subsequently became its director and held a chair in anthropology at Yale University. He was knighted in 1946. Pomare served continuously as a cabinet minister in successive Reform Governments from 1912 to 1928, being responsible successively for the Cook Islands, Health and Internal Affairs. He died in 1930 during a visit to Los Angeles.
Both men believed strongly that Western culture and Pakeha people were to be permanent features of New Zealand life, and that the most promising future for Maori lay in progressive adoption of Western practices, institutions and technology. In particular they advocated health and hygiene measures to halt the population decline, literacy and extension of agricultural assistance for the development of Maori land. They also sought a strong degree of individualism in Maori life, the adoption of the Protestant work ethic and the abolition of what Pomare referred to as the ‘pernicious’ customs of tohunga-ism, tangihanga and the hui.
In his annual report to the Health Department in 1906 Buck wrote: ‘The [Maori] communism of the past meant industry, training in arms, good physique, the keeping of the law, the sharing of the tribal burden, and the preservation of life. It was a factor in the evolution of the race. The communism of today means indolence, sloth, decay of racial vigour, the crushing of individual effort, the spreading of introduced infections, diseases, and the many evils that are petrifying the Maori and preventing his advance.’ Like Pomare, Buck believed that Maori ought to volunteer in large numbers to fight in World War I, first because it would be good for them to submit to the organisation and discipline of the armed forces, and second because such a contribution would prove that Maori had earned the right to equal citizenship status with Pakeha, and the consequent right to call upon the resources of the state for such purposes as development of agricultural land.
Once war broke out, Pomare became minister in charge of Maori recruitment and chaired a committee made up of the other Maori MPs. They stumped the country to raise volunteers for what became the Pioneer Battalion, but which in Maori was called Te Hokowhitu a Tu – the army of Tumatauenga, god of war. Peter Buck set a personal example by sailing for Egypt with the first contingent and serving in the war with distinction, rising to the rank of major. Once Maori casualties began to occur at Gallipoli and later in France, the recruitment committee was forced to redouble its efforts to obtain the necessary reinforcements.
The campaign was not an unqualified success. Although some 2200 men volunteered, about 20 per cent of the eligible group, almost half became casualties and the committee found it difficult to maintain the promised reinforcement quotas. Some tribes – Te Arawa, Ngati Porou, Ngai Tahu (on the whole, those who had been kupapa) – contributed disproportionately; others such as Waikato and Taranaki, with confiscation grievances, scarcely at all. Later drafts had to be filled by Cook and Niue Islanders, and even then did not come up to strength. Pomare was especially embarrassed and annoyed that Waikato in his own electorate mounted a passive anti-conscription campaign.
The overall Maori contribution to the war effort, however, had the effect sought by the Maori MPs. It showed Maori to be, in Pomare’s words, ‘the peer of any man on earth’, and it made it more difficult for the country’s Pakeha leaders to argue in favour of excluding Maori from full participation in the national life. It also raised hopes among Maori ex-servicemen that conditions of wartime equality with Pakeha soldiers would continue into peacetime. They did not. Legislation forbidding the sale of alcohol to Maori and excluding them from housing and farm development finance persisted after the war. Few Maori soldiers were eligible for rehabilitation assistance. These were among the conditions that drove many ex-servicemen into the ranks of the Ratana movement.
This organisation had very different roots from those of the Young Maori Party. It was neither elitist nor traditionalist in origin, though it did draw on Maori precedents for prophetic movements. It arose from a vacuum that developed in some Maori areas in the early years of the twentieth century. O
n the one hand were the Young Maori Party ‘modernisers’, working at parliamentary and Public Service level to improve the lot of Maori nationally. On the other were community leaders operating according to traditional conventions. There was a growing number of Maori, however, who were not touched by either of these brands of leadership: those who lived in places where traditional leadership structures had fallen away, and those living in communities outside their own tribal rohe. Many such people were unmoved by and uncomprehending of the kinds of directions offered by the Young Maori Party. They were leaderless, yet seeking leadership, but of a kind that was Maori rather than tribal; and they found it in Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana.
Ratana was a ploughman from the Rangitikei district south of Wanganui. He began his spiritual mission in the course of the 1918 influenza epidemic when he was 45 years old. As he sat on the verandah of his family home looking out to sea, a small cloud arose from the water and hovered over the house. From it Ratana heard the voice of God telling him that He had selected Maori to be His chosen people in place of the Jews, and that Ratana’s mission was to unite Maori and turn them towards God.
In the wake of this experience Ratana prepared himself for his new role. He read the Bible closely, and a book called Health for the Maori by J. H. Pope (one of the texts most valued by the Young Maori Party). Then he began to preach the kotahitanga or essential unity of Maori people and to practise faith healing, initially among his own family and then among a wider congregation as news of his gifts began to spread by word of mouth and in newspaper reports. People began to visit him from all over the country as his reputation grew.
Unlike most Maori leaders of the time, Ratana, although he belonged to Ngati Apa, did not have a recognised hapu or tribal base; nor was he well educated in the Western sense, or even especially charismatic. He was a man of ordinary appearance and manner driven by an extraordinary mission. Much of his success can be understood in the light of the social climate in which he preached, especially the fact that Maori people at large were at that time reeling from the physical and psychological effects of the influenza epidemic, which took four and a half times as many Maori lives as non-Maori (5516 to 1200). Further, many Maori returned servicemen had become impatient with the conservatism, inertia and technological backwardness of rural Maori communities. They sought leadership that offered, among other things, material progress for Maori.
Ratana provided leadership that met these diverse needs. From his reading of the Bible he offered – like Maori prophets who preceded him, including his kinswoman Mere Rikiriki – an Old Testament explanation for the displacement and suffering of Maori as God’s chosen, and he promised deliverance from these tribulations. Although emphatically Maori in his use of language and metaphor, he rejected many traditional practices and values such as tribalism, tangihanga, tapu, tohunga-ism and carving. His faith-healing successes were so spectacular that a settlement grew around his house and came to be known as Ratana Pa. The museum there took on the appearance of a New Zealand Lourdes as it filled with discarded crutches, wheelchairs and spectacles. Now called the Mangai (for ‘mouthpiece of God’), Ratana began to travel to carry his preaching and healing to all parts of the country. He had a special appeal to those he called the Morehu – the growing number of detribalised, non-chiefly common people, most of them at this time subsistence farmers, farm labourers or rural town workers.
From 1922 the Ratana movement that had formed around the Mangai became increasingly preoccupied with politics. It campaigned for statutory ratification of the Treaty of Waitangi as a panacea for most Maori difficulties, and collected 30,000 signatures on a petition calling for this. When the Mangai’s oldest son contested Western Maori in the 1922 general election, he astonished political observers by coming within 800 votes of unseating the experienced Maui Pomare. Clearly the face of Maori politics was changing: Ratana and his followers by this time constituted a political force as well as a spiritual one. In 1928 the Mangai declared the end of his spiritual mission and the beginning of his temporal one. He vowed to place his chosen representatives – known as the Four Quarters – into all four Maori seats.
Before any substantial progress was made towards that goal, however, Apirana Ngata was to get one final and spectacular opportunity to implement the policies of the Young Maori Party – or what remained of those policies three decades after they had first been announced. For two of those three decades Ngata had been in Parliament, but his Liberal Party had been out of office since 1912. Between 1912 and 1928, he had seen, as a direct result of government policies, Maori land holdings reduced from over 3 million hectares to 1.8 million. And of that 1.8 million, an estimated 310,800 hectares were unsuitable for development and 300,000 were already leased to Pakeha farmers.
Ngata had worked virtually on his own as an Opposition member to explore organisational and legislative measures that might surmount the difficulties associated with the administration and development of Maori land. With his own Ngati Porou people he had evolved land management by incorporated committees, of which the Mangatu Incorporation would eventually be the most successful. Ngata also pioneered a system of consolidation that allowed exchanges of interests to group land blocks into economic holdings. These experiments were limited largely to the East Coast and Urewera until the mid-1920s, when other tribes began to adopt them with the encouragement of the Native Land Court. By that time Ngati Porou owned nearly a quarter of a million sheep and had their own dairy company, finance company and co-operative store.
When the Liberals were returned to office again in 1928 as the United Party and Ngata at last became Minister of Native Affairs, he was able to devise legislation to assist Maori farmers on a national basis for the first time. His Native Land Amendment and Native Claims Adjustment Act allowed the advance of public money for clearing and developing Maori farms – up to three-fifths of the value of the property, allocated through local land boards. These loans would be repaid through subsequent agricultural production. The scheme was operated largely by Maori labour under Maori leadership, and Ngata was assiduous in recruiting the mana and talents of local Maori leaders such as Te Puea Herangi in Waikato, Whina Cooper in the Hokianga and Taiporoutu Mitchell in Rotorua. The raison d’être for the whole scheme was to ensure that Maori retained their land and used it to enable them to live healthy and fulfilled lives in their own rural rohe.
The other part of Ngata’s programme for Maori recovery was cultural revival. While still in Opposition, he had persuaded his friend Gordon Coates, Reform Prime Minister and his predecessor as Minister of Native Affairs, to set up the Maori Purposes Fund Board to provide grants for educational, social and cultural activities (the money came from unclaimed interest earned by native land boards). Together, Coates and Ngata also prepared the Maori Arts and Crafts Act of 1926 which set up a carving school in Rotorua. They collaborated too in the establishment of the Board of Ethnological Research to finance the investigation and recording of Maori oral and material culture, and Ngata himself undertook a study of Maori waiata which was eventually published in four volumes, with additional editorial work by Pei Te Hurinui Jones and others, as Nga Moteatea.
Once Ngata replaced Coates as Minister of Native Affairs, the same kinds of measures continued with increased momentum. He made use of large hui – such as that in Ngaruawahia for the opening of Mahinarangi meeting house in 1929 – for inter-tribal discussion on broad questions such as how Maori could best share in the opportunities offered by Pakeha society and technology, and on specific topics such as social welfare, land development and the future of Maori language, arts and crafts. In this manner he was able to prepare people for aspects of the programme he planned, gauge reaction to them, and often shrewdly plant initiatives so that they appeared to come from the people themselves rather than from the Government or the Department of Native Affairs.
The effect of Ngata’s cultural policies allied to his land development scheme was a flowering in aspects of Maori culture. There was a s
harpening and strengthening of the arts of oratory and waiata on marae throughout the country. Haka and action song were revived for competitive display at inter-tribal hui and competitions. Maori sports meetings intensified competitiveness and strengthened hapu and tribal cohesion. New meeting houses and dining rooms were built in large numbers throughout the North Island in the 1930s and 1940s, many of them carved by graduates of the Rotorua Carving School, such as Pine and John Taiapa. Grants from the Board of Ethnological Research laid the foundation for further research into aspects of Maori culture, particularly in association with the Polynesian Society, of which Ngata was an enthusiastic member.
In alliance with Ngata and drawing on resources he made available, many tribal leaders began cultural revivals of their own. Te Puea Herangi of Tainui, for example, established a carving school at Turangawaewae (after her leading carvers had been trained at Rotorua), built a series of meeting houses and other community facilities throughout the Waikato and King Country, revived the construction and ceremonial use of canoes, composed waiata and action songs and trained her Te Pou o Mangatawhiri concert party for performances throughout the North Island. The effect of all this, she noted, with due acknowledgement to Ngata, was ‘to make Waikato a people once again’ – to enhance tribal identity and cohesion, to make functional what had previously been dysfunctional.
Te Puea had been born at Whatiwhatihoe in the King Country in 1883, a granddaughter through her mother Tiahuia of the second Maori King, Tawhiao. She achieved prominence within the Kingitanga when she led the campaign against the conscription of Waikato Maori in World War I. Her claims to leadership as a member of the kahui ariki were greatly strengthened by her sharp intellect, quick wits, high degree of articulateness in Maori and near-ruthless determination to achieve the goals she set herself.