Moriori revival

The protection and preservation of Moriori culture

It's in the bag: after the presentation to Moriori at Te Papa, in Wellington, on Tuesday, Kyah Cook, from left, Hinemata Solomon, 11, Hokotehi Moriori Trust chairwoman Shirley King, Lin Entwistle, Ahinata King, nine, and Mikaere Tuuta, five, with the flax kete containing the deed of gift.

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Old myths die hard.

Massey University historian Kerry Howe suspects that if you asked the so-called man on the street about the Moriori, you might still get some version of the following: the Moriori were a pre-Maori people of different racial stock; they were nomadic moa-hunters, whereas the Maori were farmers who lived in villages.

Or that they were culturally and physically inferior to Maori, who drove them from mainland New Zealand, or ate vast numbers of them; some stragglers settled the Chatham Islands, where the race died out in 1933 with the passing of Tommy Solomon, the last full-blooded Moriori.

Growing up in Temuka, Maui Solomon got used to hearing this kind of thing especially at school. He remembers a teacher saying that the Moriori were a fiction, a phantom people.

Although the myths were debunked at an academic level from the 1920s on, they persisted in the education system until at least the 1970s.

So are Moriori extinct? Hardly.

According to the 2006 census, there are 924 people living in New Zealand who claim Moriori descent.

Christchurch is the unofficial Moriori capital of New Zealand with 114, followed by the Chathams (75) and Invercargill (69).

This figure of 924 is a big jump from 2001's recording of 585 which doesn't mean a sudden baby boom, but an increasing awareness of Moriori whakapapa.

Although in the Moriori world, that word is hokopapa.

Maui Solomon a grandson of Tommy and vice-chairman of the Hokotehi Moriori Trust says that their hokopapa research unit has been busy meeting families, trying to persuade them to accept their Moriori heritage.

He knows of one Auckland Maori family that has struggled for years with whether to acknowledge a line that has long had stigma and shame attached to it.

So for Solomon, it was a small but important victory when representatives of that family came to Te Papa on Tuesday night.

The event was the announcement of a one-off grant of $6m to preserve and promote Moriori heritage, culture and language.

Helen Clark spoke adding to the customary "tena koutou", the less commonly heard "tchakat henu", a Moriori phrase meaning tangata whenua.

Banks Peninsula MP Ruth Dyson spoke, as minister for the community and voluntary sector.

There were Moriori elders and children. There were representatives from Otago University, where Moriori are establishing a centre for Peace and Conflict Studies.

It all went out live to Kopinga Marae on the Chathams, the centre of the Moriori cultural world since 2005.

It points to a growing Moriori renaissance after decades or more in the shadows.

Solomon says that the $6m will be invested and that the revenue generated will fund education projects new information to counter the misinformation that ran in School Journals and the revival of the Moriori language.

That last part will take some work.

There is only one person who can speak Maori fluently and Moriori semi-fluently, Solomon says and another three or four who can confidently do Moriori songs, greetings and prayers.

He's not under any illusions about creating masses of fluent speakers: "We would like to think that in 10 years or 20 years, we'll have 10, 20, 30, 40 speakers. We'll probably never be fully fluent."

But even mere survival is good news, Dyson says, when a language and therefore the base of a culture dies every fortnight internationally.

Dyson got to know Moriori culture when her electorate incorporated the Chathams and she had the privilege, she says, of flying out there a few times with the late Michael King, whose 1989 book Moriori: A People Rediscovered was another important step in the Moriori renaissance.

In her speech, Clark cited recent government apologies to Vietnam veterans, New Zealand Chinese and Samoans.

But this $6m grant doesn't constitute an apology from the Crown for the mistreatment of Moriori, Solomon says that will come with the Waitangi Tribunal settlement.

"But this does acknowledge that Moriori people and culture suffered tremendous loss and to recover that as part of New Zealand society is going to require time, effort and resources," he says.

"This is a step towards reconciliation and I wholeheartedly thank the government for that step."

And their Waitangi Tribunal settlement? That's taking a long time. The claim was filed in 1988. Hearings began in 1994.

The tribunal issued its report in 2001, and settlement negotiations began in 2004. They are still ongoing.

Talking about this slow process back in 2000, King saw it as typical of how anything to do with the Chathams gets pushed to the bottom of the list.

"That's quite right," Solomon says. "The Chathams is a little dot on the backside of New Zealand. It's hard to get noticed."

Not just by government, but even by the Maori Fisheries Commission. "We had one vote out of 11 on the board and we constantly got done over."

At other times, the Moriori have been a political football. The idea that they were vanquished by Maori was useful as a racist myth, historians agree.

In 1974, just as Maori Treaty grievances were becoming an issue, Ranginui Walker wrote that the myth of the Moriori helped "to salve Pakeha conscience for the betrayal of the Treaty of Waitangi and the oppression of the Maori.

The myth has been used to justify the takeover of Maori lands (`the Maoris did it to the Moriori') and the suppression of the Maori language."

But it's easier now than ever to track Moriori history, thanks to the DNA trail of the kiore, or Polynesian rat.

We know New Zealand was settled by Maori around 1300, that a group left the northern part of the South Island around 1400 possibly heading back towards the Cook Islands, as two-way traffic continued for some time and reached the Chathams.

These were the Moriori, an entirely Maori population.

"Only one lot of people ever came to New Zealand," says Howe, who has also demolished fantasies about Spanish, Celtic and Aryan contact in his book The Quest for Origins.

For about 400 years, the Moriori remained in isolation, developing an egalitarian and pacifist society.

About 2000 lived on the Chathams (now it's around 600), with an economy based on seals, birds and seafood.

Even kumara wouldn't grow there. Europeans arrived in 1791 almost overnight, the seals vanished but European impact proved less fatal than Maori impact.

In 1835, two Taranaki iwi Ngati Mutunga and Ngati Tama sent a war party from Wellington.

Moriori resolved not to fight them so 300 were killed and the rest enslaved by Maori.

Even when the Chathams came under New Zealand's control in 1842, it took another 20 years before slavery ended.

So the Moriori Waitangi Tribunal claim had a slightly different cast than most: their issue was with the Crown for failing to protect their land, which was lost to Maori, for failing to relieve them from Maori slavery and for failing to recognise Moriori as the tangata whenua of the Chathams.

So, it's one thing for the New Zealand government to work towards reconciliation, but surely Moriori are also owed an apology from Ngati Mutunga, who enslaved them and who remain on the Chathams?

"It's something that's still to be addressed," Solomon says.

"It's been difficult for Moriori to even reclaim our footprint back on the Chathams. We've been confronted by opposition from different Ngati Mutunga groups over the years.

"There are still people who won't set foot in Kopinga Marae because they don't want to acknowledge Moriori.

And some still deny that Moriori even exist as a people, but they're increasingly in the minority."

According to the Waitangi Tribunal, Ngati Mutunga even tried to stop Moriori from seeking compensation arguing through lawyers that Moriori lost their tangata whenua status in 1835 when they were subjugated.

It's obvious that bad blood persists.

But there's a clever way around this for Moriori and it's by going back to those pacifist traditions that cost them so dearly.

They like to remind Ngati Mutunga that they may have been warlike on the Chathams in 1835, but they were also among the Taranaki Maori involved in the passive resistance at Parihaka years later.

"So even if Ngati Mutunga on the island can't acknowledge the Moriori tradition of peace, they can't deny that they have a tradition based in Parihaka," Solomon says.

"That's a way of building that bridge of reconciliation."