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David Harcourt
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Posted: 4 Jul 2009 09:32 pm |
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My son, who is 14, is apparently perfectly serious when he tells me that he believes the Maori would have been better off had New Zealand never been colonised. This leads me to wonder who - which teacher (or teachers), I guess - has managed to persuade him of this. I would like to have a word or two with this person. *
I am of course in the worst possible position to rebut this delusional view, being the chief personification of despised authority in Darcy's life, so I won't even try. He's an intelligent boy and will, I hope, be an intelligent man in due course. I have every confidence that his view of the world will in time be a more sophisticated one. Perhaps this will be about the time that he begins to accept that tomato sauce is not one of the four basic food groups.
But I digress.
What Darcy cannot begin to imagine or to understand is the horror of pre-Euopean life in New Zealand. This horror was mitigated and ultimately largely eliminated by the European settlers through the dissemination of their Christian and (less commonly) humanist beliefs. Much that was not good - and some things that were very bad - were also brought to Aotearoa by the European settlers. Some of the good things are the product of civilising forces acting upon all of us, Maori and Pakeha alike. But if we consider what life was like for Maori before the coming of the Europeans, and compare the welfare of Maori people then with the way in which they live now, the suggestion that as a people they would have been better off had they been left to themselves is simply ludicrous.
* Darcy tells me that this egregious individual is Mr Savage, a history teacher at Wellington College. In the latter's defence - and, yes, I do think he needs a defence - Darcy says he has no idea whether or not Mr Savage agrees with his view that the Maori would have been better off without the arrival of the European settlers. This is something which Darcy has worked out in his own head, based he says on the fact that Europeans brought with them "guns, disease and the class system". On the last of these allegations Darcy is seriously misguided. The settlers brought their class system, certainly, but the Maori had their own extremely rigid class structure. The principal difference between the two class systems at the time of settlement was that slavery had been abolished in England. Slavery remained part of the Maori class system until it was eliminated by the European settlers, along with polygamy, cannibalism and the tribal warfare which was endemic in pre-European society.
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David Harcourt
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Posted: 4 Jul 2009 09:45 pm |
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In her book The Maoris of New Zealand [London, 1976] Professor Joan Metge wrote, inter alia:
... Each hapu maintained its own war party, described as a hokowhitu-a-Tu - literally 'the god of war's twenty times seven' - but varying in fact from one hundred to several hundred warriors. Combined armies were hard to mobilise and harder to keep together, because each hokowhitu acknowledged the authority only of its own chief. War-parties moved to the attack in single file over bush tracks, sending scouts ahead to survey enemy numbers and defences. Their main weapons were designed for hand-to-hand fighting: clubs of bone, stone and greenstone, and staffs with blades for striking at one end and stabbing points at the other. They rarely met in battle formation in the open but preferred to make rapid raids and then withdraw, relying heavily on surprise, and frequently resorting to ambuscades, strategems such as mock retreats, and treachery. The success of an attack was measured by the rank of the slain. Younger women and children might be taken as slaves, but most of the defeated were killed and eaten. Apart from providing much needed protein, cannibalism completed the victors' revenge, by reducing the defeated to food...Conversion to Christianity undermined the power of the tohunga and led to the abandonment of polygamy, slavery, warfare and cannibalism...Attached Image (viewed 141 times):
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David Harcourt
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Posted: 4 Jul 2009 10:04 pm |
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In this pre-European world, then, life was not merely nasty, brutish and short (as it still was for all but a tiny minority of Europeans) it was also characterised by a more or less constant state of terror. As Metge notes:
Most northern tribes were in a state of hostility with several others at once and so lived under constant threat of attack.
In 2009 for most of us - in fact, for nearly all of us in this green and pleasant land in the southern seas, far from the rest of the civilised world - the kind of terror which was a constant element in Maori lives will be something we never know until, perhaps, the last months of our lives when we realise that the world will continue to spin after our death, as indifferent to our fate as the mountains are to each leaf that falls from a tree.
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David Harcourt
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Posted: 5 Jul 2009 12:21 am |
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Before the arrival of the Europeans, the terror began each spring:
Fighting was intermittent, a series of short engagements occurring mainly between November and April, when cultivation could be left to the women and war-parties could live off the land.
I assume, but do not know, that someone somewhere eventually woke up to the fact that the best possible time to attack another tribe was at three in the morning on a bitterly cold day in the middle of winter.
It's possible that this approach was tried, successfully. It may in fact have been successful many times.
We will never know, one way or another, as the victors in such engagements had no way of telling us about their success. In any event, they had no incentive to do so: why risk disclosing such a brilliant strategm to the enemy? As for the victims of these attacks, as Professor Metge tells us they were not in the best possible position to record their own version of events, having in nearly all cases been eaten, with the few survivors enslaved under appallingly brutal conditions.
Scenes from pre-European life: #349747 in a series
Warrior to chief: "One of the slaves says he has an ingrown toenail."
Chief to warrior: "Knock him on the head and tell the women to organise a hangi."
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David Harcourt
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Posted: 5 Jul 2009 12:27 am |
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The point of all this - and, yes, I do have a point - is that lamentations over the quality of life in the 18th century and earlier, compared with our lives today, are as uninformed as they are silly.
Measured against the way we live in New Zealand today, pre-European Maori life was bloody awful. And European life in the 18th century wasn't much better: virtually everyone - at least 95% of all people alive, everywhere on the planet - lived under conditions which were as miserable, or very nearly so, as those suffered by the pre-European Maori.
Today, to our shame - that's yours and mine, gentle reader - this is still true for perhaps a third of the world's population.
This can change, and will change, if - rather than fantasising about an imaginary Golden Time in the past - we look forward, and try to make a better future for the hundreds of generations to come.
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