Aotearoa: New Zealand's unique culture
Kia ora! This greeting of New Zealand’s indigenous Maori people is an expression of welcome to visitors. Maori make up only approximately 15 percent of New Zealand’s population, but their cultural impact is enormous. Rotorua, a city in the centre of the North Island, is a major tourist destination not only because of its geo-thermal activity, but also because it showcases traditional Maori arts and crafts.
The museum Te Papa in the capital city, Wellington, and the War Memorial Museum in Auckland, the country’s most populous city, has rich stores of carvings and artefacts. In Auckland, visitors admire an impressive 100ft war canoe and an original wharenui (meeting house), and enjoy the daily performances given by one of the country’s premier Maori cultural groups.
The New Zealand countryside offers visible evidence that traditional Maori culture is alive and well. Visitors will notice large, low-slung buildings with ornately carved barge boards and a sign with the word 'marae', on the outskirts of most country towns. A marae is the community facility of the hapu (extended family group), of the area. It usually consists of a wharenui or whare whakairo (carved meeting house), a wharekai (dining hall and cooking area), and a marae-atea (sacred place in front of the house where speeches are made). In acknowledgement of the urbanisation of the population, Maori have established marae in cities, often attached to schools or on university campuses. Tourists can visit a marae, where the protocols for behaviour are strict and traditional, by enquiring at a Visitor Information Centre. Some hotels, especially those in Rotorua, also offer a traditional Maori meal. Called a hangi, the food (most often pork, seafood and vegetables such as kumara or sweet potato) is cooked in a deep pit dug in the ground in which a fire has been lit. Stones are placed in the fire and when the stones are hot and only coals remain, the food is placed in the pit and covered with leaves or mats woven out of flax. Earth is heaped over the mats to keep the heat in and the food is left for several hours. This method of cooking food is found throughout Polynesia and is also known by the alternative Maori word, umu.
Maori are a Polynesian people whose forebears are believed to have come to New Zealand about 1000 years ago from a legendary homeland in the eastern Pacific sometimes referred to as Hawaiki. Kupe is the name of the original ancestor and it was he who gave the country its Maori name - Aotearoa, ‘the land of the long white cloud’. According to another Maori legend, the South Island was the canoe of an ancestor named Maui, Stewart Island became his anchor and the North Island was an enormous fish he caught. Research by anthropologists and scholars largely confirms what Maori oral history records: that some of the earliest visits were most likely return trips. Guided by the stars and the currents, by the wave patterns and the presence of birds, Maui returned to Hawaiki and a migration of several canoes followed. Modern Maori trace their tribal origins, their whakapapa or genealogy, back to one of these canoes. No evidence has been found to corroborate a myth that an earlier people inhabited the land.
The first Maori brought with them food items that secured their survival in this new, cooler country - the kumara (sweet potato), yams, taro and gourds. They lived by burning the forest to establish kumara plantations, by trapping the abundant bird and marine life, and by eating fern root. The loss of forest is thought to have contributed to the extinction of New Zealand’s (and the world’s) largest flightless bird, the moa, which was a major food source and whose skeletal remains can be seen in museums. By about the 16th century, population density had increased so that competition for resources led to warfare and the construction of fortified villages on hilltop sites, known as pa.
The first Pakeha (white-skinned people) known to have made contact with Maori were the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman in 1642, followed by Captain James Cook in 1769, who claimed the country for Britain. The process of colonisation was formalised by the signing of a treaty in 1840 between the British Government and many of the chiefs, at Waitangi in the Bay of Islands in the north of the North Island. The Treaty of Waitangi, which promised Maori people equal status with British subjects, is now recognised as the nation’s founding document but for a century after its signing the colonial government ignored its principles. The Land Wars of the 1860s were the result of resentment by the colonists that Maori refused to relinquish the most fertile tracts of land on which they had established a flourishing trade in wheat, potatoes and other food commodities. Draconian land confiscations combined with the impact of European diseases and intertribal warfare using the musket, decimated and demoralised the Maori population during most of the 19th century.
However, the last 30 years have seen a remarkable resurgence of Maori vitality and culture and governments determined to make good the wrongs of the past. This has been stimulated in no small measure by the establishment in 1975 of a tribunal, called the Waitangi Tribunal, to investigate claims by Maori of wrongs committed against them by the Crown under the terms of the 1840 treaty. These claims relate to land confiscations or unlawful acquisitions and their resolutions have involved the Crown in restitutions and compensation amounting to millions of dollars. The process continues with many claims still to be heard.
The Waitangi Tribunal has also been responsible for giving the Maori language status as the official second language of the country. In 1987, the Maori Language Commission was set up with powers to promote the language through education and the national broadcasting and television networks. Kohanga reo (Maori language kindergartens and schools have contributed to the big increase in the number of Maori speakers. Universities have thriving language courses, all government departments have bi-lingual titles and law courts are required to provide interpreters. The Maori language will also be enhanced through the new Maori television service that went to air on 22 March 2004. The new service broadcasts in Maori and English. New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark said of the new public channel: 'This Government accepts the obligation to promote Maori language and culture through the medium of television. The new service will enable Maori perspectives, heritage, culture and language to be presented on television, and in so doing will play a vital role in Maori economic, social, and cultural development.’
Maori Affairs Minister Parekura Horomia said: 'The establishment of a Maori television service ushers in an exciting new era in broadcasting, which will help to enrich New Zealand's society, culture and heritage.'
Such developments will see Maori face the 21st century with their feet firmly in two worlds: that of their forebears as well as that of the contemporary western world, where culture may be absorbed through the flick of a switch.
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