March 29, 2024 - The History of New Zealand through a Libertarian Anarchist lens. Please enjoy the ideas and let me know what you think.

1835: Among The Trees

September 16, 2018

By AHNZ

Among The Trees (TVNZ, August 2010) tells the mainstream history story (of the time) about the Moriori of New Zealand’s Chatham Islands. Fast forward to 2018 and times have changed. It is no longer Politically Correct to point out the genocide of the Morioris at the hands of Maori.

Presenter Janet McIntyre is still working her maternal-pleading melancholy-doccumentarian shtik in the mainstream media today but wouldn’t run a story like this in our PC climate!

Check out this Sophistry from only last month; Dr Keri Mills….

Firstly, the myth. You’ve heard it before. There were a pre-Māori people in New Zealand, called the Moriori. When Māori arrived in the country they set about obliterating these peaceful Moriori inhabitants until not a single Moriori remained alive.

Absolutely correct. The last Moriori is known to us as Tommy Solomon who lived until 1993 1933. [ed: typo!]

In late 1835 about 900 Taranaki Maori armed with guns, clubs and axes invaded. Over the course of the next few days, they killed hundreds of Moriori, cooked and ate many of the bodies, and enslaved all the others, killing most of them over the next few years as it suited their whim. Treating enslaved humans like sheep, picking them off for food as and when required, was the Maori way back then. This was far from out of the ordinary.

Are there any Moriori left?

Yes. ..Their genealogical heritage is now complex and intermingled, as with Māori

Revisionists of history like this mock the old timers for observing that all Maori were dying out. Actually they were right all along, the Maori did die out.  There are none alive today, no matter how you reckon it. The culture is gone, the language is gone, the skills are lost, superstition extinguished, economics supplanted, even the genetics remain only in mummified shrunken heads or exhumed corpses.

The part-Maori people and the psudo-Maori institutions of today bare no resemblance to the people who lived in New Zealand in, say, Cook’s day. They are not the tangata whenua, they are not even Maoris. It has simply become fashionable and politically profitable to ‘feel’ or ‘identify’ with people who were Maoris.

The overwhelming majority of this change was embraced voluntarily. There were wonderful debates about assimilation between the likes of Dr Pomare and Sir James Carroll telling a rich story banned from State History. In contrast, the assimilation of the Moriori was performed by prima nocta and genocide. 

One last thing. Many Māori histories speak of a people before their arrival in Aotearoa, who were variously conquered, absorbed by marriage, or in some cases simply remained, and have descendants alive today.

I have no wish to trample on these myths traditions

Then you act against your own wishes. For these received histories are numerous and clear and utterly opposite to today’s revisionist fashions and political correctness. History is not politically correct, sorry.

If Pākehā want to use Māori traditions as evidence for their arguments, they can go and learn Te Reo me ōna tikanga in one of the many wonderful wānanga in this country, and find out the proper context of those histories first.

Typical Blue Pill desperation argument: If you disagree about the evidence then go away. More, go away and be indoctrinated until someone else has you sharing my own vain opinions!

If these ‘wonderful wananga’ are so great why not demonstrate their benefit by presenting your own arguments? Champion your own ideas when confronted like a Maori would have rather than beg your challenger to do your homework and prove your case. So lazy. So actively disengaged. So Blue Pill!

I’ve tagged this post 1835 for the fall of the Moriori

Image ref. Moriori dendroglyph; wikipedia

 

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Anarchist History of New Zealand: I would a thousand times rather be right today than consistent for years and years."- Thomas Wilford, 1912 as the Liberal Era ended