THIS ESSAY is about two different forms of transmitting history, oral and written.

1 My beginning
is Albert Wendt’s theme, ‘We are what we remember; society is what we remember’.2 There
have been two remembered histories of New Zealand since 1840: that of the colonizers, and
that of the colonized. Their visions and goals were often different, creating memories which
have been patterned by varying hopes and experiences. The Maori oral histories of these
events have been largely suppressed histories, although they live in their own world. In the
twentieth century it is the European written histories which have dominated. Mohe Tawhai
accurately predicted, while considering whether or not to sign the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840,
that the sayings of the Maori would ‘sink to the bottom like a stone’, while the sayings of the
Pakeha would ‘float light, like the wood of the wau-tree, and always remain to be seen’.3
Maori forms of recording history were, and in some regions still are, primarily oral. Oral history
is transmitted by narrative, by song (waiata), by proverb (whakatauki), and by genealogy
(whakapapa). We who write down our histories in books transmit our chosen perceptions to
readers rather than to listeners, but both forms are structured, interpretative, and combative.
History is the shaping of the past by those living in the present. All histories derive from a
particular time, a particular place, and a particular cultural heritage. The life of any good written
history in Western European culture may itself be only ten to 15 years before its subject matter
is liable to be reinterpreted by another generation of writers. The life of an oral narrative may be
much longer — generations — but all its verifying details, its participants, and even its central
mythic cell (its symbolic intent, sometimes expressed through parable) may have been altered.
It will continue changing, and be changed, as surely as textual history. In these shifts, as in
historical rewriting, oral accounts convey an inevitable subjectivity, as well as a new objectivity,
which enables people to see the past, and the present, afresh.
People living in an oral tradition often come from the past into the present when they explain
the present. The pivotal place where this is done in Maori society is the marae and its
meeting-house. In the korero spoken on the marae and within the walls of the house, history is
shaped. There is, then, a continuous dialectic between the past and the present, as the past is
reordered and the present reinterpreted. The cycle of traditions about the people, land and
events is dynamic, not static. For the Maori, the past is seen as that which lies before one, ‘nga
ra o mua’, the days in front. It is the wisdom and the experience of the ancestors which they are
confronting and seeking to interpret. The words of the 203
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ancestors exist still in memory, wrought into oral tradition, and they themselves can be
encountered as they appear to the living in dreams. ‘Nga kupu a nga tipuna’ or ‘nga kupu tuku
iho’, the words and phrases of the ancestors, take on new meanings in new contexts.
In listening to the voices of the colonized, rather than the observations and reports of those who
were the colonizers, a gap in perceptions soon becomes apparent. As Gillian Chaplin and I
talked about Rua Kenana and, subsequently, Te Kooti Arikirangi we came to understand this
with ever greater awareness.4 The focus of attention is different; the sympathetic identifications
are different; the encrustation of meaning around events is different. What for the Prime
Minister in 1908, Sir Joseph Ward, was a minor, tricky political negotiation with a troublesome
leader of Tuhoe, was for Rua a ‘Ceremony of Union’ between himself and the Crown, a ritual
which had been formally enacted and had, therefore, fundamental obligations for both parties.
The final assessment, or what it all meant, was inevitably different.
It is only relatively recently that Western-trained historians have come to realize that they have
been perpetuating colonialist attitudes in their so called objective histories. At the same time,
these histories have served, to a considerable extent, to erase Maori memories and
perceptions. As the great granddaughter of the nineteenth-century prophet Te Kooti said about
her ancestor:
I didn’t know anything about him. I used to hear how he was a rebel and all that, and I didn’t
think I was connected to him. Because we weren’t encouraged to talk about Te Kooti and
whatever he did, if he was a good man or bad man. We weren’t. This was at home. I was in
Standard VI [in 1928], and we were asked to write about Te Kooti and, well, I didn’t know. I
didn’t know anything about him. I went home and talked about it, and was told to forget it. ‘Don’t
worry about it! It is over! Finished.’ I went back and told them [my parents] that my headmaster
was threatening to strap me. Because I didn’t know anything about Te Kooti. And I asked them
— then. My mother said, ‘Oh well, it is too late now’. And she started telling me who we were,
who he was. My grandfather was there and she said, ‘That is his son sitting over there.’ I must
have been about fifteen then.5
Her family history was suppressed because of shame. The overriding interpretation taught in
Poverty Bay about her great-grandfather was, as she said, that he was an ‘arch-rebel’.6
But quite other traditions had survived in the oral narratives and the waiata of Te Kooti. They
convey quite different perspectives; other ways of seeing. They are, among the Ringatu, who
are the followers of Te Kooti, the main means of conveying their history. These oral traditions
coexisted alongside the written accounts of the victors. It is they which carry the Ringatu
understandings.
In the oral narrative forms what have survived are not so much directly political stories
(although these do exist, particularly among men) but family myth-narratives. These are the
histories which establish the particular relationship between Te Kooti and the family’s own
ancestors. Maori history is structured around kin. Whanau (the extended family) and hapu (the
functioning tribal unit) are the basic concerns of Maori history. It is the whanau which
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gives identity to the individual, and the tipuna, the ancestors, are the source, in turn, of its
mana. History is told in these terms. It is defined by family and by whakapapa. It is concerned
with the holding and the transference of mana by successive generations.
To attempt to cross the frontiers of European history and to gather oral narrative histories
requires, therefore, an understanding that the narratives will be structured for their own
purposes. The people with whom I have talked in recent years are those who have grown up
within the Ringatu tradition. This means that they have most commonly been brought up by
their grandparents (or other close kin), who had lived with Te Kooti. ‘These old people’ had
perhaps been prisoners with him on Wharekauri, one of the Chatham Islands, between 1866
and 1868, or had ridden to him to learn about the new faith when he was sheltering with Ngati
Maniapoto in the King Country between 1872 and 1883. It is these tipuna who link the living
individual into the myth-histories which surround Te Kooti.
I can tell my own story about my great-grandmother, because she was a follower of Te Kooti.
Well, I come from the Bay of Plenty. That’s how I know — my great grandmother — she was a
staunch follower of Te Kooti. When she was a young woman, they transported her with all the
other Maoris around Gisborne to Chatham Islands. Whakarau they call them. My
great-grandmother was one of the whakaraus [the captives]. I remember her saying to me
when I was a girl, oh, they were driven from Opotiki on the buggies to Poverty Bay, all the
Ringatus in those days. Oh, it was sad. They were taken to the wharf, and Captain Porter7 was
with the soldiers in those days, the red coats she calls them, ‘nga hoia koti wherowhero — koti
toto’ — eh?8 And she calls, ‘Captain, captain!’ ‘Hurry up, hurry up! Go on the boat. Go on the
boat!’ And Te Kooti called out to that fellow, Porter, ‘When I come back (in Maori), when I come
back I will slay you!’ Which he did, when he did come back . . . . They were there for about two
years. Then she came back. … She was with him too, for a little while, at Te Kuiti [living in
exile]. Then when her first husband died she went back to Torere. She brought us all up; four
generations she brought up.
She was a makutu old lady, and I didn’t realize it until I grew up and they told me that my
great-grandmother had some mana. Some power. She could destroy, you know. You did
something wrong against her, she just prayed. Some kind of prayer that she uses, and it reacts
on to that person . . . . That mana was given to her by Te Kooti. Te Kooti bestowed it upon her.9
This woman’s focus here is that her own knowledge, and her right to speak, derives from her
great-grandmother. Her account conveys an alternative history, the perspectives of the
whakarau. It opens up other worlds of causation.
In a similar manner, her husband recounted the narrative of his grandfather, Te Hira Uetuku,
and Te Kooti.
My grandfather, he went there [Te Kuiti], in 1878. There was a lot of confusion with this land,
Mangatu. So they said over here, ‘Go and see Te Kooti’. So he went to see Te Kooti, and when
he got there — Te Kooti had a habit of misleading people to test you at all times to see how
good your faith is. Well, he was going there and tell Te Kooti, ‘Oh, what’s going to happen to
this land that belongs — that my great-grandfather has fought for? What’s going to happen to
it?’ In other words, he’s going there for his family in preserving and maintaining his rights to the
land. So Te Kooti said to him, ‘Well,
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now that you’re here, I see you people are very tired — here’s a bottle of whisky.’ And my
grandfather — well, his friends all got that bottle of whisky, all had a drink, but my grandfather
refused. My grandfather said, ‘No. I came for a purpose and my mission is about the land.
Mangatu.’ Then, I think he put a curse on the ones that already had a drink of that bottle —
Heni: That’s my family! My people! They’re all dead now!
Ned: Te Kooti said, ‘Oh well, I’ll give you something — he mauri. He mauri mo te whenua.’
Pertaining to some powers unknown to us. That he will preserve your rights to the land. So my
grandfather never talk about this thing. But I hear a lot of others — outsiders — talking about it.
‘Cos it is believed that it was part of the diamond that Te Kooti used — to go through the dense
bush at Te Wera. And those that followed him saw it. It was in the form of a lamb: the diamond.
Some say that it is a portion, or part of it, broken off from that, and given to my grandfather to
bring back and plant it on Mt Maungahaumi[a]. That is the mauri, to hold and preserve the
family in the years to come. It was told to Te Hira’s father, old Pera Uetuku Tamanui. Te Kooti
said to him, ‘You can sell the rest of Mangatu, but don’t ever sell the mountain. Hold the
mountain. Because that mountain in days to come, well, your great-great-grandchildren will
have a footing. It’s better that than having no land.’ So, Te Hira said to Te Kooti, ‘Well, you can
see my horse is used up. It’s been a long ride from Mangatu to here, to Te Kuiti.’ — Te Kuiti, by
the way, is named to decipher things — for ‘hei kuiti nga tikanga o te iwi Maori’ — if any
problems between the Maori people, well, Te Kuiti was the place for it. Hei kuiti nga tikanga o te
iwi Maori. We have parliament members to decide things for the people, for the running of the
country. Te Kuiti was named on that principle for the Maori people — so my grandfather said to
him, ‘Oh, you can see my horse is used up. He’ll never do this trip.’ So Te Kooti said to him,
‘Well, you’ve got a mission and it’s got to be fulfilled. Take my horse.’ I believe my grandfather
was the only one, apart from Te Kooti, rode that horse. The white horse. It took him only a day
to come from Te Kuiti to Maungahaumia and back again, to fulfil his mission.10
This narrative establishes this family’s relationship both to the prophet and to their land. It
shows the Maori practice whereby history was, and still is among the Ringatu, conceived as an
extension of mythology. Many of the narratives about Te Kooti endow him with super-human
powers, which are believed to
have been given to him by God. In this story Te Kooti tested Te Hira and, when he had proved
himself, gave him the mauri, the diamond, to protect the tribal mountain. Te Kooti thus
bestowed upon this family’s tipuna his protection, and a portion of the diamond which is, in this
narrative, identified with the sacrificial Lamb of God. The diamond therefore carries a multitude
of meanings. It is not only an image of hidden wealth, or power to be recovered in ‘the days to
come’.
It recreates the quintessential image for the Maori world, Te Ao Marama, the world of light and
knowledge, and it specifically asserts through its biblical reference the salvation of the people in
the ‘days to come’.
The ancestors share in these divinely bestowed powers. The narratives tell of their mana, and
also convey a predictive view of history which assures that the people’s autonomy will be
restored, as the wheel turns, and the past is renewed in the present.
The actual form of the narratives is like a fan. At the apex is the core narrative, which
estabishes the whanau’s link to the prophet-leader, his teachings, and his particular Words for
them. From this apex flows the history of the family, through two or three generations to the
living. Some of the family histories are
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similar and, indeed, they may share a ‘core’ narrative. But the ancestors about whom the
history is told are always their own.
Genealogy is the backbone of all Maori history. Critical narratives may therefore be rearranged,
in both time and place, around the appropriate ancestors. Maori oral narrative history is
obviously concerned with its own leaders. They may not necessarily be those who have been
particularly noticed in the European world. There will also be conflicts between narratives, as
whakapapa and kin order their priorities and their truths. Maori history is agonistic, and old
conflicts will be refought in words, as anyone who listens to whaikorero on the marae will know.
It is, therefore, extremely difficult simply to insert an oral tradition into a written text which
purports to deal with the same events.
For example, one of the favourite devices in all oral narrative traditions is the riddle. The riddle
is a form of structuring, like the parable, which enables new meanings to be found in old
stories. A riddle is a test for the listeners as well as for those in the story. In the story the task is
usually set by those with access to knowledge which is ultra-human in its source. The answer
will only be discovered by those with faith. Here is a riddle told concerning the successful
escape of the whakarau from the Chatham Islands in 1868. In this story, the Archangel Michael
sets a task for the prisoners:
And before, Te Kooti referred to this Angel, Michael, coming to rescue them. He said to them,
‘Look, here’s a stone! I want you people to eat it. If your faith is good, you can do it.’ So I
believe old Penehau put it in his throat — almost choke — couldn’t get it down — too big! So,
they had a session with one another. ‘How we going to eat that stone?’ Just saw old Pene
trying to perform, how to swallow it — it won’t work! So, all right: ‘Let’s all put it to God. Tell God
to help us.’ And when they went to sleep it was given to one of them in a dream. He woke up
startled, and he said, ‘I’ve got it! I’ve got it! I’ve got it!’ And they all woke up and said, ‘What?
Oh, how to eat that stone.’ And he got that stone and pounded it into dust. Got it all into dust
and he gave you a bit. That’s how we were told.
Heni: That’s the sharing. That’s right. ’Cos my great-grandmother ate that stone.
Ned: ’Cause Te Kooti said, ‘You people got to swallow that stone.’ But they couldn’t find an
answer. But in a dream, after their prayers, the Lord blessed them. This particular person was
given the understanding. Everyone of them had a bit. So they were rescued [from
Wharekauri].11
In this manner, the understanding of the mystery, the solving of the riddle, gave the prisoners
their deliverance.
The systems of explanation which are embedded in the narrative traditions create the mental
world which the people inhabit. Their decisions and actions — their ‘history’ — are all
influenced by their systems of belief. Rua Kenana’s first wife, Pinepine Te Rika, became a tapu
woman. She became tapu from about 1905, the time when she, according to the oral narrative
traditions of the Iharaira, the followers of Rua, climbed the sacred mountain of the Tuhoe,
Maungapohatu. She later told people of her experiences on the mountain, and this narrative
has become a part of the oral tradition of the next generation:
Ana, ka moe au i te tama a Pinepine ia Te Whatu, ana, ka korero mai te mama ki au ana, i te
raua pikinga ki Maungapohatu, te maunga. Penei noa te whanaui o te rori ne, he kohu
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hoki. E toru pea ana okiokinga ka eke raua ki runa i te papatahi i runa. Ka korero mai a
Pinepine; i te mea naku ka korero mai ki ahau, kare a korero ki etehi . . . . Ko te mea ke ra hoki,
ko te taimana. Koia ke ra hoki te piki a Tai raua ko Mami ki reira. Na ra e korero mai ana a
Mami ki au, ana, na Te Atua tonu a Tai i tono kia haere ki reira, kia piki, mana e arahi, ana, ka
kite ia i Te Karaiti raua ko tana tuahine i reira, i te maunga ra.
Well, I married the son of Pinepine, Te Whatu, and his mother told me when they climbed
Maungapohatu, the mountain. The road was only this wide, and foggy. She must have rested
about three times before they reached the flat on the top. Pinepine said she would not relate
this to any other person but me . … It was that thing, that diamond, that was the reason. That
was the reason Tai [Rua] and Mami [Pinepine] climbed up there. Mami was telling me that it
was God indeed who sent Tai to go there, to go to the top. He must take the lead. Then it was
s/he saw Christ with his (Christ’s) sister there,
on that mountain.12
From this moment Pinepine was set apart. She could not cook food for herself, because
cooked food violates the state of tapu, or the state of being under the influence of the gods. Te
Puhi said Pinepine was, for a time, always carried outside the pa for her meals, and her hands
were always washed before leaving. She had to be fed with feeding sticks, or from her own
ratao (platter of leaves) by Marumaru, her female companion. Pinepine was tapu because she
had seen what Rua had seen: the hidden diamond. The diamond is, again, the mauri whenua,
the guardian of the land and the people, the Tuhoe, and it is the symbol of their hidden mana.
In some narratives it is said to have been placed there by Te Kooti; in others it has always been
there. But it was Te Kooti who covered it with his shawl (‘horo’), or, alternatively, the tartan rug
that is particularly associated with him. As a tapu woman, Pinepine also lived apart from her
husband, unlike all Rua’s other wives. Equally, she was seen as King Solomon’s wife,
Pharaoh’s daughter, who lived apart in her own house.13 Pinepine, then, lived in a world which
was ordered by a framework of thought that was both Maori and scriptural in its origins, and
which can be explained only by reference to the narrative of the vision on the mountain.
Pinepine died in 1954.
Te Kooti created this body of thought, and the actions it has successively generated. He was
not the only Maori leader to possess and transmit such a world view. All the major prophet
leaders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have created histories which are predictive in
the telling, and hermeneutic in their systems of resolution. For the Ringatu, however, it is Te
Kooti who is critical and, indeed, he created a faith which has endured. The old Ringatu
matakite (seer) and tohunga (reader of signs) Eria Raukura, who came from inland Poverty
Bay, explained that it was on Wharekauri, where both he and Te Kooti were imprisoned from
1866 to 1868, that the two traditions were joined in a revelation by the angel Michael to Te
Kooti. The Maori lineage he stated as deriving from the spiritual encounter of the ancestors with
Io, when they arrived at Aotearoa. These were ‘the things of the past’, ‘nga mea a muri nei’,
which were joined with ‘the first things’, ‘nga mea tuatahi’, or the prophetic sayings from
Abraham until Christ. ‘Te hononga’, Eria called
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it,14 or the marriage of two predictive views of history, and of two perceptions of the present as
a cyclic renewal of the past. All the Ringatu explanations of history derive from this conjunction
of thought. They assert an overarching interpretation of events in a testimonial form of telling
history: that is, where
the predictive words of the prophet-leader, or ‘nga kupu whakaari’, are fulfilled in other,
apparently discrete events. The events give testimony to the words. This predictive form of
telling history is found particularly in oral societies, and it infused the Bible. As Walter Ong has
commented, the orality of the ‘mindset’ in the biblical texts is overwhelming.15
The oral narratives which surround Te Kooti are concerned with the future, restored, autonomy
of the people in their land. They assert that Te Kooti’s powers were derived from God, and they
demonstrate how he shared his powers, his mana atua, with those who followed him. He gave
them taonga — precious objects and precious knowledge. These powers are temporary, and
are held only in trust. They can be used for good, or for ill; that is their burden. So ‘history’
constantly tests the leaders, and the people: and that is what the narratives are about. They
assert the separate nature of the authority of the
Maori leaders from that of colonizers. The Maori mana preceded the colonizers, and the
narratives state that it is upheld by God, through his prophets.
An account given by one of Rua’s followers tells how the divinely bestowed power of Te Kooti
was transferred to his successor. This mana was held for a while, in trust, with the chiefly leader
and tohunga of Waimana, Te Whiu Maraki:
Te Kooti had this thing of God. And he said to this old man, Kuku — Te Whiu — ‘I’ll give you
something to keep in your hand. Keep it for safe.’ And Te Whiu says, ‘What is that?’ ‘Oh, the life
of the whole of the Waimana people. Something to look after them.’ Te Whiu says, ‘All right. I’ll
have it.’ So he gave that thing to Te Whiu. And when Rua came, trying to be God, when he
came from Maungapohatu out to Waimana, well, the day they left Maungapohatu, he told a man
to go and run ahead of him and get Te Whiu to give this thing that Te Kooti gave him. So this
man rode down to Waimana, and he went to Te Whiu and asked him for that thing. Te Whiu
said, ‘No, he won’t have it. I’m going to keep it for myself.’ So this man rode back and met Rua
at Tawhana, that night, and Rua says to him, ‘Well, how you got on?’ ‘Oh, he won’t let you have
it. That’s his own keep.’ ‘Oh.’ So — Rua says to this man, ‘Tomorrow morning, you ride out
ahead of us in to Waimana and tell him to give you this.’ So, next morning he went. The rest of
the people came after. When they got to Matahi, they met there. Rua asked him, ‘Well, what is
it?’ ‘He won’t give it to you. You’re not the Son of God.’ So Rua says, ‘Oh well, I’ll go in myself
tonight.’ And then, that very night, this old man told his daughters and his son, Te Maipi, ‘That
thing has gone out of my hand. That’s the man all right — coming. Rua.’ So in the morning we
all gather up to Tataiahape and wait for him. ‘That’s the man. This thing in my hand has gone.
He’s got it now.’ In the morning, this man Rua used to send before him, he came up and was
waiting for Rua to tell him what to do that morning. When Rua came, he said, ‘It’s all right. Let
your horse go. I’ve been there last night. I got it in my hand.’ So he had it . . . . That thing — he
got it from Te Whiu. It’s got a bit of a share for the people. That’s my way of thinking.16
In the Maori oral histories the tribal or family heroes are unique, yet the stories may be similar.
This similarity is evident in the discrete accounts of
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Te Hira Uetuku of Ngariki, the ancient hapu of Maungahaumia, and of Rua, whose mother (from
whom he traced his descent) was from Tamakai-moana of Maungapohatu. At the heart of each
narrative is the diamond; and at the heart of each is the protection Te Kooti bestows upon the
people. But the tipuna are their own, and each narrative is a statement of their mana.
You might ask further about Eria Raukura, as I once did of a Tuhoe elder. He replied angrily,
‘Eria! What do you want to bring him in for? He’s from Waimaha [on the other side of the
Urewera ranges]. He’ll makutu you!’17 Eria, and the narratives which placed him as a matakite
were local, and I was on the wrong side of the mountains. At Tataiahape in the Waimana valley,
where I was, Eria was a threatening force because he had broken from Rua. Eria had been
baptized by Te Kooti in 1881 as the leading tohunga to teach the faith, and was, therefore, a
major figure in Ringatu history. He had originally endorsed Rua as Te Kooti’s successor, and he
died only in 1938. But despite being part Tuhoe, he ‘belongs’ to the Gisborne side: so do not ask
about him in the Bay of Plenty.
Different histories, then different heroes. In the oral form of telling history, the narrative belongs
to the narrator. This can be seen most clearly when the narrator tells the story as events in
which he or she participated, but which occurred before the narrator was born. Paora Tuhaere,
the nineteenth-century Ngati Whatua chief, told Percy Smith: ‘My home was Muriwhenua, it was
my permanent residence because my ancestor lived there. Later I left Muriwhenua because of
this murder [which he had described]. Then I tried to revenge myself and Hokianga’s people
were defeated and I took possession of the old country [Hokianga]. Because of this battle the
whole of Hokianga was finally taken by me … and I lived in the country because all the people
had been killed.’18 All these events occurred long before Tuhaere was born.
This form of narration was common in the accounts given orally in the Maori Land Court in the
nineteenth century. While I have not encountered people describing and inhabiting a past
before they were born, I have encountered the personal presence of the narrator in events in
which they were not physically involved. The accidental shooting in 1925 of Henare, Rua’s only
son by his rangatira wife, Te Akakura Ru, when Henare was about 15 years old, shattered the
whole community. It has been described to me by several people. Sometimes, they were the
only person who witnessed the accident. The event has become a part of the life of the
narrator. This is not merely dramatic emphasis, nor for the sake of telling a good story. It is what
has been aridly called the ‘kinship I’,19 and it reaches not only into the past but into the future
as well: ‘Thus it is that I am born in you’. To be a Maori, as the Ngati Rereahu elder Henare
Tuwhangai observed in the 1985 documentary programme on ‘Te Maori’, is to share the world
with the tipuna and the whanau. Consequently, history is told in these terms.
The oral histories will cluster around the immediate ancestors of the living whanau. Most of the
ancestral stories recorded by Elsdon Best from Tuhoe at the beginning of this century have now
passed out of local tradition.20 The focus of the whanau ancestors has moved down the
whakapapa. Thus the old stories drop out, or are reworked around the different ancestors. The
whanau
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is effectively the two or three generations back from the present family: a time span that most
people can recall. A few of the narratives will, however, pass into the wider ‘oral tradition’. They
will, in turn, evolve. Thus the story of Rua and Pinepine on Maungapohatu has passed into
Tuhoe oral tradition and is known among all Iharaira families. But when Te Puhi narrated it, she
still emphasized that she knew the history only because Pinepine, her mother-in
law, had told her. Her identification of her source, Pinepine, was her means of stating the
veracity of the narrative. Other versions, also stated as deriving from Pinepine, have already
developed significant differences. Whaitiri, the early Tuhoe ancestress and deity of lightning, is
present in Heta Rua’s version of this narrative,21 as well as in Te Puhi’s. But it is only in Te
Puhi’s account that Christ is also present with his ‘sister’ (‘tuahine’), Whaitiri, on the mountain
top.
That oral narrative histories are not the prerogative of the men and the formal oratorical domain
is already evident. In Maori society, women are important purveyors of family history and its
values. The inner strength of the whanau derives from the women. As Heni Sunderland of the
Rongowhakaata people commented, ‘Without a doubt, it is the women who have the strengths.
Within the extended family and out onto the marae as a whanau as a whole, you will find it is
we, the women, who are the ones who really motivate our men. They wouldn’t like me saying
that, but I do think that.’22 The women are also usually the composers of the oriori, the lullabies
written for children by which they are taught the history of the whanau and the hapu. It is the
women, therefore, who are the first conveyors of history.
For them, the experience of childlessness, or wharengaro — the house destroyed — is to be
most feared. A high post-neonatal infant mortality has occurred with a remorseless frequency
among Maori families for much of this century. Its occurrence is often attributed to a fault, and it
may also be seen as having been predicted for the family. Ancestral history will be searched for
an explanation. The solution, it follows, must be sought in faith and ritual. As one woman
explained:
My first one was what you call a premature. Just lived a week. I was riding horses and that, not
knowing how it goes. What to expect. The first one is hard . . . . had John, my second one, right
on here, right on this corner [of the meeting-house] . . . . He was seven months old when he
died — at Maungapohatu. Then the old people had to go around, saying something about it,
eh, losing your kids. Quite a few of us, as they said. That’s the wharengaro, losing your child. It
goes in the family. A wharengaro is a family that doesn’t conceive. What child they have, it dies.
So my family all got together. And that’s why I got my third one. Old Tuhua, he was the eldest
on my mother’s side, in that family. He’s the eldest of the Pari family — the Te Rika’s. There
was another family that had lost about, how many? — four, five kids. That’s why I said it comes
in our Te Rika family. It was all done in the one time, same time. These two families got
together at the same time. Got all to agree to one thing. You have got to be all of one mind, not
one pulling one way, one pulling the other. Tuhua came down, and they asked him. It was 1944.
Each one had to get an offering, a koha, for their own family. He looked through the line of the
family. It’s always there; it’s like a curse. And once you understand, then you get kids.23
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212 JUDITH BINNEY
In this very personal account (here abridged), the interpretation and the human actions are
derived from a larger frame of understanding which is essentially Maori. It rests on the
perceived conjunction between the past and the present, and between the ancestors and the
living.
The oral, myth-narrative tradition, encrusting meaning around events, has clearly survived to
the present day. It has survived most particularly among people who were brought up in the
small rural communities, which retained their own cultural and religious identity for much of this
century. But it has also survived in other environments. The Maramatanga tradition within the
Roman Catholic church, developed in the 1920s and 1930s and revived again in the 1960s,
also retains systems of historical explanation which stem from a cosmology where the spirits of
the dead, the wairua, are considered to be the media of communication between God and man.
These ancestral spirits explain and direct ‘history’ for the living.24 The Maramatanga faith is
centred in Levin, north-east of Wellington, and Ohakune. Its followers are active in Maori affairs
at a national level. They ‘are not marginal individuals, alienated from the mainstream of Maori
society. Their ready access to all important currents, their central and pivotal positions cannot
be ignored.’25 They are considered important within the Kingitanga, and within the Ratana
movement. Their iconography and their religious beliefs form a system whereby they manage to
keep the Pakeha domination at bay.
This brings me back to the central problem for a Western historian. First, Maori oral history is
not merely another source of information, nor even of perception. The purposes of the oral
narrative tradition are to establish meaning for events, and to give a validation for the family’s
and the group’s particular claims to mana and knowledge. Some pivotal family histories may
develop as the hapu’s structured histories. They will be told, for a purpose, on the marae. An
awareness of the structuring of the oral narratives also makes one very aware of the
responsibilities engendered in recording oral history.
The primary responsibility must be to those with whom you have talked. It is their history. In the
areas in which I have worked, individuals and families have allowed me to record some of it,
because they share my view that recording is important. Maori history can then be
communicated to Maori who no longer have access to it. I write here with an awareness of the
positive responses among the Tuhoe and other Maori to a written history, based to a
considerable extent on oral accounts, of Rua.26 Secondly, the transmitting of Maori perceptions
allows the colonizers to see the perspectives of the colonized — a necessary step so that the
dominant culture changes its attitudes about its possession of ‘truth’.
The integrity of the various oral histories has to be retained when they are transmitted in a
written form. These accounts are focused quite differently from the linear history, or diachronic
order, of the European historical tradition. Anthropologists have mostly tried to maintain the
integrity of such world views by a synchronic approach. For the historian this is an inadequate
approach, as it is for the anthropologist wrestling with the problems of cultural transformation.
The contradictions in what constitutes history — oral and written — cannot be resolved. We
cannot translate other histories into our own. We can merely
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MAORI ORAL NARRATIVES, PAKEHA WRITTEN TEXTS 213
juxtapose them.27 The structures and the events have been bonded, culturally, in time and
place. We need to remember, too, that the European forms of writing history can be considered
to be just as subjective in their criteria of what is important and what is relevant as the oral
forms.
Maori oral narrative histories convey what is seen to be the essence of human experience to
the people who are living. As the Samoan historian Malama Maleisea has commented, if there
were a truth, there would be no histories.28 Or equally, as the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe
put it, in his evocative novel about the colonization of his country, Things Fall Apart, ‘There is no
story that is not true . . . . The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an
abomination with others.’29 He was writing of the coming of the whites to the Igbo of Nigeria.
To incorporate Maori oral traditions into written history, then, is not a task to be undertaken
easily. Yet there is currently much demand for ‘Maori’ history from the community. If it is to be
undertaken it must be with the awareness that its concerns are probably different. The primary
structuring of the recent Maori oral history is family history. But if family and genealogy, whanau
and whakapapa, order Maori history, so notions of causation and consequence — which
transform chronicle into explanatory history — are equally cultural. In the Ringatu Maori world,
they are derived from a very ancient cosmological framework, one where divine forces
intervene in this world. Witi Ihimaera’s novel The Matriarch evokes this powerful conjunction of
myth with history.30 Such a view is not unique to the Ringatu. The lineage of prophetic tradition
and the acceptance of the power of matakite infuses all the major Maori movements, religious
and political. The old cosmogonic traditions have been interwoven with the biblical hermeneutic
traditions of telling history by a succession of Maori prophet-leaders in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, of whom Te Kooti was only one of the more important. Today, all Maori
movements trace their descent from this lineage of the prophets. The ideology which these
narratives convey offers solutions to the problems that Maori still face in their own land. The
‘telling of history’, whether it be oral or written, is not and never has been neutral. It is always
the reflection of the priorities of the narrators and their perceptions of their world.