Moriori People - The Moriori in New Zealand

The Moriori in New Zealand

Based on writing of Percy Smith and Elsdon Best, there grew theories that the Māori had displaced a more primitive pre-Māori population of Moriori (sometimes described as a small-statured, dark-skinned race of possible Melanesian origin), in mainland New Zealand - and that the Chatham Island Moriori were the last remnant of this earlier race. Being based on the work of two widely respected experts, these theories also had the advantage - from a European settler view - of presenting a neat progression of waves of migration and conquest by increasingly more civilised and technically able peoples, and therefore justifying racist stereotyping and colonisation by cultural "superiors". These theories were widely published in the early twentieth century, and crucially, this story was promoted in a series of three articles in the School Journal of 1916, and the 1934 A. W. Reed's schoolbook The Coming of the Maori to Ao-tea-roa —and therefore became familiar to generations of schoolchildren. Notably, the concept also undermines notions of the Māori as the indigenous people of New Zealand, by portraying them as conquerors.

A number of historians, anthropologists and ethnologists, however, examined and rejected the hypothesis of a racially distinct pre-Maori Moriori people. Among them, anthropologist H.D. Skinner in 1923, ethnologist Roger Duff in the 1940s, and historian and ethnographer Arthur Thomson in 1959, as did Michael King's Moriori: A People Rediscovered in 2000 and James Belich and K.R. Howe in Te Ara.