The Moriori.

The Moriori.

That Moriori settled first New Zealand is a claim
without foundation. They were never here before the Maori came.
They sailed from Polynesia, tribal warring to escape,
making landfall at Rekohu on the Chathams’ Eastern Cape.

In the Chatham Islands’ harsh conditions, main activity
was hunting birds and shellfish - all the produce of the sea.
Unsuitable to grow accustomed crops, their daily meals
included protein meat and fat from sea-fish and fur-seals.

Though colder, less hospitable than lands they’d left behind,
the Chatham Islands had resources of a different kind.
They developed, in their isolation, different ways of life
with language, rules and culture quite distinct and free of strife.

Because they’d left their birthplace sick and tired of constant war,
their chief, Nunuku-whenua, ordered there should be no more.
He made each adult and their children take a solemn vow
to tolerate no violence in the settling of a row.

And, as they lived in total peace, their population grew
to reach about two thousand till, in 1792,
their isolation was disturbed as Europeans arrived
and, from diseases introduced, few sufferers survived.

Nine hundred Maori warriors came in 1835
and, of the Morioris, but 100 left alive.
The rest were carried off as slaves or slaughtered out of hand
by Taranaki tribes who sought to occupy their land.

As slaves, the Moriori were forbidden to conceive
or marry with each other though the women, we believe,
often mated with their Maori masters and there were a few
who married European men and bore their offspring too.

Eventually, in 1870, Maoris braved the waves,
returning to New Zealand with their Moriori slaves
whose pledge of pacifism and non-violent lifestyle
had led to their undoing and their loss of domicile. 

In spite of all the genocide that Moriori faced
and the burdens of enslavement that upon their race were placed,
several thousand of mixed ancestry remain alive today
in the Chathams or New Zealand where they’ve chosen now to stay.

Most full-blooded members passed away while in captivity -
the last pure Moriori died in 1933.

Hugh Wyles, June 20th. 2008.