MAORI LORE

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 486, 16 October 1928, Page 16

MAORI LORE

Address on Fishing Beliefs CONTROL BY DEITIES New avenues in Maori belief were opened < in an address on Maori fishing lore by Mr. George Graham last evening. His paper was the' last of the 1928 series of addresses under the Anthropology and Maori section of the Auckland Institute and Museum, and Professor Sperrin-Johnson, who presided, said that the session had been distinctly successful. Mr. Graham traced man’s association with fishing m the dimmest days of history and said the Maori, like all Polynesians, was pre-eminently a fisherman. Tribes had gone to war through disputes over fisheries. Heading the many native deities who controlled the ritual departments which, in the Maori mind, made up the fishing world was the god, Tangaroa, and mythology was inseparably connected with fishing. Ceremony also played its part in the capture of fish. “The Maoris recognised ‘open’ and ‘closed’ seasons.” Mr. Graham remarked, “appreciating the migratory and breeding phases of fish life. Tapu was employed in the seasonal distinction, and rahui, a form of prohibition, while being universally recognised in a closed season, was sometimes established by the natives when a tribal tragedy had taken place in a fishery.” Great ceremony was attached to the making and the use of hooks, and each type of fish was believed to be caught better with a certain type of hook. BIGGEST FISH STORY A chief who used a hook made from the jawbone of an ancestor considered that his fishing mana was increased. Thus, in the biggest fishing story on record, Maui, the demi-god. when he fished up the North Island, Te Ika-a-Maui, he used the jawbone of his grandmother, who had been a li irmless old soul named Muri-rongo-whenua. Mr. Graham noted how quickly iron had become in demand by tlie Maoris, and said that, in the Auckland Museum, was a hook from iron on Captain Cook’s ship when it was at Mercury Bay. The hook had been owned by Te Taniwha, an old Hauraki chief. People engaged in net-making had been placed under a tapu. Trespassers were slain, and their relatives considered that only justice was being meted out. Old, worn-out nets were kept safely lodged] To destroy them, belief said, would be to offend Tangaroa. Mr. Graham went on to describe the seine, drag, scoop and hang nets made, and lobster and eel traps. He outlined the law's governing fishing. They were stricter than modern regulations. For a fisher to announce verbally that he was going fishing was more serious than a social breach. His only sign of his intention was his great show of preparations. How some tribes had shunned certain kinds of fish which had been concerned in tribal death was instanced by the speaker. Schnapper was once forbidden to be eaten bv members of the old Waitemata tribe, the Waihua. Mr. Graham added that the old beliefs w'ere rapidly disappearing.