MAORI MEMORIES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 February 1939, Page 3

MAORI MEMORIES

'MAORI RUIN.

(Recorded by J.H.S. for "Times-Age.”)

To continue the ever vital question of racial ruin referred to in yesterday’s “Maori Memoryl,” the serial number of which (1844) curiously coincides with the actual year of publication of the following remarks (1844). when a British historian predicted that not until a century later (1944) would we fully realise the evil effects of our Maori treatment. "The Government policy is causing discontent among the Maoris, and the missionary influence has but a shadow of its former results. He wrote: “We are mistaken in thinking that giving presents and granting loans to these workers will have any other effect than to make them idle and covetous, causing even the chiefs to lose that self-respect which raised them so far above all other primitive races." We are fast approaching the fulfilment of that prophecy 1944, when we will realise that they must work in companies, be taught in technical schools, and that to supply them with poisonous liquor is wholesale murder and robbery, far more criminal than war. The missionaries certainly put an end to tribal wars; but our rulers did something infinitely worse by destroying their moral and physical stamina with drink, antagonising their great chiefs, then supplying arms with which to resent the grave national wrongs we inflicted upon them.

Individual Maoris were the most independent persons in the world. In an all night runanga, as a protest against such wrongs, the sale or gifts to Europeans of pigs or potatoes was absolutely prohibited. At daybreak a hundred old women rushed the new townships to sell these forbidden fruits of their labour.