The Broken-hearted Maori.

Maori Record : a journal devoted to the advancement of the Maori people, Volume I, Issue 1, 1 July 1905, Page 3

The Broken-hearted Maori.

(By Tohunga.)

The Maori is said to be dying out of bad housing, bad clothing, bad feeding, bad rearing, bad nursing, bad everything. His pas are unwholesome and his rooms stifling, and his clothing unsuitable, and his life generally opposed to sound hygienic principles. Which is about as much reason why the Maori race is dying out as it is for the procession of the equinoxes. These things help, of course, as ropes, pistols, precipices, and ponds help to swell the suicide rate. But they do not make it. The heart of the Maori is broken, and everybody knows that when the heart is broken the door of Life is thrown wide open for Death to enter in any shape it chooses to take. Naturally, we have broken the Maori heart, for he was a free man and a warrior, not a slave. It is the slave race that stands impact with and subordination to a conqueror, not the free race, as all history tells us. The Red Man of North America was a free man, and where is he? Gone to the happy hunting grounds of the Great Spirit, or waiting to go, few and helpless, on the reservations to which he has been driven after carrying on for four hundred years that pathetic and hopeless and ceaseless battle for his fatherland categorised as “Indian raids.” And the Black Man lives and flourishes and breeds rabbit-like, after four hundred years under the lash of the driver, after long centuries in which he was like a beast of the byre. Our Maori is free as the Red Man. He could fight while fighting was possible. He can die now fighting is no longer possible, but he cannot live and not be free. He cannot cast away from him the passionate instincts that were the blood in his veins, the customs that were the skin of his body. And so there is no future for him and his, and his heart breaks within him. One does not need to bo Maori to know this. One only needs to be human enough. For thus it has been since the beginning of time with the proud races, and thus it will be till the end.

But we have not enslaved the Maori, it will do said. In a manner, no; but in verity, yes. We have crushed his civilisation, crushed it and shattered it so utterly that its dances have become a show for tourists and its lore the play of charlatans, and its ideals the scoff of a generation that feels the iron grasp of the King in the faintest touch of a policeman’s hand. We have netted him with our telegraph wires and staked him on our railways,'and stunned him by that magical art of civilisation which calls armed men cut of the sea. We set Maori against Maori, and made warrior fight warrior, while he saw that among the Pakehas even the lowest of the low shrank from lifting his hand against the White Queen. And some of the Maoris said : “Go to, let us have a king to rule over us, and make us as one man, even as the Pakeha is one !” And the end of that we —the last attempt of a brave race to make head against invasion. Conquest may come in a variety of forms, but however it comes it is conquest. We may speak of treaty and compact, of Maori equality, of just laws, of the advantages of Western civilisation, and all this may he quite true. But it is no longer possible for the Maori to live in Maoriland his own life, and to work out for himself his own progress and his own development. He must adopt the English life and the English ways, and accept the English customs if he would have hope for his children in the land of his fathers. There is no alternative, whether we talk of treaty or not. That is the end of it, the inexorable end of absolute fact. And there is, perhaps, in the whole world no sadder picture than that of the Maori sitting with his head between his knees, aching and longing and craving for the old things, waiting hopelessly to 'die. Do we not know? The Maori, like individuals of all other imaginative races, can be convinced that he is to die by winter, and be slain by his conviction. Without any disease, without anv tangible ailment, he can loosen his hold on life and give it up. He can endure wounds that no European could endure, uncomplainingly, bravely, even lightly, can survive physical injuries, half of which would kill any European. But he must have the desire to live, the firm faith that the joys of life are still open to him, the inspiration of coming satisfactions that endows him with the strength to suffer and bo strong. If he had national hope, national faith, national belief in his future, the Maori would fight against conditions, none better. He would fight as the Jap. is fighting, to make himself better than the European, to make himself wiser and stronger than the European, to do the things that the European ought to do and does not do. He would sweep out his pas as the Jap. has swept out his camping grounds, would obey hygienic law as the Jap. is obeying, would teach us all amazing lessons in the great art and science of healthy living and wholesome surroundings. But why should he ? Why should he distress himself when there seems no purpose in all that he might do, when do what ho will he is of the race that has been overthrown, is the product of a civilisation that we call barbarism, but that he loved, and that is vanishing before the Pakeha as the frost before the sun? It is sad; there are few things sadder. But do we think that we can alter this tragedy of a people which

has its roots in the fact that we are what we are? Unsanitary conditions slay their thousands and their millions, but cannot of themselves stifle the life of a race that waits and believes. In the ghettoes of Eastern Europe ignorance and folly and cruelty have done their worst for ages, but the Chosen People emerge from the ghettoes with unbroken confidence that the God Who watches over Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps, and that the glory of Judah shall return again and the temple at Jerusalem be rebuilded. And if one could persuade the Maori that in the centuries to come a brown Arthur would come with the sword Eicalibur and free the land of the Pakeha and restore the tribes to their own as it was before Waitangi, the Maori would draw a long breath and set himself to live. The Maori man would fall asleep with a hopeful prayer and open his eyes to the light that would some day shine on his dreams come true. The Maori woman would clasp her baby to her arms and strain every power to rear it, to be a warrior or the mother of warriors when the time came to be again a free people. Is not this selfevident? We have only to put ourselves into their places to know it ; yet we are a dull and unemotional race as compared to this people, of whom every man was an orator and every orator a poet born. And if anybody replies that Pakeha and Maori are friends, and that no Maori would wish to drive out the Pakeha— we in their place? Is it common sense to think that there is in all New Zealand one full-blooded Maori who would not wish to be one of the people that lorded the land and feared no alien, being as the Maoris were before the Pakeha influx? He might wish for the Pakeha missionary, but he could not wish for that overwhelming tide that has made New Zealand the most British of all the colonies and submerged the greatest of all native races. For in that tide he drowns, borne by it be knows not whither. To him, our history and our aspirations have no meaning. To him, the law that has been handed down to us by our forefathers is alien and hateful. To him, our greatest triumphs are his greatest dangers, our very friendship tells him that we know there is nothing in him we need fear. And so the Maori is broken-hearted and dies, and none can help him in Maoriland, because the Pakeha has his grip upon it and there is no room for the old race to be as it would. But perchance if the Maori were carried to a country where he could be master, or, at any rate, master’s man, say to Central Africa, in the great tableland, where he could be organised as a military caste and know again the joys of the warrior and the passion of facing odds, where he and his could live in their own villages, and where he could rear his children not only to obey the King’s law, but to enforce it over lower races, there might be something for him to live for, and he would not die. But whatever happens the Maori heart must be mended before anything can be done for him by all the doctors and teachers and trainers in the world.