The relationship between Maori and Land

Tu Tangata, Issue 8, 1 October 1982, Page 27

The relationship between Maori and Land

Land is an important part of the Maori culture. Most identify with it and love it closely. Maoris had a very spiritual relationship with it, and the legend that man originated from the loving union of the skyfather, with the earthmother, Papatuanuku shows that. The Maori word for land ‘whenua’ also means the placenta which surrounds a child in its mother’s womb. They associated the comfort, nourishment and security found by a baby in a mother’s womb with what the land did for them.

Before the whiteman came to New Zealand, the Maori owned all the land and it was divided up in to sections for each tribe. Though people had rights to the resources the land provided, they had no rights to the land itself. It was an asset of the tribe as a whole an idea that is very socialistic.

With the arrival of the Pakeha to colonise New Zealand came land speculators, farmers, labourers ... many of whom had been landless in England, and were hungry for 10 acres, 100 acres, 1000 acres of this new land. Many Maoris were persuaded to sell their land for a pittance and became poverty stricken. As a result other Maoris refused to sell land to the Pakeha, because they saw what would

happen if they did. Land agents really had a hard job. Not only did they have to deal with subborn natives who couldn’t be persuaded to part with their land, but they also had the problem of conducting a sale with the whole tribe rather than with one individual owner. They got around both these problems in one very simple way hassling the Maoris until they retaliated, then getting the Government to call them rebels and confiscate their land. When Maoris were subjects of the Queen, that was brutal injustice towards them.

The Government did many other things to help the Pakeha obtain land. One thing was the Native Land Act (1865) which aimed to change the Maori principles of land ownership, to the European system of individual freehold ownership. Through this Act, Pakeha buyers only needed to deal with the few members of the tribe that were listed on the title as absolute owners, and could ignore the wishes of other tribal members completely.

Today Maoris are being persuaded to return to the land, and develop and farm it co-operatively. It’s ironic that this follows a century of discouraging the Maori tribal way of life in favour of individualism.

Some Maoris feel today that they must look after their ancestral land and pass it on to the next generation because it is the essence of their tribal identity. But a generation of landless and rootless Maoris is growing up that doesn’t feel any loss because of it. They don’t have the ties with their tribal land that their parents did, and many feel they are under no obligation to return there and look after it. That attitude is causing a lot of conflict between older and younger generations of Maoris, and is helping to widen the gap between them. If young Maoris continue living in the cities in the Pakeha lifestyle and the old Maoris grow older sitting on the maraes, they will lose touch with each other, and the traditional Maori way of life could be lost because the young Maoris might feel it has lost its meaning and can’t apply to today.

I feel that more young Maoris should return to their tribal lands and be given grants to develop it. In the short term it would provide jobs and in the long term help our economy. But most importantly it would bring the older and younger genrations of Maoris back in to closer contact with each other. It would ensure that their traditional way of life wouldn’t stagnate and would instead be adapted to the needs of Maoris today. The philosophy of the traditional Maori would take on new meaning for Maori youth and help resolve a lot of our society’s present problems.

Helen Webby

Whangarei Girls High School

Form 4