Maori People Quotes

Our people once were warriors. But unlike you, Jake, they were people with mana, pride; people with spirit. If my spirit can survive living with you for eighteen years, then I can survive anything.

There was in the meeting-house a wood quiet. It was the quiet of trees that have been brought in out of the wind, whose new-shown limbs reach out, not to the sky but to the people. This is the quiet, still, otherness of trees found by the carver, the shaper, the maker.

A Maori conqueror explained, “We took possession…in accordance with our customs and we caught all the people.

martial people, however, it was not long before Maori began to use muskets in inter-tribal

In Debt, the anthropologist David Graeber tells the story of Tei Reinga, a Maori villager and “notorious glutton” who used to wander up and down the New Zealand coast, badgering the local fishermen by asking for the best portions of their catch. Since it’s impolite in Maori culture (as in many cultures) to refuse a direct request for food, the fishermen would oblige—but with ever-increasing reluctance. And so as Reinga continued to ask for food, their resentment grew until “one day, people decided enough was enough and killed him.” This story is extreme, to say the least, but it illustrates how norm-following and norm-enforcement can be a very high-stakes game. Reinga flouted an important norm (against freeloading) and eventually paid dearly for it. But just as tellingly, the fishermen who put him to death felt so duty-bound by a different norm (the norm of food-sharing) that they followed it even to the point of building up murderous resentment. “Couldn’t you just have said no to Reinga’s requests?!” we want to shout at the villagers.

ON THE CHATHAM ISLANDS, 500 MILES EAST OF NEW Zealand, centuries of independence came to a brutal end for the Moriori people in December 1835. On November 19 of that year, a ship carrying 500 Maori armed with guns, clubs, and axes arrived, followed on December 5 by a shipload of 400 more Maori. Groups of Maori began to walk through Moriori settlements, announcing that the Moriori were now their slaves, and killing those who objected. An organized resistance by the Moriori could still then have defeated the Maori, who were outnumbered two to one. However, the Moriori had a tradition of resolving disputes peacefully. They decided in a council meeting not to fight back but to offer peace, friendship, and a division of resources. Before the Moriori could deliver that offer, the Maori attacked en masse. Over the course of the next few days, they killed hundreds of Moriori, cooked and ate many of the bodies, and enslaved all the others, killing most of them too over the next few years as it suited their whim.

Every generation of children instinctively nests itself in nature, no matter matter how tiny a scrap of it they can grasp. In a tale of one city child, the poet Audre Lord remembers picking tufts of grass which crept up through the paving stones in New York City and giving them as bouquets to her mother. It is a tale of two necessities. The grass must grow, no matter the concrete suppressing it. The child must find her way to the green, no matter the edifice which would crush it. "The Maori word for placenta is the same word for land, so at birth the placenta is buried, put back in the mothering earth. A Hindu baby may receive the sun-showing rite surya-darsana when, with conch shells ringing to the skies, the child is introduced to the sun. A newborn child of the Tonga people 'meets' the moon, dipped in the ocean of Kosi Bay in KwaZulu-Natal. Among some of the tribes of India, the qualities of different aspects of nature are invoked to bless the child, so he or she may have the characteristics of earth, sky and wind, of birds and animals, right down to the earthworm. Nothing is unbelonging to the child. "'My oldest memories have the flavor of earth,' wrote Frederico García Lorca. In the traditions of the Australian deserts, even from its time in the womb, the baby is catscradled in kinship with the world. Born into a sandy hollow, it is cleaned with sand and 'smoked' by fire, and everything -- insects, birds, plants, and animals -- is named to the child, who is told not only what everything is called but also the relationship between the child and each creature. Story and song weave the child into the subtle world of the Dreaming, the nested knowledge of how the child belongs. "The threads which tie the child to the land include its conception site and the significant places of the Dreaming inherited through its parents. Introduced to creatures and land features as to relations, the child is folded into the land, wrapped into country, and the stories press on the child's mind like the making of felt -- soft and often -- storytelling until the feeling of the story of the country is impressed into the landscape of the child's mind. "That the juggernaut of ants belongs to a child, belligerently following its own trail. That the twitch of an animal's tail is part of a child's own tale or storyline, once and now again. That on the papery bark of a tree may be written the songline of a child's name. That the prickles of a thornbush may have dynamic relevance to conscience. That a damp hollow by the riverbank is not an occasional place to visit but a permanent part of who you are. This is the beginning of belonging, the beginning of love. "In the art and myth of Indigenous Australia, the Ancestors seeded the country with its children, so the shimmering, pouring, circling, wheeling, spinning land is lit up with them, cartwheeling into life.... "The human heart's love for nature cannot ultimately be concreted over. Like Audre Lord's tufts of grass, will crack apart paving stones to grasp the sun. Children know they are made of the same stuff as the grass, as Walt Whitman describes nature creating the child who becomes what he sees: There was a child went forth every day And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became... The early lilacs became part of this child... And the song of the phoebe-bird... In Australia, people may talk of the child's conception site as the origin of their selfhood and their picture of themselves. As Whitman wrote of the child becoming aspects of the land, so in Northern Queensland a Kunjen elder describes the conception site as 'the home place for your image.' Land can make someone who they are, giving them fragments of themselves.

It's the shape of the stories that matters, the way belief forms around it. The story has real weight', He pointed at himself. 'Patupaiarehe look like monsters in some stories, but they're beautiful in a lot. I guess people believed more in the beautiful version. And the ideal of beauty changes. If I'd been born two hundred years ago, I bet I wouldn't look like this. The stories shaped me. They shape everyone, inside and out, but me more than most, because I'm magic.

ethnic groups, but to say that we don’t divide each other into races would be to ignore thousands of years of human history. Not to mention the fact that white people drive a car like this: Fig. 3 While black people drive a car like this: Fig. 4 Despite increasing globalization and intermarriage, or “miscegenation,” there are still distinct and important differences between members of the different races. Since the subtlety and scope of those differences are far too complicated to be helpful to us in everyday life, we employ certain heuristics, or “stereotypes,” to better understand and more comfortably interact with those different from ourselves. Like the Maori. Such stereotypes are sometimes controversial, because they can oversimplify the differences between individuals. Every person is different, and it is rare for someone to fit a stereotype perfectly. Except for so-called “walking stereotypes,” like Carson from Queer Eye.2. Others don’t have any of the characteristics ascribed to their race in such stereotypes. It’s an imperfect science at best. For example, just because the Maori are, in general, lazy, selfish, and long-winded, that does not mean that noted Maori opera singer Kiri Te Kanawa is any of those things. In fact, she is only two of them, because she is a soprano, and sopranos tend to be very succinct. Even so, stereotypes can be very useful in our everyday social interactions and decision-making. They are actually a kind of survival instinct—a crude form of received inductive reasoning that can help us make snap judgments in situations where we don’t have all the facts. When entering into a business deal with someone of Roma descent, for instance, I am very careful of my possessions. Knowing the stereotype that gypsies are tramps and thieves,3. I am able to better protect myself when coming into contact with them,

The early Greek tribal society resembles in many respects that of peoples like the Polynesians, the Maoris for instance. Small bands of warriors, usually living in fortified settlements, ruled by tribal chiefs or kings, or by aristocratic families, were waging war against one another on sea as well as on land.

the Maori people of New Zealand have long practiced a type of tattooing known as ta moko, which is traditionally done with chisels.

The goal of tattooing was never beauty. The goal was change. From the scarified Nubian priests of 2000 B.C., to the tattooed acolytes of the Cybele cult of ancient Rome, to the moko scars of the modern Maori, humans have tattooed themselves as a way of offering up their bodies in partial sacrifice, enduring the physical pain of embellishment and emerging changed beings. Despite the ominous admonitions of Leviticus 19:28, which forbade the marking of one’s flesh, tattoos had become a rite of passage shared by millions of people in the modern age—everyone from clean-cut teenagers to hard-core drug users to suburban housewives. The act of tattooing one’s skin was a transformative declaration of power, an announcement to the world: I am in control of my own flesh. The intoxicating feeling of control derived from physical transformation had addicted millions to flesh-altering practices . . . cosmetic surgery, body piercing, bodybuilding, and steroids . . . even bulimia and transgendering. The human spirit craves mastery over its carnal shell.

Only Indigenous people are real Canadians, Kiwis, and Aussies, everybody else is an immigrant. Before you yell slurs at an immigrant of today, Start by heading back to Europe yourself.

Many of the very ancient accounts of Polynesian peoples were much alike. This indicates that they were common to the Polynesians before they separated and spread to their various islands. The Polynesian people—the Hawaiians, Tahitians, Samoans, Tongans, Marquesans, and Maori, to name the major people groups—are very close “cousins.

The Maori legends say that ‘Io dwelt in the uppermost of 12 heavens and was served by angelic beings who also acted as messengers.10 Fornander said the Hawaiian legends relate that the triune God created three heavens, the earth to be their footstool (he ke‘ehina honua-a-Kane), and a host of angels or spirits (i kini akua) to minister to them.

The following are portions of a translated Maori sacred chant of creation compared to Genesis 1. “‘Io dwelt within the breathing space of immensity. The universe was in darkness, with water everywhere. There was no glimmer of dawn, no clearness, no light. And he began by saying these words, that he might cease remaining inactive, ‘Darkness, become a light-possessing darkness.’ And at once light appeared.”25 Genesis 1:2-3 says, “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

In 1880 the colony had increased to 500,000 white people, owning 12,000,000 sheep and exporting nearly £6,000,000 worth of goods. The Maoris were 44,000, but while the whites were rapidly increasing, the Maoris were somewhat decreasing. They had 112,000 sheep

This idea of two distinct varieties of people (which quickly hardened into a Polynesian/Melanesian divide) turns what is, in fact, a spectrum of skin tones and peoples across the Pacific into a more or less binary division between black and white. With this binary came a tangle of other ideas about morality, intelligence, temperament, beauty, social and political complexity, even depth of time. Melanesians were routinely described by Europeans as not just dark-skinned, but “primitive” in their political, economic, and social structures. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts, they are depicted as small, dark, and mistrustful, the women “ill-favoured” and “ugly,” the men “despotic” and cruel. Banded together in small, autonomous groups, they appeared to Europeans to lack any form of law, government, or organized religion and compared unfavorably with their larger, fairer-skinned, more hierarchical neighbors the Polynesians, differing from them, in one unforgettable formulation, “as the wolf from the dog.” The term “Melanesian” had thus long served in European discourse as a marker for otherness and inferiority, and in the racially charged climate of the early twentieth century, Te Rangi Hiroa could hardly fail to be aware of this. When the anatomist J. H. Scott (the probable author of the Otago Medical School notice offering to buy Māori skeletons) asserted, “We know the Maoris to be . . . the result of the mingling of a Polynesian and a Melanesian strain,” or when Sullivan argued for a “Melanesian element” in his Tongan or Samoan data sets, Te Rangi Hiroa would certainly have recognized the subtext. And in his own early somatological studies, which were written explicitly with the work of these other men in mind, you can see him struggling with the problem.

So, I am writing down as much as I can about the Huguenots, the Jews, the Romans, the Irish, the Italians, the Indians, the West Indians, the gypsies. My own people too. Spivs and skinheads and mods and teds. Hippies and occultists. I have scribbled books containing the stories of coolies and lascars down on the docks. Native Americans in the Victorian Wild West shows, buried aboriginal cricketers in Hackney, accounts of Maori who somehow made their way to London’s docks from Aotearoa. Chinese Limehouse, opium smoke, ripper myths, the self-exiles hiding in Epping Forest.

The Maori people have a saying: "For women and land, we die". "And Tommo also has a saying: "We ain't got no women and we ain't got no land and so I'm telling you straight, we ain't gonna die for fuck-all o' nothing!