Māori Quotes

Experience soon taught me never to write about anything important to me - the Māoris, animals, the unemployed men, the empty boarded-up houses that frightened me. The subsequent trampling of my sensibilities would have destroyed me. Soon everything I wrote came only from my imagination.

The Māori word for autism is takiwātanga. Translated it means, "In one's own time and space.

I’m reminded of the Māori elders and their belief that trauma, anxiety, depression, and substance abuse are “all the same thing”—and all related to our connectedness, our sense of belonging.

A girl in my high school once told me I had pretty eyes. I was puffed up over that until I was like thirty. You wouldn’t believe how stupid guys get over compliments on our looks, I was vain as. But my eyes weren’t anything special—light brown, not even hazel, yellow on a sunny day. The morning after the lights went out they lighted to dark amber, then they went the colour of new lager, and on the third day they were gold. P—said I looked like a Māori TV Pink Panther. C— said I looked like Edward Cullen from that old Twilight movie, if Edward Cullen had the body of a history teacher. A— said I looked cool. He was the only one.

We are creatures of words...we are creatures of imagination. We live on the edges of dreams and the margins of thought. We live in the whisper of the page.

If you go to an “Asian American and Pacific Islander” event, you’re not going to see Samoans, you’re not going to see Tongans, you’re not going to see Māori. We’re half of the acronym, but not even close to half the representation. The Indigenous story is always washed away by the immigrant story. Americans are proud to say that “we’re a nation of immigrants,” but that’s also saying “f*ck the Indigenous people.” We’re proud to be mixed in Hawaii, but we need to acknowledge that that comes at the price of Indigenous people. We can support each other, but there’s a difference between inclusion and erasure.

Māoridom in Aotearoa dictates that we generate prestige from manaakitanga. It is the connection and hospitality we express for those in our care but also to show all that they are our equal, they too have mana. What many may not know is that manaakitanga fortifies all those involved in its practice. The high-calibre nourishment that we express sustains our mana as much as those we give it to. Manaaki helps us unlock ourselves to the experience of service and activated respect. It is not pious or sacraficial in nature. It is not foolish either, however it has been mistaken for such and historically abused by settler colonialism. For Māori, manaakitanga is restorative of an unseen order, far beyond anything transactional.

Don’t do that to me again, Bunny,” she whispered in a heartbreakingly pained voice. “I need you, so fucking much. We have to see this bullshit through and live out one of those corny happily ever after sequences.” I smiled, despite how her hoarse voice was shredding me up inside. “And instead of children, we have a six-foot-four Māori man with a bad temper?

Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past Māori proverb

Why has the idea of Māori privilege been so durable? In the first hundred years of colonisation, the idea of Māori privilege aided and abetted the taking of Māori lands and resources. This loss was framed as a ‘privilege’, a necessary step towards amalgamation and the innumerable benefits it would bring to Māori. In the latter half of the twentieth century and the early decades of the twenty-first century, Māori privilege has again been put to use. Notions of privilege, first used to dispossess Māori, are now being redeployed to consolidate the ill-gotten gains of the previous centuries.

The Colonial Office maintained that land speculators such as the New Zealand Company were a threat to Māori, hence the need for the Crown pre-emption clause of article two. However, rather than protecting Māori, Crown policy based on pre-emption became an effective means of divesting Māori of their lands. Indeed, during Crown colony rule and under the Liberal government, millions of acres were acquired for Pākehā settlement. The privilege of protection was not just about protecting Māori land rights, it was also about amalgamating Māori into settler colonial society. It was envisaged that English law would eventually supplant Māori custom. At first the Crown sought to do this gradually through ‘official’ privileges such as the Protectorate of Aborigines (to ensure Māori interests were taken into account in land transactions) and the Native Exemption Ordinance (to utilise the authority of chiefs in disseminating British law). Pre-emption, the Protectorate of Aborigines and the Native Exemption Ordinance were in essence tools of amalgamation.

Since 1840 native policy had swung from ‘the privilege of protection’ to ‘the privilege of free trade’. Proponents of either position based their arguments on article three of the Treaty of Waitangi, or at least their interpretation of it. Yet time and time again, no matter the policy, Māori were invariably dispossessed of their lands.

Each no-dig hāngi we make in the oven with cabbage leaves sutures a different part of me back together. Every time we collect and cook something together with love and joy makes up for every time I ate until I was sick. We take a small moment each day to stand in my parents’ garden in the sun. To nourish ourselves, we harvest the earth and the beings that spring from it. All our small attempts to care for ourselves and each other wash away some of the shadowy figures that have followed us around for so long. I have a knife, a basket, and two legs. He kai kei aku ringa.

Titiro ki te rangi tahuri rawa ake, kahore he whenua e . . . Kua riro." We looked up to heaven and before we knew where we were there was no land left . . . all gone.

In their thousand-year isolation the Māoris had discovered a certain pitch of the human voice, like that of the woman whose chant was still rising and rising in the air, which instantly and without exception made anyone who heard it cry.

Island life, with all of its quirks and anachronisms, also fascinated Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace developed a theory of evolution based on natural selection before Darwin published his, but the fact that he was not an independently wealthy gentleman who owned a country house with a swan-encrusted ornamental lake and hedge maze meant Darwin got all the glory. Wallace’s Island Life considered how isolation could preserve animals such as Mauritius’s dodo and New Zealand’s moa, but left them totally unprepared for contact with dogs, pigs and hungry sailors and/ or Māori, which rapidly population-bottlenecked them into extinction.

I'm going to an Iranian film tonight with Fereshteh. Her family friends approve of her having an Iranian friend." "You're Māori." "Yeah, I know, but they accept me. Fereshteh taught me some phrases and says I'm from Shiraz, which makes them all nod and say that explains it." "Is that unethical?" "I don't think so. When I lived in Germany people were always disappointed in me for not being able to speak Turkish. They thought I had forgotten my roots." "You never forget your roots.

We are all grandchildren and we are all ancestors,” says Māori lawyer and children’s rights campaigner Julia Whaipooti. “Personally I’m driven by our mokopuna (‘future generations’) to make the world a better place than when we found it.

From Taoism’s yin yang and the Māori takarangi to Buddhism’s endless knot and the Celtic double spiral, each design invokes a continual dynamic dance between complementary forces.

This apparent evolution in canoe design is a salutary reminder that cultures are not static and that there is a logic to their transformations. If the Māori stopped making double-hulled oceangoing canoes, it must have been because they were no longer sailing across the ocean. But Tasman’s evidence suggests that as late as the mid-seventeenth century, at least in the South Island, the inhabitants of New Zealand were still using vessels of a type that linked them to the rest of Polynesia and to the tradition of long-distance ocean travel.

the Great Fleet is a cherished piece of modern New Zealand mythology. It recounts the arrival of an armada of seven great voyaging canoes carrying men, women, and children—as many as seventy to a vessel—with all their gods, plants, animals, food, water, implements, and tools. The canoes, which arrive more or less together, separate once they reach Aotearoa, each one traveling to a different part of the coast, where the occupants alight and settle, thereby establishing the land rights and lineages of people who would later trace their descent from these founding figures. For most of the twentieth century, the arrival of the Great Fleet was considered to be “the most famous event in Māori history because,” as one eminent Māori scholar put it, “all tribes trace their aristocratic lineages back to the chiefs of the voyaging canoes.” It was also the capstone of the Polynesian migration story and the end of the great voyaging era. New Zealand was the last of the Polynesian islands to be settled; following the arrival of the Great Fleet, in the words of a Māori proverb, “The tapu sea to Hawaiki is cut off.

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.

In the Māori word kahurangi, meaning “wandering” or “unsettled,

Oral narratives (one can think here of the Iliad or the Odyssey) are famously non-chronological, beginning in the middle of an action and unfolding in a zigzag fashion, frequently detouring from the main events to fill in background or explain important information. Traditional Māori narratives were similar, and when they were edited by Europeans (with a European audience in mind), many of these structural kinks were ironed out. The effect was to turn “terse, cryptic and audience-centred originals” into smooth, exegetical narratives, making them more like history and less like myth.

But Polynesians, too, had their own systems of ranking and classification. Te Rangi Hiroa described “Melanesian” physical characteristics as conflicting with “the Polynesian idea of beauty” and wrote that among Māori, “a fair skin was admired,” while those at the darker end of the spectrum had “to put up with the humorously disparaging remarks of their lighter tinted friends.

but that they had answered him by flourishing their weapons and breaking into a war dance. This—the famous Māori haka—was vividly described by Lieutenant John Gore: About an hundred of the Natives all Arm’d . . . drew themselves up in lines. Then with a Regular Jump from Left to Right and the Reverse, They brandish’d Their Weapons, distort’d their Mouths, Lolling out their Tongues and Turn’d up the Whites of their Eyes Accompanied with a strong hoarse song.

From a high of something like 250,000 at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the population of the Hawaiian Islands had been reduced to less than 40,000 by the century’s end. In New Zealand, the Māori population declined by nearly two-thirds over the same period. And in the Marquesas, where estimates put the number of inhabitants before contact with Europeans at approximately 50,000, the population crashed so completely that by 1926 there were just 2,225 Marquesans left.

This is where we start. Let it be blank. Blank is different from nothing.

In Māori thinking, the past is before us because we can see it; we walk backwards into the future since we cannot look and see what it will bring.

Are you Italian?” Nico asked, putting down his drink. I looked up at him. “A quarter, and how did you know that? I don’t look it.” “You kind of do, plus you use a spoon like Gina, that’s the waitress, and she’s half Italian.” I shrugged, having picked up the habit from my nonna. “What else are you?” he asked. “I’m also a quarter Māori, part French, Welsh, Danish, and English.” His eyes twinkled at me. “Add a few more countries in there and you’ll be a one-woman United Nations.” I smiled at that and lifted the pasta to my mouth. Gina returned with Nico’s plate of food, causing me to lower the fork momentarily, making me wonder whether I should wait for him, but Gina started asking him questions about university, so I took a bite. I shivered at the delicious taste of garlic, the chef having put the perfect amount in, just how my nonna would’ve made it. The waitress disappeared as Nico picked up his fork, twirling the spaghetti onto it without the aid of a spoon. “Looks like you got the best parts out of all of those nationalities,” he said. I blushed at the compliment, always embarrassed when people said nice things about my looks. “Thanks.” “You’re welcome,” he replied, popping the spaghetti into his mouth, his unusual eyes once more twinkling at me, so bright that I understood why his adoptive parents had chosen him.

Ideas of infinity and eternity denote limitlessness in space and time, which does not seem to me to be a category of ancient Māori thought; instead, the abundance of multitude is always stressed, and this is characteristic of the concreteness of Māori thinking.

Two concepts belonging to the Māori people of New Zealand have had a significant influence on Western thought, so that they have become familiar terms in English, namely mana and tapu, Anglicized as ‘taboo’. Both of these concepts are broad structuring principles in Polynesian-speaking societies, and were impoverished in their transposition.52 It is interesting to reflect upon the reasons for their Western adoption. Mana is essentially spiritual power or spiritual authority, belonging to things in the natural world or to humans, and which can be broadly or narrowly drawn, while tapu is the state of something being set apart and governed by some specific ritual regulations. These concepts obviously exist in a certain reciprocity: tapu recognizes the presence of mana in something or in someone. There were analogous concepts in Western polytheistic traditions, such as numen in Latin, but of course those were as alien to Westerners by the 19th century as were the exotic peoples of the Pacific. In their appropriated form, these concepts no longer refer to the divine coordinates by which a people locate themselves in the cosmos, but to different flavors of ‘irrationality’.