THE THOUGHTS OF A MA.ORI CHIEF.
THE Weekly Press, a sporting journal, of Christchurch, New Zealand, in appearance something like the Field, published in December, 1892, a series of papers of some intel- lectual interest. They were the component parts of an essay by Apirana. Turupu Ngata, a leading chief of the Maoris, con- taining his views on the past and future of his own unhappy people,—the first essay, it is believed, ever written by a Maori of unmixed blood. Apirana, though educated at a local University, and full of English knowledge, remains a native in feeling, in sympathies, and in aspirations, and his whole utterance, which is often singularly eloquent, and always free from the Indian taint of unreality, is penetrated through and through by a kind of reflective horror of the White man, who, he nevertheless clearly perceives, in the inevitable conflict of their destinies, will ultimately and speedily stand a victor and alone. His thoughts are all sombre, and almost all worthy of attention. He does not, indeed, though he evidently exults in the Maori past, add much to our knowledge of its details. He accepts the theory of European inquirers, that the Maoris are probably either Malays or members of a race forced to emigrate by the Malays, who, after a long residence in the Navi- gator Islands, set sail under some unknown impulse for New Zealand, and there grew and prospered and developed, what, for want of a better word, we may call a polity. The only thing he adds to the best English accounts is his belief, based, apparently, on personal investigation, that the islands, when the Maori adventurers landed, were not uninhabited, but con- tained a few people of some Negro, or rather Negrito, race, whom the invaders conquered, absorbed, and, as it were, civilised, who are still recognisable by their faces and certain peculiarities of pronunciation, and who still form the tribe holding the land round Taupe and the Lakes. It was to be expected that, as an antiquarian, Apirana, Turupu Ngata would be more or less of a copyist, though his references to his own legends, as supporting the European story, have a value of their own; but be has often quite distinctive thoughts. One of them, in particular, is well worthy of Missionary atten- tion. There is a tendency among the new Missionaries to rely for success chiefly upon the ethical teaching of Christianity, or Upon the atonement it oilers for sin ; but Apirana, though a Christian himself, believes that the attraction of the new creed for his countrymen consisted wholly or mainly in the miracu- lous career ascribed to Christ, which struck their fervid imagi- nations, always haunted by desire for the supernatural ; and that the great relapse of the tribes, and the spread of the creed called Hau-hauism, was due to the gradual wearing away of this interest, and the new stimulus offered to the craving for awe by the miracles related by the Native priests. That is a singular statement, revealing as it does one whole side of the savage mind, and we wish Apirana had dwelt upon it longer; but he wanders away almost at once to that which evidently fills or, if we may say soy chokes his mind,—the decay and, as he thinks, approaching extinction of his heroic people. In spite of their slight recent increase, which he acknow- ledges as an accidental fact, the Maoris are dying, he says, of contact with the White man ; and nothing can save them but a miracle, which will not arrive. His only hope is for the survival of a few who may be elevated in morale as well as mind ; and even in that fragment, as it were, of a national destiny, be has but little confidence. Through column after colura, n runs the same melancholy refrain of angry hopelessness, hopelessness almost equal to that of the Marquesan who regards a coffin as the most acceptable of presents, and makes it thenceforward his bed. His countrymen, says the Maori Chief, in spite of all that has been taught them, remain savages still. 'The feelings and motives that influence the Maori's inner and more private life to-day are the same that influenced him ages ago, though tamed and refined by conformity to European customs, by contact with European civilisation, and by the far-reaching influence of Christianity. Your Maori of to-day is but the savage of yesterday, polished and draped in English finery. Within him there are raging the fierce passions that but a while ago made him revel in slaughter and cannibalism. His hands are bound with the
manacles of civilisation and humanity, but they are restless to grasp once more the spear, the taiaha, and mere. Outwardly, be accepts the truth of Christian teaching, and worships the Pakeha's god most reverently, but his mind is governed by superstition, his secret longings and natural tendencies are towards the tohungas, the only visible monuments of his old priestly regime." No indelible impres- sion has been made upon the Maori mind, nor can the surface impression be deepened, for to deepen it there must be contact between the Maori and the Pakeha, and in that contact is the destruction of the weaker race. There is no hope in religion, says the Chief, for the religious teachers of to-day have lost all touch with the inner life of the Maori, and no hope in education, though in itself the best of all things„—for education does but take mental tone out of a Maori. Full as he is of hatred for the Pakeha, the latter still tyrannises over his imagination, still compels him towards a degrading imitation of his ways of life, still draws him irresistibly towards the settlements where drink and idleness and sexual vice kill out the lower people, leaving behind them only a half-caste race ; upon whom the Chief, with that incurable pride which we find everywhere among the pure-blooded peoples, pours out, almost shrieking, the full vials of his wrath and contempt. "Illicit inter- course, vice, and immorality, have already destroyed the purity of the race, have stunted a race once famous for its physique, have rooted out whatever industrial tendencies survived other pernicious influences, and degraded the characteristics it once possessed of hospitality, liberality, bravery, and manliness. You view instead a pigmy race of men and women, a degenerate cross between the Pakeha and the Maori, inheriting the worst qualities of both, elevated by no sense of rank, with no dignity, possessing mental qualities that are employed for the fabrication of notorious schemes ; of theft, burglary, murder, and crime." There is no hope, says the Chief, of improvement in this respect. The Pakeha lad is a god to the Maori maiden, and the only remedy is the deportation from New Zealand of all the lower Whites, —a remedy which, while he suggests it, he himself pro- nounces to be "impossible." Education, as we have said, is worse than useless. "By educating the Maori, you generally render him . unfit to take part in the struggle for life in which his race is engaged. You render him versatile, pliant, and yielding under the influence of an English mind, conceited and overbearing towards his own people. It is true that the higher Maori schools have sent into the world men and women who are in every way qualified to fulfil the duties of English subjects, who are socially and morally equipped for the daily battles of life. It is true that their higher education has made them more sensible to the good that may be derived from industry, and has enlightened them to the danger in which their race is placed. But with all their sound intellectual and moral training, they have in the majority of cases relapsed into the ways of their parents, and exerted the most evil influence by their example. Insta- bility of character and versatility in occupation, place them in a position between the Pakeha, and their own race ; from it they view with supreme contempt the shortcomings of the one in such matters as dress, food, and dwelling, and survey with defective eyesight only the more prominent, the more fascina- ting, and the more easily acquired customs and occupations of the other."
It is despair, in fact, which is in the Chief's heart, and as it overwhelms him it breeds only one desire,—for a resistance which may possibly be only moral, but the idea of which is strangely obscured by metaphor if the essayist is not also dreaming of one last hopeless insurrection, in which the remnant of his people, gathered round their chiefs, should perish sword in hand. 1 Only let the chiefs see that they are departing from the bravery, grandeur, and nobleness of their great ancestors when they help on the general ruin ; that they can retrieve their lost honour only by making a firm stand and rallying round them the remnants of their people, though they be on the verge of ruin and destruction. Then shall we witness a spectacle, once seen never to be forgotten, a spectacle that will fill the heart with pity, though calling for admira- tion; a race battling bravely, nobly against the fates, now sinking under the leaden weight of the fear that the struggle is hopeless, now up and striking out fiercely against over- whelming odds, braced with the hope that the day may yet be
'won; the aged and the feeble trampled under foot, the ranks 'for a moment wavering as the black banner of death and destruction sweeps down once more to the bloody attack; 'death gaining the day, warriors weltering in their blood, leaders stricken in the bloom of manhood, yet gladly dying with the knowledge that though their race is lost, it has died hard, bravely, and nobly."
The Chief is possibly too pessimist, though the whole history of the Pacific seems to confirm his fears; but even if some poor remnant of the Maoris should survive, theirs is a melancholy history, and not one easily to be explained. The English have not willed their destruction ; and though they have brought with them strange drinks, strange diseases, and, -possibly owing to their superiority, new incentives to loosenees of life, many races inferior to the Maori, such, for instance, as -the Negro, have survived all those things. The Maoris are brave to a proverb, physically strong, and though, as Apirana affirms, almost incurably averse to steady industry, still they have fed themselves, while they have not, so far as history records, been attacked by any of the awful epidemics which have occasionally swept away whole peoples. The race, as the Chief affirms, shows a tendency in the towns to merge, by crossing, into the greater multitude of Whites, but there seems no reason why, in districts where the Whites are scarcely visible, it should not at least linger on unharmed, as the Roman soldiers did in Dacia, and the Saxons who were lost in an alien population in a corner of Eastern Europe ; as, indeed, even gipsies have done for ages in Transylvania and Roumania. There seems to be in the Maori, as in all the other Polynesian and Melanesian races, a special liability to despair, as if their imagination were essential to their vitality, and when that was 'cowed by the obvious superiority of the intruders, they gave up with the wish to live, the capacity for living. Something of the same kind was visible in the Peruvians after the 'first conquest ; it has been traced, though in lower mani- festations, among all the thin tribes of Australia ; and it not unfrequently appears in the strange withering-away of coneeript armies, when engaged on expeditions for which they have no heart. It may have been strongest among the Maoris, for they were an imaginative people, full of the love of poetry and legend, and with a pride in the achievements of their -tribes like that of Highlanders. If that is the true explana- lion, the Maori race is perishing of heart-break, which has sepped at once the vitality and the morale of the entire nation. 'Certainly that is the conclusion, false or true, which seems to is indicated by this first essay ever published by a Maori Chief, this dirge in eloquent prose over a vanishing people, once owners of New Zealand, now only forty-two thousand strong.
Previous page
