(This article was rejected by the Northland Age, now part of the Jacinda-government-subsidized NZME-NZ Herald conglomerate)

By Bruce Moon

Matthew Tutaki, Chairman of the “National Maori Authority” has got all fired up (“maorieverywhere”, 6/6/21), claiming among other things that “Colonisation of this country destroyed Maori communities. Our people were murdered, men, women and children. Our women were raped. We were demhumanised (sic) and lied to.”

Well, well, leaving alone the plain fact that this is grossly untrue, let us look at a prime example of Maori colonisation: the colonisation of the Chatham Islands by Ngati Mutunga and Ngati Tama from Taranaki in 1835.

Colonising the Chathams

The innocent indigenous people, the Moriori, were slaughtered and their lands appropriated, Within a few short years a population of about 1600 was reduced to a mere 101, a “holocaust” indeed! Not only that but the victims’ bodies were systematically prepared for cooking in the Maori ovens, the women in one account fighting over the raw penis.¹

I observe that while the Spanish colonisation of South America and the Belgian atrocites in the Congo was appalling, the colonisers did not go as far as to eat their victims. But, as Rakatau pointed put in the Native Land Court in 1876, this was Maori custom, tikanga, just part of the process of establishing new land claims.²

By contrast, in mainland New Zealand, colonisation promptly terminated brutal intertribal slaughter in which tens of thousands of Maoris were killed and eaten by other Maoris and the survivors enslaved. The people got better food, clothing, housing and many other benefits. 

So attractive indeed were the incoming white men that so many Maori women slept with them that there may not be a single full-blood left in the country today. 

How about you, Mr Tutaki? Ho! Hum!

1 M. King, Moriori, ISBN 0 670 826553, , 1989, p.64 ff

2 Ibid.