This is the fifth post in the Historicizing Adaptation blog series, introduced here by series editor Shannon Stunden Bower.
Aotearoa New Zealand has a long and painful history of adaptation. From 1845, the British colonial Governor George Grey, alongside Native Land Commissioner Donald McLean and Anglican missionary John Morgan, unofficially enacted their “flour and sugar” policy, a strategy of protracted negotiation that aimed to fully integrate the Indigenous Māori into the economy of settler capitalism. Māori would be ‘encouraged,’ through grants and loans of agricultural equipment, to abandon their traditional way of life and embrace pastoralism. Alongside these policies, McLean was preparing yet further plans for the erasure of Māori culture throughout the colony. Focusing on the remote Wairarapa coast of the eastern North Island, a wave of purchases completed by 1853 sought to separate the Ngāti Kahungunu iwi from their traditional habitations, breaking long-held connections and subjecting them yet further to Crown control. Amid these conditions, adaptation seemed inevitable.1
However, adaptation was not a process conducted in silence, nor was it as all-encompassing as many Europeans may have hoped. Many Māori would choose to engage in opposition, defending their right to continue occupying their ancestral lands, growing traditional crops, and observing their long-held cultural practices. At Otaraia, a pā by the Ruamāhanga River, rangatira Ngātuere Tāwhirimātea Tāwhao repeatedly refused to engage in land sales, especially where important forest resources were concerned. Ngātuere recognised the very real risk that his people could lose access to their traditional resources altogether if, “by the white man’s instruction,” these lands were to be sold and consequently cleared. Widely known as a formidable negotiator with over half a century of proven diplomatic experience, he represented an intimidating force that Europeans would certainly struggle to reckon with.
Speaking with surveyors Henry Tacy Kemp and Francis Dillon Bell in 1849, Ngātuere explained that “he was quite satisfied with his pah [sic] and his land, there where he stood. Otaraia was his, and he would keep it.” In his view, European land acquisition would cause his people to “be banished into the scrub,” whereas traditional cultivation practices were both sustainable and efficient – “look at his potatoes, they were good enough food for him.”2
A decade later, Ngātuere’s desire to continue traditional occupation on his lands had not changed. Though Otaraia had long since been abandoned, Ngātuere defended the right of his people to cultivate, gather, and hunt on their traditional land at the more northerly settlement of Taratahi, a recent ‘purchase’ by the settler government. In a letter published in the Crown-owned newspaper Te Karere o Poneke in 1858, Ngātuere stated:
evidently, the practices of surveying and selling land by the Government remain unclear […] when it becomes clear that these practices are corrupt, this trouble will end. Finally, these methods will have been revealed.3
In continuing his occupation and cultivation on the Taratahi block, Ngātuere campaigned for “adequate compensation” for what he saw as an illegal procedure designed to alienate his people from their land. Engaging in active resistance against adaptation, Ngātuere aimed to dissuade Europeans from continuing environmentally damaging “procedures” on Indigenous soil.4
Other groups would seek to adapt to these changes by modifying their traditional practices against the backdrop of European expansion. Tuku whenua, the long-held system underpinning land transfers among Māori, was often subject to these modifications. Consolidated evidence of land ownership by Māori had rapidly become necessary due to the establishment of Land Courts by Europeans, which would question the legitimacy of their historic occupation of land containing valuable ecological resources. Networks of these knowledge systems also served to solidify ancestral and familial connections to land, preventing ecocide through the maintenance of a highly intertwined cultural apparatus of hereditary ownership.
At Te Kopi, a coastal settlement at Palliser Bay, Ngāti Moe (a hapū, or sub-tribe, associated with Ngāti Kahungunu) would aim to consolidate records of tuku whenua through whakapapa connections, linked to ancestry and marriage over the course of centuries. Internal land transfer agreements had become increasingly important among Ngāti Moe, who adapted their systems of land usage in response to the threat of colonial expansion. In some cases, Land Court proceedings related to land transfer would reveal these deliberate motives of preserving ecologically-important land. In the event that European settlers would stand to inherit according to laws of marriage and succession, they would often be deliberately excluded, the land being granted to their Maori spouse instead. Adaptations in this manner would anticipate European developments in the region by some years, spurred by a strongly-held conservation ethic that would persist throughout colonisation.
For instance, Te Aitu-o-te-Rangi Jury of Ngāti Moe, a prominent woman based at Te Kopi, was officially transferred land at the river settlement of Waka-a-Paua during the 1840s. Despite her marriage to a European settler, she was to be considered the sole owner of the land, and her husband’s assets were acknowledged separately. Her son Te Whatahoro Jury described to a court in 1868 how she was described as a principal landholder during these discussions:
[Te Aitu-o-te-Rangi] had a joint interest in the land as a Ngati Muratu but it became wholly hers … my mother and I cult[ivated] at Nga Taira after the gift.5
Ngāti Moe rangatira Wī Kingi Tutepakihirangi acknowledged the abnormality of this land transfer before ultimately granting it, emphasizing that reorganization continued to occur during these strategic land ownership consolidations.6 This reflected a deep-seated desire to keep ecologically-important land within individual hapū or whānau familial units rather than selling it to colonists, an adaptation vital to the continuation of whakapapa lines connected to valuable environmental resources.7
Adaptation in the face of colonial expansion also took on more overt forms. Discourse among Māori concerning the extent to which European customs should be integrated into traditional cultivation methods was often turbulent, and no clear, singular current of thought existed to unify these diverse beliefs. However, a common viewpoint on resource use changes was that European-style cultivation could be integrated into mahinga kai without compromising their relationship to the land. An 1842 editorial in Te Karere Maori, a Crown-sponsored publication, suggested:
I’m not saying that all traditional cultivation should be abandoned; no, we can cultivate these foods together […] we should adopt this noble practice for ourselves.8
These compromises would form the basis for another technique by which Māori resisted outright absorption into the settler-capitalist economy. The missionary William Colenso would record several instances seven years later at Te Kopi, where he saw “several plantations” containing wheat, a European-introduced crop. Isaac Pakitara, a Māori contact of Colenso, grew “ripe Raspberries, & a bunch of new Onions” in a traditional plantation nearby.9 In adopting these practices, Māori effectively refuted the idea that their society would necessarily have to pivot to pastoralism in order to thrive economically. While European methods offered the supposed benefits offered by Grey’s “flour and sugar” policy, Māori resisted colonists’ implications that land would need to be cleared to sustain their population with exotic crops.
It is difficult to assess the impact of Māori efforts to adapt to the overarching colonial policy of pastoralism. However, the methods by which they chose to face this threat are significant. In Wairarapa, Māori showed agency in outright resisting these colonial calls to integrate, directly opposing the exploitation of their lands and peoples. They had the foresight to prepare evidence in case of further alienation. Those that chose to adopt European methods, as well, often defied colonial expectations. Against the collective will of settler-capitalists, Māori had decisively shown that adaptation could not equal erasure.
Glossary
iwi: a Māori nation, consisting of a loose confederation of hapū and whanau
hapū: a clan within an iwi, comprising an autonomous political community
whānau: an extended family group
mahinga kai: literally, “working [for] food,” a collection of subsistence gathering practices underpinned by a mutualistic relationship with the local environment
whakapapa: a system of genealogy involving ancestral connections to land
pā: a hill-fort or fortified village, commonly misspelled as pah by early European settlers
rangatira: a person of noble birth charged with the leadership of a hapū, perhaps derived from rāranga-tira (“weaving together a group”)
tuku whenua: a system of land tenure and transference, granting conditional claims to land based on gifting
Feature image: An expressive interface between Māori and colonist cultures, as the Wairarapa plains near Rangiwhakaoma hosted horse races in 1852, one year before the land’s official acquisition by the Crown. John Pearse, Races held in the Wairarapa (“Waidrop”) plains in 1852, watercolour on paper, 1852, National Library of New Zealand, E-455-f-070-1.
Notes
1. Hazel Petrie, “Colonisation and the Involution of the Maori Economy,” Transactions and Proceedings of XIII World Congress of Economic History 1(1), 2002, pp. 2-20.
2. Joy Hippolite, Wairoa ki Wairarapa, Wellington: Waitangi Tribunal, 1991, p. 19; Tony Walzl, Land Purchasing in the Wairarapa, 1840-1854, Wellington: Waitangi Tribunal, 2001, pp. 271-286.
3. Ngatuere Tawhirimatea Tawhao, “Mo te Karere o Poneke”, Te Karere o Poneke, 6 September 1858, p. 3, trans. Jamie Ashworth.
4. Walzl, pp. 271-286.
5. Tom White, Jury Whanau Land Claims, Wellington: Waitangi Tribunal, 2002, p. 13.
6. Tom White, Jury, p. 14.
7. H. McCracken, Land Alienation in the Wairarapa District undertaken by the Crown and the Wellington Provincial Council 1854-c.1870s, Wellington: Crown Forest Rental Trust, 2001, p. 42.
8. Anonymous, Te Karere Māori, 1 November 1842, p. 45, trans. Jamie Ashworth.
9. William Colenso, journal entry, 16 December 1848, qMS-0489, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.
