Study of Maori myths leads to new theories on early migrations

Press, 20 August 1985, Page 13

Study of Maori myths leads to new theories on early migrations

By

KEN COATES

Contrary to popular belief perpetuated by pakehas for many years, New Zealand has a rich Maori literature of stories, poems, travels, folklore, and mythology. Still largely untranslated, overlooked by scholars, and therefore unknown and unappreciated, it is more comprehensive than that of any tribal people elsewhere in the world. Most was written in the last century, from about 1840 on, by Maoris who had been taught to write by missionaries and often encouraged by Europeans interested in their culture.

The Maoris had perceived the danger that traditional beliefs, customs, and religious myths, passed on orally, were in danger of being lost in the overwhelming impact of European settlement. Serious interest in the hundreds of manuscripts, books, and copies of early magazines published in Maori lapsed. By about 1930, there was an unconscious exclusion of Maori literature from specialised study. So material lies virtually untouched in the archives of libraries and museums, and in private collections. Almost by accident, the University of Canterbury senior lecturer in Maori, Dr Margaret Orbeli, stumbled on the rich resource when, as editor of a Maori magazine, “Te Ao Hou,” she delved into the manuscripts held by the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington.

Her academic background had been in English, in which she gained a doctorate at Auckland University, but the wealth of untranslated Maori material she discovered throughout the country heightened her interest in the language and culture. She went back to university in Auckland where she gained a doctorate in anthropology, writing a thesis on Maori love poetry. A meticulous worker with highly developed skills as a translator and interpreter, she was one of the first scholars to make critical studies of Maori poetry. She describes the thousands of poems as powerful and sophisticated, possessing tremendous subtlety and force. She is keenly aware that traditional Maori stories, implicitly believed, formed part of an intricate pattern of religious belief explaining the natural world and events such as birth and death. Dr Orbeli has written “The Natural World of the Maori,” just published by Collins and lavishly illustrated in colour, which represents four years’ work in which she has drawn on images in poetry and folklore to show how the environment shaped Maori thinking. Her research has led her to challenge the assumptions of scholars that traditional stories of Maori ancestors sailing to New Zealand from Hawaiki are historical accounts. She argues that this insistence has led to arbitrary rejection of events that are inconsistent with historical credibility, but which are full of religious significance for Maoris. In a new publication just off the Canterbury University press, she savs Hawaiki is a mythical homeland, and stories of the arrivals of various canoes are not historical events.

Even more controversial is her contention that accounts of the first ancestors finding tribes here

when they came to live in Aotearoa are also mythical.

Margaret Orbell’s insights into the meaning of Maori literature could, if widened into a major field for research and scholarship, have a far-reaching effect. It is important that it be taken seriously for the sakes of people of Maori descent, she says. “New Zealand society is still in many cases racist. Many Maori people have been led to feel less important human beings because of the colour of their skin. Often they have been led to feel that Maori life and culture is of little continuing interest to most pakehas.” She is critical that Maori manucripts from the Governor Grey collection were not publicly exhibited for the first time by the Auckland Public Library until late last year. “Somehow, pakehas have

felt so insecure in this country that they have had to unconsciously repress this other tradition.” Although there are New Zealanders devoting lives of specialised scholarship to Old Icelandic literature, old French, old German, English, Roman, and Greek — “many of these fields are pretty well tilled” — little is happening in Maori literature. For South Islanders, there are problems over obtaining copies of stored manucripts, and this is frustrating for teaching in this field. Study of Maori literature would make pakehas feel better about the country they live in and help them understand it has a past, according to Dr Orbeli. “Poets have complained about a lack of unicorns in our hills, but there has been the equivalent,” she says. “Land and people have had a close relationship for a long time, and there is nothing to stop us making an imaginative identifica 7 tion with other humans here before us.” In talking about Maori myths, Margaret Orbeli is not dismissing them as popular fallacy or untrue. She means a story of great religious significance which shapes the lives of those who subscribe to it, and which is important on a number of levels.

In the pattern of colonialists everywhere, the myths have often been turned into stories for children. “But Maori mythology is enormously rich, inexhaustible, and it greatly repays careful, sophisticated, specialised study,” she adds. “It can then be made meaningful and accessible to the general reader.

For unconscious and all too human reasons, pakehas have trivialised Maori tradition, Dr Orbeli feels. It has been largely

hidden by a different language, and another obstacle to appreciation is that pakeha New Zealanders have been traumatised by transplantation from one part of the world to another. It takes time to come to terms emotionally with a new environment.

Dr Orbell’s analysis of Maori tradition involves understanding a way of thinking markedly different from Western thought patterns. About 2000 years ago, the ancestors of the Maori left Savai’i in western Polynesia and began exploring and settling in eastern Polynesia, naming Hawaii in the north and Havai’i in the Society Islands after their homeland. In about 800 AD they discovered Aotearoa.

Within a few generations, speculates Dr Orbeli, from the original migration into eastern Polynesia, everything said about Hawaiki became mythical and religious. The whole idea of keeping objective records of the past is a Western concept, she adds. To those who question how the Polynesians could have thought differently from Europeans and been satisfied with a religious explanation, she replies that all Europeans were satisfied with that in the Middle Ages. “If a Maori faced the rising sun in the east because he had a ritual to perform, he faced Hawaiki, the mythical source of power and life,” she says. “He was plugging into the original source of things and did not need more than that.” Hawaii in the north and Havai’i in the Society group are both, in local tradition, homes of the gods. Hawaii has its eruptions and power, and Havai’i has a crater where the souls of the dead are said to go underground. In New Zealand, the mythical world of Hawaiki is said to be in the east when a source of life, and in the west when concerned with death and disaster. The earliest ancestors of the

Maoris were said to be living in Hawaiki; for example, Maui is said to have set out from there in order to fish up the North Island. Dr Orbeli makes it clear that in saying the first ancestors who came to New Zealand are mythical, she is not holding that none of the early names in tradition did not belong to people who actually lived. Some may have.

Many of the mythical figures from Hawaiki made expeditions around the tribal territory establishing landmarks, making the land ready for their descendants. People were then living in the landscape which had landmarks related to their earliest ancestors — the natural world was explained and had meaning. How many canoes brought the Maoris’ ancestors to New Zealand? Dr Orbeli says there is so much folklore and ’tradition genetically related to other stories in eastern Polynesia she cannot imagine all of it arriving here in the heads of the crew of a single canoe. Several canoes probably arrived in the original migration. If tradition was taken as seriously as archeologists take their evidence, and if there were as many people working in this field, closer correlations could be made, she adds. It might even be possible

to show some traditions come from one region of Polynesia, say the Cook Islands, and others from different parts. Margaret Orbeli is a dedicated worker in her field, keen to see more Maori literature published. She is pleased that in a Penguin anthology of New Zealand verse, many Maori poems with original texts, and translations, have been included. The Maori department at the University of Canterbury is also helping to make Maori writing more accessible and has recently arranged for publication of two stories written in Marlborough in the early part of this century. It is hoped they will find their way into schools and libraries. Probably the most exciting prospect for Maori literature is the proposed establishment of an institute for Polynesian studies at the university. Funds for this were left by Professor John Macmillan Brown, first professor of classics and English, who had a keen interest in Polynesia and who died in 1935. An institute fostering study into Maori and Polynesian writing could help meet the desire of Margaret Orbeli that the field needs “dozens of people writing dozens of different kinds of books.”