Illuminating the Maori world

Press, 9 November 1985, Page 20

Illuminating the Maori world

The Natural World of the Maori. By Margaret Orbell. Photographs by Geoff Moon. 230 pp. $44.95.

(Reviewed by

John Wilson)

Pakeha New Zealanders eager to enrich their lives from the cultural stream that the Maori people have fed into contemporary New Zealand life can rejoice that Margaret Orbell has not been daunted by criticisms of the work of some pakeha writers and scholars on Maori history and culture, from attempting to put some of her great store of knowledge of traditional Maori literature into a form accessible, and palatable, to non-academic readers. “The Natural World of the Maori” can be welcomed as a book written from a particular point of view, by a person with a particular sort of knowledge, without in any way denigrating claims that someone of Maori blood, with Maori experience in their bones, has a peculiar ability to interpret the same material which no Pakeha can match. The distress of some Maori at having the antecedents of their living culture (not to mention their race’s more recent experiences) studied and written about by “detached” pakeha, prompted by “academic” curiousity, is understandable. But this is not a book that should give rise to such distress, nor a book which pakeha readers need treat with suspicion because of its authorship. Margaret Orbell makes no pretence at having the insights into the material culture, literature, and religious beliefs

with which her book deals which being Maori could give. Her perspective is a valuable one, nonetheless. She is a pakeha anthropologist whose field of study has been the myths, legends, songs, and proverbs handed down, most of them, by Maori authorities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These authorities recorded their traditions, sometimes at pakeha prompting, for later generations and Margaret Orbell has based her life’s work on the not unreasonable assumption they expected sympathetic and respectful Europeans as well as Maori to benefit from this. Margaret Orbell clearly has deep sympathy for the literature she has studied and acquired from it a sensitive understanding of how the Maori saw the natural world of New Zealand. She has used the “resource” of traditional Maori literature (understanding literature in its broadest sense) to attempt to bring alive for later generations the “world” of the Maori, their material culture as well as their beliefs. Her text expresses the integration of the material and spiritual worlds which was a fundamental feature of Maori culture. Thus she will slip easily from explaining the practical use made of a particular plant to expounding how the same plant figured in poetry, legend and proverb. She has “dug” like an archaeologist with the same goal — of understanding how the Maori lived in New Zealand from the time of their first arrival and

how they experienced the world of New Zealand. The book is so well written that one is tempted to conclude that her resource is richer than the archaeologists’, or at least capable of giving access to parts of the Maori experience which the archaeologist has no hope of penetrating. Thus her first chapter, “Land and People,” is one of the best .brief accounts I have read of the Maori discovery and occupation of New Zealand. Her Epilogue is a skilful summation of how, in Maori belief, the natural world and human experience were integrated with the world of the mind and spirit in a way they are not in the traditions of Western thought. The worlds of secular pursuits and religious belief and practice were one to the Maori, and one of the chief virtues of this book is to show how pervasive this integration was in Maori society. The text, as well as the pictures, makes this a popular book. The language of traditional Maori literature is esoteric and elliptical and only someone intimately familiar with it could distil such a clear text from it. In this book Margaret Orbell has “appropriated” important parts of the Maori past for pakeha readers, but because there is nothing colonial or condescending in her manner or purposes, the book stands up against any criticism of it based on the unfortunate way Maori culture has been treated by some insensitive and unsympathetic pakeha scholars.