MAORI BURIAL CUSTOMS

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XX, Issue 191, 2 August 1930, Page 9

MAORI BURIAL CUSTOMS

By their spirited protest against the cremation in California of the body of their chieftain. Sir Maui Pomare the famous Ngatiawa tribe of Taranaki. New Zealand, have again confirmed the world-old statement that tho burial customs of a '*ao3 are regarded as a religion. But when one reads of cremation being a violation of the native tradition, one is inclined to think that there is “too much protest.” because generations ago cremation was one of the forms of burial practised by the Maoris and to-day in the Marlborough Sounds (South, Island) and in the Wellington Province (North Island) there arc to be found cremation-mounds, rich with the ashes of the dead and the oil-or fat of the norpdise. With some knowledge of the Maori mind in its manv f drins of childlike reasoning, I am inclined to the belief that the natives are mostly worried over the fact that the crematorium may deprive them of the grana dnd gorgeous ceremonies with which they intended to invest the tangi or funeral obsequies of their great chieftain.

Was not Maui Pomare great in the Councils of the Pakehn, even in the days of Seddon. Massey, Coates and Sir Joseph Ward? Did he not carry in him the blood of tiro Maori Napoleon, Te Raiiparaha? And was not his grandmothei. Te Kahi. one of the two women who wore permitted to sign the Treaty of Waitangi? Further. could ho not trace his ancestry to Toi-rni-kawa “the wood-eater,” who flourished fifty generations ago, even before the da\s of the kumara (potato) ? Hero was an opportunity cf allowing tiro Maori to give full nlav to his ancestral emotions ami religious subjugation to a pedigreed brother whose genealogical tree in length would have put to shame that of all the nobility of England, even back to the days of William the Conqueror. And it is all upset because some twentieth centurv Yankee in California. with his up-to-date ideas, was unaware that embalming also was one of the burial customs ill New Zealand in the far-off days. However, it is not improbable that the Maori mind, after further cogitation. will evolve a m<‘ ns of overcoming the present difficulty and I shall be surprised if eventually the ashes of that good man Sir Maui Pomare are not accorded a native burial, with all the solemnity an I honour that has been extend <l, generation after generation, to his great ancestors.