Whakapapa

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 74, Issue 6365, 2 May 1947, Page 7

Whakapapa

Interest in Maori family histories and the method of their preservation has been kindled by the proceedings in the Raglan .Electoral Court. A prominent Wellington Maori told a reporter that many a young Maori to-day is making a point of writing his or her genealogical tree, or “whakapapa.” “I have done the same —some 50 generations of it,” he said. “In my youth my father would repeat to us our descent. In his youth Maori was still an ear language, but the pakeha has made it both an eye and an ear language, and so, not having the time to memorise as of old, more of our young people are keeping theirs in written form. That does not mean to say, however, that many of the ancestral trees of tribes and leading families are not retained, in the memory of their leaders; and some still impart the descents orally. The main genealogical trees carrying back to the various canoes have been in writing since the first Maori Land Court sat in about 1860. They go back to the ancestral home in Hawaiki. Maori history beyond that is being traced on philological lines.”