Maori Ancestral Rights

Te Ao Hou, October 1956, Page 8

Maori Ancestral Rights To get back to our question in New Zealand: before any criticism can be made of the course taken here, it is necessary to know what did happen and, broadly, why it happened. Some brief historical survey is therefore necessary. In the days before Europeans arrived the Maori customary system of land holding centred on the tribe or hapu. Founded on ancestral right, conquest or occasionally gift, confirmed always by occupation or use, a tribe would hold an area of land consisting of a number of blocks. Within the tribe, the hapus or family groups would have rights located in blocks or parts of blocks, but rarely was there anything approaching individual ownership. Generally speaking rights would tend to be more finely divided out in closely settled areas, as in places of fixed residence and areas of intensive cultivation. There are however examples of something approaching individual rights of use, if not of the ownership order, in bird-sharing trees, rat-catching runs, fishing channels and the like. But there was no real certainty of rights since they could be overturned by force. Within the tribe there was a reasonable chance of preserving rights but they could hold good only within the tribe. No assertion of ancestral title or gift or occupation could avail against a superior force of arms by an outside tribe. There could be no certainty as a lawyer would put it of “quiet enjoyment”. It is clear, therefore, that title, even where it might approach the individual title, stood or fell with the tribe or hapu whose corporate strength would defend it. The individual could not exist apart from his membership of the group and the rights of the group dominated the rights of the individual, as witness for example the “muru” custom. The chiefs and elders were the governing organs of the community, and, to a greater or lesser extent according to their degree of autocracy, could claim to speak for the tribe.