Understanding and Sympathy

Te Ao Hou, November 1957, Page 8

Understanding and Sympathy Peehi set out to help restore some of these supports of Maori society and to adapt these traditional values to the changing times by stimulating racial pride, developing understanding of the Maori point of view, and cultivating sympathy toward the people who were undergoing vast changes by encouraging study of their problems. He said: “I take an interest in these matters because after a lifetime spent in this land, I can look back with much pleasure of many years of contact with the Maori folk. I know if treated in a sympathetic manner they will respond and that outbreaks of irresponsible and superstitious activities are becoming rarer than of yore.” Peehi listening to a Maori playing a flute. So that was why Peehi threw in his lot with the Maori people. He was born at a time which enabled him to grow up among those ancestors of the present generation who had hardly begun to emerge from the Old World into the New World. His earliest playmates were Maori children from whom he obtained his love of the bush and the first few words of the Maori language. Above all, he grew up among their kaumatua, learnt their point of view, and understood how to build on the old way of life in preparation for the new. He attained manhood at an equally fortunate time. The Maori had reached the depths of that despondent state into which he fell after the wars with the pakeha and “Maoritanga” was at its lowest ebb. Peehi's “hobby”, as he called his interest brought him in contact with Apirana Ngata, Peter Buck and others who were forming the Young Maori Party and who needed the help of pakehas with a little appreciation of the difficulties and the requirements of their people. Peehi regarded himself as a dwarf among giants. He was then not a great Maori scholar. His education in the pakeha sense was limited. He had only five-and-a-half years' schooling, but that did not mean that he and his parents did not appreciate the value of education. As it happened there was no school where he lived. So his father wrote the alphabet on his bedroom wall before his son was five years' old, and he learnt to read and write by making the most of his parents' teaching and the good books he was encouraged to read at home. The result was that when he did go to school for a short time he was able to pass the Junior Civil Service examination. But Peehi did not want an office job. He loved the outdoor life. So he decided to go farming in Poverty Bay. At the place where he worked he built himself a hut and concentrated on learnining the Maori language. He also studied Spanish because he wanted to go to South America for a time. The trip did not eventuate but he went to the United States, where he worked in timber camps for five years. His return to New Zealand and his meeting with Percy Smith, the Maori historian, was another fortunate coincidence. Percy Smith was the Surveyor-General who had the job of making a road through the Urewera Country, the home of the Tuhoe tribe. Smith knew many of the old customs and beliefs were intact among these people who had been isolated right up to that time. So he persuaded Peehi to become an overseer on the roadworks and to collect and record information about the Tuhoe people in his spare time.