The Tribal Traditions

Te Ao Hou, November 1964, Page 43

The Tribal Traditions Traditions are concerned with mortals, not with the gods and heroes of the myths. They are genealogically placed not more than thirty generations from the present, and knowledge of them is usually quite local. Maori traditions, for example, are not known outside of New Zealand. The earliest Maori traditions concern the discovery and settlement of this country. The earliest recorded version of such a tradition was told to the missionary Hamlin at Orua Bay, on the south shore of the Manukau Harbour, in 1842. Hamlin published the story in, of all places, the ‘Tasmanian Journal of Science and Technology’. It is an account of the arrival of the Tainui canoe, in essentially the same form that it would be told by an elder of the Tainui tribes today. By the late 1840's (as I have already mentioned), literate Maoris, realising that the decline of the indigenous culture was inevitable, were themselves recording what they knew of the old beliefs. We are indebted to John White, who collected much of this material in his ‘Ancient History of the Maori’, a magnificent six-volume collection, now unfortunately out of print and prized by book collectors, who will pay forty pounds for a set. The migration and settlement traditions are thought by many people, including, I believe, everyone who has worked intensively with them, to have much historical value. The wide distribution of much of the mythology is conclusive proof that Polynesians were able to preserve legendary material for many centuries. So it is not unreasonable to suppose that settlement traditions, genealogically dated at only five or six hundred years ago, and of obvious functional importance in the social and political organisation of the people, were maintained with equal fidelity, and reflect actual events. In the case of those whose organisation was not completely shattered by the inter-tribal and inter-racial wars that succeeded colonisation, continuous traditional records have been recorded, told in terms of great men and great

battles and tied in with genealogies. It has been demonstrated by Dr Robertson of Kawhia that in some cases the internally consistent and continuous record extends six hundred years into the past; in other cases it is fragmentary and discontinuous prior to about 1600. The land courts played an important part in eliciting and recording traditional information. Given as evidence of conquest, occupation, or customary title in land claims, the stories were tested in cross-examination by rival claimants, and the proceedings of the court were usually taken down both in Maori and in translation. The resulting very large body of material, stored in the District Land Courts and in microfilm at Wellington, has barely been scratched by the folk-lorist, the culture-historian, or the ethnographer.