Last week, New Zealand's Waitangi Tribunal moved to redress a dreadful injustice that occurred in the nineteenth century, an injustice which led to the near extinction of the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands. The tribunal found that the Moriori were entitled to at least 50 per cent of the land in the Chathams, and recommended that they also receive compensation for their sufferings from the New Zealand government.
When discovered by the British in 1791, there were about 2,000 Moriori. Their Maori ancestors had made the 800 kilometre journey from the South Island of New Zealand sometime around 1100 AD, and developed a distinctive and peaceful culture in their new home. According to Moriori traditions, a chief named Nunuku had ended internecine violence long before the British arrived, replacing tribal warfare with ritualised contests between individual representatives armed only with quarter staffs.
But the British discovery of their islands had terrible consequences for the Moriori. They were massacred and their numbers declined precipitously. Tommy Solomon, the last full-blooded Moriori, died in 1933, although there are still a few mixed-race Moriori living in the Chatham Islands, as well as in New Zealand.
However, the people who devastated the Moriori were not British settlers. The Moriori were the victims of their distant Polynesian cousins, the Maori.
In 1835, seven years before the New Zealand government annexed the Chatham Islands, two tribes of Maori who had been driven from their lands in the Taranaki area of the North Island by rival tribes commandeered a ship in Wellington. They ordered the captain to take them to the Chathams, which some of their fellow tribesmen had visited while working as crew on a whaler. They had returned with tales of a "land of food" inhabited by a people without weapons who did not know how to fight.
900 Taranaki Maori made the voyage to the Chathams in two trips. Soon after their arrival they began to "walk the land", which perhaps can best be described as a traditional Maori variant of the terra nullius doctrine. The Maori tribes went from place to place, taking over the land and killing anyone who was seen as offering opposition.
In fact, the Moriori had decided to try to accommodate the invaders, rather than to resist, although this in itself would have been interpreted as an indication of cowardice by the Maori. Hundreds of Moriori were killed and most of the rest were enslaved, some to be kept as food stock for cannibal feasts.
The surviving Moriori were forbidden to marry or to reproduce, which suggests a deliberate attempt to exterminate them as a people. A few managed to escape to Pitt Island, 25 kilometres to the south-east of the main island, where they were able to eke out a miserable existence in the bush.
Without denying the acts of brutality that British settlers sometimes committed against indigenous people in New Zealand, Australia, and other parts of the South Pacific, there seems nothing to match the depredations that the Maori inflicted on the Moriori. But this is a matter of great sensitivity and evasion for the Maori and the Moriori, as well as for those "progressive" middle class Pakeha who want to reserve all the wickedness that occurred in New Zealand to their British forebears.
Two years ago, for instance, major controversy broke out over a display dealing with the Moriori at Te Papa, New Zealand's National Museum. The display made no mention of the Maori invasion, although no other event in the past two centuries has had even remotely comparable consequences for the Moriori.
Four New Zealand history professors protested about this extraordinary omission, and a senior museum official's suggestion that critics of the exhibit wanted "a view of history which has overtones of racism". The Museum's chairman responded that the Moriori, who were heavily involved in putting the display together, had decided "not to present themselves as victims".
This is an admirable sentiment, but it is certainly not applied consistently. Maui Solomon, a descendant of Tommy Solomon, and a lawyer who is the Moriori spokesman, had previously written that his people had suffered "shocking prejudice and maltreatment by historical misrepresentations by (mostly European) people".
So why did the Waitangi Tribunal recommend that it was the New Zealand government who should pay compensation to the Moriori?
A cynic might suggest that the government is likely to be far more generous than the Maori, who have never apologised to the Moriori for what occurred. Indeed, after the tribunal's decision, a spokeswoman for one of the Maori tribes responsible for their suffering said that while what had happened was "totally inappropriate now", it was "custom at that time" and therefore "appropriate".
The tribunal justified its recommendation by claiming it was feasible for the Crown to have intervened, particularly when elders, representing the 100 surviving Moriori, pleaded for help in 1862. The tribunal said that the failure to intervene until 1863, when slavery was formally ended in the Chathams, cost many lives and prejudiced later Moriori land claims.
In other words, people many generations removed from slavery should be compensated by contemporary taxpayers because nearly 150 years ago a government did not act quickly enough to free their ancestors, while the descendants of the actual slavers sit on the sidelines, waiting for their own compensation package.
It is an interesting principle. As the distinguished expatriate New Zealander Professor Kenneth Minogue recently observed, the Waitangi process "sometimes looks like a successful society trying to talk itself into a nervous breakdown".
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