From Noble Savage to Brave New Warrior?: Constructions of a Māori Tradition of Warfare

Abstract

FUELLING THE DEBATE ON VIOLENCE IN AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND'S Maori community, scientists have claimed that what has been dubbed the 'warrior' gene is dominant in Maori males.1 The study contends that the gene, associated with aggressive and antisocial behaviour in general, might contribute to explaining the over-representation of Maori in violence statistics.2 Although ostensibly one-sided and ignorant of the broader socioeconomic context, such assertions create the need to interrogate the biased image of Maori people as 'warriors' - by Pakeha as much as by Maori - and its import for Indigenous culture today. By way of examining instances of Maori warriordom across socio-historical and cultural categories, changing notions of a Maori tradition of warfare are explored, interrogating the ways in which the concept of the warrior is embraced, maintained, and re-asserted as an intrinsic feature of modern Indigeneity, a process which reverberates in contemporary Maori writing.Colonial or Other' GazesContemporary stereotypes about Maori men frequently reduce their image to an instance of physicality, prowess, and often brutality, manifesting the Maori warrior as a cliche which is a perpetuation of colonial 'Othering' discourses. Such constructions negligently ignore and silence Indigenous cultural complexity and dynamics while at the same time reinforcing colonial notions of the 'noble savage'. The tradition of warfare seems to have emerged during the fourteenth century, a period that sawthe creation of an outstanding art and architectural tradition around the construction of finely carved and decorated meetinghouses; the development of an advanced science of horticulture; the formulation of a highly esoteric religious system; and the development of a complex social organization based on tribalism and chieftainship.3This cultural dynamic generated complex Indigenous communities, for which warfare was appropriated as a salient aspect of tribal life:Warfare was an extension of tribalism [ . . . ] and was so institutionalized that it permeated all areas of Classic Maori life: in art, meetinghouse carving served a powerful warrior-ancestor cult; chieftainship provided an energetic leadership system; and religion contributed a combative priesthood and spiritual support. Every tribal man, woman, and child served the institution of warfare.4Colonial constructions of Maori warriordom that hark back to traditional practices manifest themselves in oral tradition, colonial accounts, and archaeological evidence remain wilfully silent about the cultural complexity of the Indigenous people at that time, de-contextualizing warriordom by means of reducing the concept to an image of 'uncivilized' savagery and cannibalism. Even before settlers invaded the country at the close of the eighteenth century, colonial images of the savage 'warrior' were perpetuated by explorers to the Pacific, whose encounters with the Indigenous people in some part resulted in lethal confrontations or at least open hostility, as in the following manuscript of a journal entry from James Cook's first Pacific voyages:When ever we [were]viseted by any number of them that had never heard or seen any thing of us before they [generally] came off in [their] largest Canoes [...]. In each Canoe were generaly an Old man, in some two or three these use'd always to dire[c]t the others were better Clothed and generaly carried a halbard or battle ax in their hands [...]. As soon as they came within a1* a stones throw of the Ship they would there lay and call out Haromai hare uta a pateo age that is come here, come a shore with us and we will kill you with our patoo patoo's and at the same time would shake them at us, at times they would dance the war dance, and other times they would [trade with and] talk to us and answer such questons as were put to them with all the Calmness emaginable and then again begin the war dance, shaking their paddles patoo patoo's [. …