Europeans began constructing permanent settlements, and in 1840 the British government drafted the Treaty of Waitangi, which was signed by many Maori chiefs. The introduction of firearms and European diseases had a profound and negative effect on the Maori. The Maori referred to the Europeans as Pakeha, which is a term today which means “Non-Maori” more generally. The first Europeans sighted New Zealand in 1642, but it wasn't until the 18th Century that regular contact between Europeans and the Maori began.
#CIVILIZATION 6 CULTURAL VICTORY FULL#
For men, these cover the full face, and for women these are done on the lips and chin. The distinctive Maori facial markings are called tā moko, and are unique to the person. The Maori perfected the haka, which is an energetic chant with strong, ritualized gestures and facial expressions, used to represent strength, courage, prowess, and respect. Each hapu kept its own oral heritage alive, pointing back to the canoe-colonists from which they arrived at the island. The Maori created beautiful objects from pounamu greenstone and the feathers of the islands' birds. Most groups, or hapu, were led by chieftains, who were imbued with mana-prestige and power-and who could repay friends with kindness and enemies with proportioned revenge. Whakapapa has always been an important social system of the Maori, richly complex and laden with important cultural meaning.įor the next three hundred years or so, the Polynesian heritage of the Maori was shaped by the land they settled.
Indeed, one of the most important aspects of Maori culture is the recitation of lineage, whakapapa, by which the speaker situates themselves in their history, indeed back to the mythological past. They say the first settlements were by Kupe and Toitehuatahi. The Maori's own account of their arrival says they are descended from the people of Hawaiki, and that the hero Maui dragged the islands of New Zealand up from the depths with his fishhook. The oldest known Maori sites are near Te Pokohiwi (Wairau Bar) on the South Island, where the Wairau River dumps into the strait between New Zealand's two main islands.
The seas around the island teemed with life. There were few land mammals and a few ancient genera of reptiles. It was a land of innumerable species of birds, including immense and flightless giants, terrifyingly large raptors, and shy bush dwellers. They would have come ashore to a place where human beings had never settled, which had torn away from the mainland 100 million years previously, which had a unique and precious biome formed by ages of geological separation. The group would have used the sophisticated, traditional Polynesian navigational techniques to find this land, inferring its existence from cues and clues reflected in the natural world. Sometime during the 13th Century, people in canoes set off from somewhere in the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific and headed south and west, until they arrived at the islands we call New Zealand, and which they called Aotearoa-"the land of the long white cloud".
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