Maori Socio-Political Organization In Pre-Colonial Period

Precolonial Maori thought elevated land and geographical features as divine, with an individual gaining identity and empowerment from their turangawaewae, literally ‘the place one puts their feet’. Maori creation myths and cosmological belief centre on the birth of man at the union of the ‘earth mother’ Papatuanuku and the ‘sky father’ Ranginui. Take insight from the Te Reo Maori word for land, whenua, which is the same word used for placenta, and sometimes for birth.

Above I recite toku mihi, the Maori traditional introduction, in which I recite my genealogical affiliations. Some idea of Maori sentiment towards land and identity, concepts which are roughly indistinguishable, can be gleaned from this common recital, performed prior to any public speaking even today. The recital proceeds in order first of geographic scale, followed by social detail, to locate my place in New Zealand. It is geography that defines an individual’s identity in Maori thought, taking precedence over even the social grouping one associates with. Early colonists understanding land to be “but a durable commodity, like any other which is bought or sold on the market” encountered in New Zealand a people holding spiritual ties to this “durable commodity”, and remarked with surprise that “One did not own land … One belonged to the land”.

Maori society was and remains to this day organised according to genealogical groupings. Today the structure holds no political weight, but simply identifies kinship ties, but such groupings were the polities of 19th century New Zealand. At the highest level an individual belongs to an iwi, a tribe, within which one would belong to a subtribe, called hapu, comprised of several whanau.

Whanau is familiar to Western social organisation as extended nuclear family, and in general would form the household unit in Maori daily life. Each level acknowledges leaders; leadership gaining precedence further up the hierarchy, that is, the chief of the hapu is subordinate to the chief of the iwi. The thirty iwi recognised in the North Island in 1845 averaged 2, 000 persons in number, however this figure conceals much variation in size and significance.

The Precolonial Maori understood rights to resources to be allocated on a functional basis, in contrast to the European geographical subdivision of land. An individual or family group would hold the right to utilise a resource, perhaps a geographical area, perhaps a feature of that geographical area, towards an end. A household would be recognised as a fisher of a certain body of water, cultivator of an area of land, and as a hunter of a nearby forest. Allocations could be so detailed as placing a particular tree under the dominion of a bird trapper. Such a relationship with a resource did not imply others were precluded from concurrently utilising the same resource towards their own ends. That same tree might simultaneously be recognised as the fruit-gathering resource of another, perhaps several, families, and wood for the house of another. Nor did a household’s relationship with one resource impose any restriction on their dealings with other resources, besides those implied by the convenience of having one’s things at proximity.

Critically, this disaggregation of ownership rights into multiple concurrent use rights did not allow a possessor to use the property at their unfettered liberty, in any desired way, but only as their right was understood in function and quantity. Individuals did not exert control over individual spaces, iwi did. Individual use rights were located within the physical territory controlled by the iwi. It was the iwi, like the European state, that enforced the use rights of individual economic units against encroachment from other tribe members, and that defended those use rights against attack from other iwi. Chiefs, more like European government officials than monarchs, did not command more property than the ordinary people within their jurisdiction, but they held greater than ordinary power to allocate rights to others. Continued use allowed rights to be inherited generation to generation, but with disuse comes expiration, after as little as a few years, whereupon the rights would revert back to the tribe for reallocation by the chief. The authority of the chief normally included the creation of property rights when the situation arose, but not the destruction of existing property rights. Chiefs enjoyed rights of their own, but these were defined no differently by those enjoyed by his dominion, in that he was to maintain it by his continued utilisation. “We are not like the King of England, ” wrote one chief in the 1830s, “We work to get food”.

The tribal unit’s relationship with its land therefore corresponded more closely to the European conception of sovereignty than of property ownership. An individual could no more alienate land outside the tribe than an English landowner could transfer his land to the sovereignty of France. The English struggled for several decades to understand the Maori system of property rights. “It was as difficult for us to enter into and comprehend the tribal and communistic rights of the Natives, as it was for the Natives to enter into and comprehend our system of individual titles”. Erroneous assumptions and misunderstandings were inevitable. Coming from a culture in which property rights were organized by geographic space, and observing Maori exercising use rights within the same zone of land, many colonizers concluded that the land was held by all in common. “The right of individual property has never existed in New Zealand, ” affirmed Edward Gibbon Wakefield, and as late as 1879 Rees would recall “a system of Communism prevailed … no native held to himself any portion in particular of the surrounding territory of the vicinity in which he lived”. Inquiring after the purchase of land, as was the primary interest of the colonisers, was bound to be a problematic exchange in a non-monetary economy where such a concept of “sale” in land had not been developed. Even apart from the question of whether the Maori understood a “sale” to be the same transaction as the colonisers understood themselves, suddenly confronted with offers to purchase land, Maori had to improvise rules governing the sale of land. The trader Montefiore explained to the House of Lords in 1838 that chiefs had the power to sell their tribes’ land without consulting tribe members. At the same hearing, a member of the Kawia tribe explained precisely the opposite, that he could sell any of “his” land without consulting the chief. Other members of Kawia were unable to explain what their kinsman meant by “his” land.

English perceptions of Maori property became crucial in the 1840s, when England assumed colonial authority over New Zealand, whereupon it became necessary for English government officials to decide whether and to what extent the Crown should recognize Maori ownership of land. Importantly, the English had come to realise that, while at any given moment the Maori were occupying only a small fraction of the country, the Maori nevertheless understood that they owned it all. “Every inch of land in New Zealand has its proprietor, ” Dieffenbach reported in 1843. The Crown could, as it had previously done in Australia, refuse to recognize any aboriginal property rights. Or, it could formally recognize Maori ownership of the whole of New Zealand, this solution the nearest formalization the Maori’s own attitude towards their rights. Alas, the English text of the Treaty of Waitangi, the document formally ceding sovereignty over New Zealand to England, was ambiguous on the solution. Ambiguity and voids in translation which have plagued the Treaty of Waitangi continue to affect New Zealand law making and mediation to this day. In apparent goodwill that might deceive one into thinking the following several decades of Pakeha-Maori relations would be conducted in good conscience, Article Two of the Treaty confirms to the Maori “the full exclusive and undisturbed possession of their Lands and Estates, Forests, Fisheries and other properties which they may collectively or individually possess. ”

The recognition of Maori as owners of New Zealand meant that in the absence of war the English - and only the English, as it is specified in Article Two of the Treaty that transactions in land could be made only with the Crown – could acquire land only by purchase. Having recognised the Maori as owners, in the Pakeha sense of ownership, of the land of New Zealand, Pakeha were now to undertake transactions to transfer that ownership to the Crown, and then onwards to colonial settlers. Given the disparity in concepts of individual land titles, until 1865 land was purchased from tribes as a whole rather than from Maori as individuals. The English were interested in acquiring geographic spaces, not individual use rights to particular resources, so they necessarily had to deal with the iwi as the only political unit with the authority to take action with respect to an entire zone of land.