Maori Oral Tradition

He Korero no te Ao Tawhito

Jane McRae

• Publisher: Auckland University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781775589082
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Maori oral tradition is the rich, poetic record of the past handed down by voice over generations through whakapapa, whakatauki, korero and waiata. In genealogies and sayings, histories, stories and songs, Maori tell of ‘te ao tawhito' or the old world: the gods, the migration of the Polynesian ancestors from Hawaiki and life here in Aotearoa. A voice from the past, today this remarkable record underpins the speeches, songs and prayers performed on marae and the teaching of tribal genealogies and histories. Indeed, the oral tradition underpins Maori culture itself. This book introduces readers to the distinctive oral style and language of the traditional compositions, acknowledges the skills of the composers of old and explores the meaning of their striking imagery and figurative language. And it shows how nga korero tuku iho – the inherited words – can be a deep well of knowledge about the way of life, wisdom and thinking of the Maori ancestors.

1.

Māori Oral Tradition

Kōrero Tuku Iho

The oral tradition comprises what Māori in te ao tawhito (the old world) composed, remembered, told and retold over generations – and their descendants, from the nineteenth century, wrote down. The genealogies, sayings, prose and narratives, and songs and chants, which they passed on verbally, portrayed their life and created a substantial, many-stranded, body of knowledge.

The tradition is historical in describing the storied Polynesian homeland of Hawaiki, the canoe voyages to and arrival in Aotearoa around 1300, the establishment of hapū or kin groups and life in their territories;¹ as well as some of the interaction Māori had with Europeans in the nineteenth century. It is also a social record that captures family and village life, daily occupations, and customary practices and rituals. And it has a political aspect in chronicling the ascendancy and decline of chiefs and leaders and the flourishing and demise of tribes. There is also a biographical strand in the recording of the achievements of singular individuals and logging of kin relationships in genealogies, and a personal, or autobiographical, one in the rendering in songs of feelings and experiences. The oral texts also make up a linguistic history of usage and dialect; and they are ‘literary’ in the sense that many are finely composed.²

Taken together in its many forms or genres, the oral tradition offers a remarkable representation of the Māori world. As record of past lives, collective wisdom, lore and practical instruction, it is enormously valuable historically. To borrow Umberto Eco’s words, it is the knowledge of the past that forms ‘the basis of every civilisation’, the sum of experience and learning acquired over generations.³ As scholars have shown, and examples in this book attest, by studying the oral tradition a lot can be learned about how Māori lived in ancestral times and what they thought and felt.⁴ But to Māori in those eras their oral traditions were pragmatically and emotionally important: telling their histories, preserving knowledge, and giving explanation, justification and reason for who they were and what they did.⁵

The continued vitality of this inherited knowledge, which survived the depredations of colonisation and influence of European ways of life and thought, and took in changes over time, testifies to its long-lasting influence on and inestimable value to Māori. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the nineteenth century they took up a new means – writing – of communicating and retaining ngā kōrero tuku iho a ngā tūpuna or the oral traditions handed down by their forebears.

The Origins of a Literature

From the 1830s Māori were making good use of the orthography for their language, which missionaries had devised with their help.⁶ The written form of their oral traditions, evident in manuscripts in public libraries and private hands, was prompted by Europeans (or Pākehā as they came to be known) who, from the 1840s, asked Māori to write down their traditions or recorded them as they dictated. The prolific collector Sir George Grey (Governor of New Zealand from 1845 to 1853 and Premier from 1877 to 1879) described one way this was done: ‘In many cases I told them exactly what I wanted, supplied them with the requisite writing materials, – and some months afterwards received a valuable manuscript which had been dictated to an educated native.’⁷ Major extant manuscript collections include those of Grey, the Reverend Richard Taylor, Edward Shortland and John White, who all drew from that writing for their nineteenth-century published works on the society and traditions.⁸ Acquaintances – the scholarly and the interested – wrote out for them genealogies, sayings, histories, stories and songs, and explanation of custom. Most, if not all, were men;⁹ many were chiefs and tribal leaders engaged with Pākehā over government and political issues; and some had close contact with missionaries and converted to Christianity – which can be reflected in the content of their writing and the biblical names they assumed. It is not surprising, therefore, that they used writing, their own or a scribe’s, to good purpose. But it was not only the chiefly or well known who wrote out or recited traditions for interested Pākehā.¹⁰

In the 1850s, or maybe even earlier, Māori were writing down their traditions for their own purposes. No doubt pleasure in the newly acquired art of recording prompted some to that. As the nineteenth century advanced, however, they recognised the changes to and potential loss of their habits of memorisation, oral delivery and transmission and so took the initiative to preserve their traditions in writing. In some cases this was the work of a tribal collective or family. An example is the voluminous manuscript legacy of one Ngāti Kahungunu scribe, Hoani Te Whatahoro Jury who, from the late 1850s to 1890s, wrote at the dictation of Wairarapa elders such as Nēpia Pōhūhū, Paratene Te Okawhare and Moihi Te Mātorohanga. Some of their work, which is representative of the oral tradition in its mix of tribal history, explanation of esoteria and customs, and record of genealogies and songs, has been published in S. Percy Smith’s The Lore of the Whare-wānanga and Agathe Thornton’s The Birth of the Universe.¹¹ As speakers or clerks, Māori also contributed to another store of manuscripts. From 1865, minutes of the Native Land Court and its committees recorded (some in English and some in Māori) the oral histories that tribal members recited when they made claim to an official title to their lands; individuals attending the courts also kept their own minutes.

Many Māori, however, among them some whose manuscripts are cited in the chapters that follow, wrote down their teachings so they would be known and remembered. Such were the intentions of two Ngāti Porou recorders around the 1890s.¹² One wrote at the start of his manuscript:

He pukapuka whakapapa tīpuna tēnei me tētahi atu mahara a te tangata, tērā e tuhia ki tēnei pukapuka hai whakamahara ki ngā mea e kūare ana.

This a book of genealogies of the ancestors and other recollections by the people, which have been written in this book to inform those who are ignorant of them.

The other concluded, after writing about the early ancestor-explorer Kupe:

Ko te mutunga tēnei o te whakahaerenga o ngā kōrero o tēnei tangata, a Kupe, me ana mahi katoa. Kia mārama ai te titiro a ngā kaikōrero i ngā pūtake kōrero, kua oti nei te tuhi ki roto ki tēnei pukapuka, kia kaha anō hoki koe ki te pupuri i roto i tōu ngākau.

This is the end of relating the accounts about this man, Kupe, and all his activities. To inform readers looking into the ancestral accounts,¹³ these have been written in this book, and also to encourage you to keep them in your mind.

Here in the final phrase there is a subtle duality in meaning, in ‘ngākau’ that can also mean ‘heart’; the act of memorising and the traditions themselves were serious and deeply felt matters.

When, in 1853, Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikāheke of the Ngāti Rangiwewehi tribal group of Te Arawa, wrote about the ‘retention and transmission’ of Māori knowledge for Sir George Grey, he used the same phrasing. Reflecting on the more recent need by their own peoples of writing to preserve knowledge of the past, he contrasted that with his ancestors’ ability to preserve it over generations ‘by heart’:

Ko te rau o te iwi, ko te rau o te motu, tangata Māori Pākehā rānei, kāore i mōhio ai ki te pupuri i ngā kōrero a ngā tūpuna o mua; tōna mōhiotanga peā he mea tuhituhi ki ngā papa pukapuka. Kei Hawaiki, kei Aotea[roa] nei, he mea tuhituhi ki te papa angaanga, o roto o te hinengaro, o te ngākau . . . . Ko te tangata Māori, mau tonu ngā kupu te pupuri i te ngākau, mate atu he whakatupuranga, mau tonu iho.¹⁴

Most people, most in the land, whether Māori or Pākehā people, did not know how to retain the traditions from the ancestors of old; their knowledge was of course written on the pages of books. In Hawaiki [and] here in Aotea[roa], it was etched on the head [lit. ‘skull’], within the mind [and] the heart . . . . The Māori people kept the words by heart forever; when one generation passed on, they were kept forever [by the next].

This engagement of heart and mind was echoed by Moihi Te Mātorohanga of Ngāti Kahungunu, who said expressively (as S. Percy Smith translated in like vein) of the pupils in a whare wānanga or school dedicated to higher learning:

Heoi ma ratou he whakarongo, he tamaua take ki te Pu ki te Weu, ki te koronga o te hinengaro i roto i o ratou ngakau.

Their business was to listen, and to firmly fix in their hearts, in their very roots and origins, all they are taught, with also the strong desire to retain it.¹⁵

Depth of feeling, respect for and even awe of some traditions gave Māori pause for thought about the appropriateness of writing to pass on their ancestors’ treasured words and wisdom. Some were apprehensive that written texts of esoteria regarded as tapu or sacred,¹⁶ and usually the preserve of select individuals, could be made public; and others that such lore would be misunderstood, or misused and become harmful.¹⁷ Opinion about the new media of pen and print varied greatly from the earliest use of writing. But the historical evidence is that many were eager to use literacy to preserve and communicate their oral heritage.

Nineteenth-century Māori also ventured into print with their traditions. Some assisted Pākehā, such as Grey and White, with their books; others sent material for publication in Māori-language newspapers of the 1840s to 1930s, and, from 1892, to the Journal of the Polynesian Society. By the twentieth century, Māori were compiling their own books, in their own language or English, of and about their traditions.¹⁸ Perhaps over that time many thought like Rēweti Kōhere of Ngāti Porou who, early in the twentieth century, spoke of one advantage of books as bringing the ancestors to life, adding with approval the statement, ‘Although they have died they still speak’ (‘Koia nei tētahi pai o te pukapuka hei whakaora mai i te hunga kua mate, e tika ai te kōrero, “Ahakoa mate e kōrero ana anō.”’). And his kinsman Āpirana Ngata regarded publication as a means beyond memory and manuscript to preserve ‘the heirlooms and treasures’ of the culture.¹⁹

The incorporation of manuscript writings in a published literature was a great step towards preserving the oral tradition, and provided an invaluable corpus for students. The literature, however, should be read with a thought to its time. Certainly in the nineteenth century, collectors altered texts when preparing them for publication. For example, accounts from different tribes were merged to create a singular Māori version, the order of events was changed in a narrative, or references to European or Christian thinking were excised to give the impression of an unadulterated tradition.²⁰ And sensibilities, exemplified in Taylor’s comment about a particular myth that ‘a great deal . . . will not bear repeating’,²¹ led some to delete, modify or fail to translate sexual or other matters that they found offensive. There is inevitably some change to a manuscript when it is published; every retelling or restatement (oral, written or printed – even facsimile reproduction) comes with an implicit commentary, with the preoccupations of the editor and day. The published literature is, therefore, a step further away from the oral tradition of the old world; the manuscripts are the source closest to it and a primary means of discovering what that world was like.²²

Invaluable as the manuscripts are, it pays to be circumspect about them. For example, they raise questions as to how accurate an impression of the traditions and past they give. One has to take into account the possibilities of errors made in hearing and transcribing or misunderstandings about meaning between Māori and Pākehā, and be open to new interpretations and information about them that arise over time. It is impossible to know too if Māori in the nineteenth century wrote down (or recounted) their traditions exactly as they had known them. For they had already been influenced not only by the act of writing and other literature but also by the habits and thinking of the newly arrived people; the practices of orality and literacy had begun to overlap. However, as Bruce Biggs acknowledged, these writers recorded ‘their own culture from first-hand knowledge . . . or the memories of their elders’.²³ It is also reasonable to suppose that what they wrote was very close to what they knew and had retained, for three reasons.

First, there is notable consistency in the content of the manuscripts from the 1850s to the early twentieth century and across different tribes. Māori cannot all have written similarly by chance.

Second, Māori oral tradition (like others) has a distinct compositional style. As a result it is often obvious when a writer strays from that style and manifests the effects of writing or new knowledge. In an otherwise conventional narrative there may be, for instance, an aside to explain a custom to an outsider or an expression – a date or measurement – that had no traditional equivalent in Māori. A representative style, patterned structure and more or less standard content lend support to the reliability of the written transmission of the oral tradition. What cannot be known, however, is whether writers or tellers omitted or altered parts for reasons such as a failure to recall them, concern at divulging personal or sacred material, or consideration that some content might shock the modest missionary, collector or reader. But perhaps that is not of real concern. For what Māori did write down gives great insight into what was composed and preserved in the oral society and a captivating view of how life was lived in the past.

Third, it seems reasonable to suppose that Māori in the nineteenth century, with their great respect for the traditions and their keenness to pass them on to the next generations, would have chosen to record them carefully and accurately – and selectively – for their readers.²⁴

But to step away from the written page, to go back in time and get a sense of the tradition in its original context, it is useful first to pict...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Māori Oral Tradition Kōrero Tuku Iho
• Chapter 2. Genealogies and Lists Whakapapa
• Chapter 3. Proverbs and Historical Sayings Whakataukī
• Chapter 4. Narratives and Prose Kōrero
• Chapeter 5. Songs and Chants Waiata
• Conclusion
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index