Title: Making New Zealand vol 01 no 02: The Maori

Author: Centennial Branch, Department of Internal Affairs

Editor: Eric Hall McCormick

Publication details: Centennial Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, 1939, Wellington

Part of: The New Zealand Centennial Publications

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page 10

The Tribal Chief was Powerful But Public Opinion Ruled

In theory, Maori society was divided into three classes. There was a group of chiefs and other gentlemen of good birth who were the heads of the tribal group. Then there was a class of commoners. The lowest class was made up of slaves. There were three classes in theory. But in fact, just because all the people of the tribe were related by blood to each other, it was sometimes difficult to know where the gentleman class left off and the commoner class began. But there are words for each of these three classes in the Maori language, so we must suppose them to have existed as a social fiction if in no other way.

The chief was the first-born of a family of rank. Maori society laid great stress on primogeniture in the inheritance of power and position. A firstborn son was only passed over if he had shown himself definitely unworthy to lead his tribe inpage 11peace or war.

The basis of Maori society, as of every other society we know, was the family group. This consisted of a man and his wife and his children, married or unmarried. It was a larger family group than we are accustomed to, but it was a strongly unified group of blood relatives. Some of its strength came from the fact that its members addressed each other with kinship terms which stressed this unity. Thus in such a group one called the many men of his father's generation, 'father,' though he knew quite well who was his father. Similarly the men called all the children by the term for son or daughter, as the case might be. This again meant that everyone looked upon everyone else in the tribe as somehow or other related to him. And he would call upon these other people for help in the tasks of peace as well as in the duties of wartime—and help was never denied him.

What made Maori society a going concern was really the power of public opinion, the mana and influence of the chiefs and the working of certain beliefs and customs such as tapu and muru. Tapu was a sort of prohibition which told the Maori what he could and what he could not do. It was supported by supernatural power so that a person who broke a tapu was punished by sickness or death or else by the loss of the protection of the gods. Thus it was necessary to call in a priest to deal with these matters because he was the person in the tribe with the necessary powers to control supernatural forces.

Muru, on the other hand, was a sort of licensed plundering of other people's property. It was allowed if one of the group had incapacitated himself by accident, for instance, or broken the customs of marriage. In this sense, the individual was regarded only as a part of the group, and if his conduct had in any way upset the group, then it was lawful for the group to punish him by plundering his property. A Maori who knew that his faults or his evil-doings would be punished by muru, or by the supernaturals, or by the dislike and ridi-cule of his friends, was slow to do wrong. Although the Maori had no courts of law nor any policemen, he was a very social and custom-abiding person.