Flawed calculations tell a false story of indigenous Maori harmed by colonisation
New Zealand is no longer one people, but divided into two separate races, not united but ‘partners’. The full project of apartheid with separation of governments, rights, and laws has been set down the He Puapua report (as described in my book of that name). The control of media and public information is so complete that the project has been successfully hushed up, and most people remain unaware of the proposal for a dominant tribal way of life with many race-based centers of power (of hapu and iwi) scattered across the country to replace one unified nation.
Support for that division has been provided by serious distortions in stories of the past, a rewriting of history, and the production of misleading accounts from controlled research – together feeding feelings of grievance among Maori and of guilt among non-Maori.
One key in that power grab has been the capture of science: the period from the mid-1980s through until the mid-1990s witnessed the rapid acceptance of Maori science as an equal partner with what was to become specified and thereafter denigrated as “Western” science. The claim is that “Matauranga Maori as accepted by the traditional Maori science community is embedded in Maori science protocols and traditions. Within these cultural confines tohunga have defined scientific principles, processes and practices within a multiple of disciplines to increase Maori knowledge about the physical, biological, natural and social universe.”
But when tohunga were active Maori leaders held the opposite view. After years of discussions on marae the Maori Members of Parliament understood that the teachings and actions of tohunga were doing great harm, akin to witchcraft, and should be outlawed. The Tohunga Suppression Act in 1907 was an occasion of celebration for the Maori MPs who were united on this issue.
The suggestion of Maori science is absurd; the Maori were a Stone Age people, lacking not only metals but the wheel, literacy, and much else besides. But the acceptance of such claims by supposedly learned bodies such as universities and the Royal Society of New Zealand has been even more foolish. When I made an appeal to the audience during a 2012 talk in Nelson (on long-term challenges to civilisation, “The limits to growth, 40 years later”) to call on the Royal Society to face up to that and similar challenging problems, the response was laughter. Many of the audience were scientists from the Cawthron Institute who looked upon the Royal Society with outright derision, knowing that the leadership had been captured and no longer spoke for independent, questioning, science.
The entire process of division demands a complete lack of appreciation of science, how it arose, of basic scientific principles, and the subsequent centuries of success. Science requires a dependence on fact, a refusal to follow the precepts, or dogma, of any ancient authority or to allow control by a political or religious body, be it matauranga Maori as defined by today’s tohunga or directives from the Pope in Rome backed by the force of the Inquisition, long rejected. That need for freedom must be recognised and demanded.
The meaning and value of science has been forgotten in New Zealand. Research, and the subsequent public information and education, has been required to conform to uncertain ancient doctrines; science has become directed towards a pre-determined narrative and made a weapon for a propaganda machine, giving power and prestige to a tribal elite of chiefs under rangatiratanga.
The result is control of the social sciences. Like many others carrying out social or historical analysis, I have experienced the pressure to either conform or to lose payments and opportunities for employment.
In 2000 I noted that the Maori population showed positive signs of recovery during the nineteenth century, moving to growth by the end of the century even while they continued selling land. This was not acceptable to the funding agency, the Crown Forestry Rental Trust, who insisted that I must reference the conclusion of others that colonisation had harmed Maori. I was forced to rewrite the report before I was paid. My changes introduced confusion into a clear analysis, which kept them happy.
A similar experience around that time further showed that nonsense is more acceptable than clarity. A proposal for working with gangs (for the Maori Council and Te Puni Kokiri) was turned down by a sympathetic official who had to follow government policy and refuse any interaction with gangs. He sent off the proposal for a rewrite by someone expert in such legalistic subterfuge and the result made no sense – but was accepted as confusion had destroyed the unacceptable proposal.
Steadily employment opportunities dried up, which had the benefit that I no longer had to face the moral dilemma of presenting muddle rather than clear analysis (I was not prepared to include any untruth). To keep active, I continued an analysis on the Maori nineteenth century population but a paper was turned down by the NZ Population Review since the conclusion had been that colonisation had a beneficial impact (they said so in their referee’s report).
Around the same time I had become aware of the rewriting of history and of the Treaty of Waitangi. Fascination with the question of what had happened led to a reading of history as set down at the time, and the writing of a series of books on New Zealand history. The last is last year’s “Who really broke the Treaty?”, showing what you find when you dare to challenge a proscribed belief, including the following comment which denies the validity of Treaty settlements.
“The Treaty gave the right to govern, and British law prevailed thereafter. Should the new authority make a judgement, and reach a decision, that someone did not like – or which some now disagree with – was not to break the Treaty, which simply gave the right to govern, without any promise of perfect adherence to any one point of view. The Treaty involved simply setting up a system and a structure by which decisions and judgements would be made by the proper authorities – no longer by chiefly might and tribal warfare.”
My approach has been to ask questions, search for information and find answers (a conscious scientific approach), refusing to place any value on today’s politically driven ‘oral history’. Thus, like many other contributors to this NZCPR website, I sit outside the establishment.
My experience was common; I have met several who were keeping their heads down and not mentioning unpopular facts, others who had changed careers or focussed their work on safe topics. The capture of many institutions and of information to education, public and decision-makers has been successful.
Out of the confusion comes a firmly stated account of settlement and population, as if the estimates and the conclusions are firmly established, while in fact the basis is a set of “Numbers from Nearly Nowhere”. Two important examples of the subsequent false narrative have been described in recent research papers published by NZCPR, “Maori nineteenth century population: model estimates” and “Pre-contact Maori population and date of first arrival”.
The first paper deals with a claim of harm to Maori in the first decades following the Treaty, supposedly demonstrated by an 1840 population estimate, together with population estimates for 1769 and 1800 which assume that population loss during the murderous tribal musket wars was insignificant. The picture is of harm done by colonisation to a successful culture.
In a reasoned analysis, conclusions will be based on facts, with understanding built up through a logical process, providing a clear explanation, easy to follow. A difficulty arises when such a logical analysis is absent; all that remains is confusion and unfounded assertions. That is the situation here and positively stated claims, held to be authoritative, appear without any such derivation.
The reason given by demographer Ian Pool for an assumption of a minimal impact of the tribal wars was that they would all die sometime. This is so bizarre that I could only quote his words, not being able to make any sense of his claim. Pool also made the false assertion that there is little sound evidence of widespread infanticide, whereas there have been many accounts of the practice. But both are now widely accepted.
I have been unable to establish the derivation of key estimates, such as the reported populations in 1769, 1800 and 1840. Yet these have been used to present a picture of a successful society with a minimal impact of the extensive tribal wars and of a sudden and extraordinary population decline – of 30% or 40% (a graph copied from a published paper has a drop of 42% in just ten years) – as a consequence of colonisation. This sudden population collapse is thought to be a result of introduced diseases – which had been present since the first contact of Maori with Europeans and would not appear suddenly at that time. There was no record of any such epidemic, which would surely have been noticed; after all, as Darwin pointed out, 10% is an extraordinarily severe mortality from epidemics with man. Despite the census reports of considerable shortfalls of the breeding population (girls and women, the result of female infanticide) which reduced over the decades after 1840, the inevitable impact of such a demographic deficit is ignored, as is the steady recovery in the fifty years following the Treaty.
That picture is corrected with an alternative account, including a simple model based on census data and a comprehensive count of war casualties (while there is no summary account of any significant outbreaks of disease following 1840, historian James Rutherford provided a list of casualties in the 1800-1840 tribal wars; this was no guesswork).
The second paper corrects the insistence that Maori were the first settlers, which is the basis of the claim that they are the indigenous people and thus qualify for the international support promised by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP), with its insistence on separate rights and governance, along with recovery of ancestral lands, for all who can claim indigenous identity (all of which, as pointed out by a definition of racism in that report, are unacceptable under the United Nations Charter).
That assertion of first comers around 1250-1350 has been strongly influenced by an insistence that the only acceptable evidence is that with two or more carbon dates. This is an impossibly high barrier given that conditions in New Zealand fail to preserve human remains, and that the custom was to hide any bones well away from possible discovery.
In fact, there is considerable evidence of prior settlement. Simple calculations show that the numbers arriving and the following slow population growth among such primitive settlers make that picture impossible. Skeletal information then tells of population decline, not growth, in much of the time following the thirteenth century, leading to the conclusion that New Zealand was probably first settled before 750 AD.
The only information source, with multiple carbon dating, accepted as trustworthy by those claiming that Maori were the first settlers proves the very opposite.
This conclusion is supported by oral history collected during the first century of European settlement, and by a wealth of information from archaeology including evidence (such as artifacts) of the pre-Maori settlers.
A great deal of valuable scholarship is swept aside by the current account; we are all the poorer, being directed away from an appreciation of the peoples who have settled these lands – an enforced ignorance that includes the lives and debates of intelligent Maori leaders, which were part of the remarkable cultural transformation of the 1830s and 1840s when many living in a tribal, Stone Age culture recognised the benefits of joining developed civilisation with a system of law replacing the might of warrior chiefs.
They were free to think for themselves. New Zealanders today must recover that same right, and no longer accept distorted accounts of the past.