The Moriori Genocide

— and nothing in humanity’s collective memory or conscious — belies the suffering that took place hundreds of years ago.

  "The Moriori are the indigenous people of the Chatham Islands, and Polynesian cousins to the Māori of New Zealand, which is 500 miles to the west of the Chatham archipelago. The Moriori lived by 'Nunuku's code,' a nonviolent and passive resistance ethos."

"These three Moriori men (standing) are wearing a mix of traditional and European clothing. They carry defensive staffs and wear flax mats around the waist and shoulders, feathers on the front of the head, and albatross tufts in their beards"

But who has heard the story of the Chatham archipelago, or it’s indigenous people, the Moriori? The story of these people is hard to tell — they were never a populous group, and today their are just a few hundred Moriori left. They name “Moriori” bears a striking resemblance to the more commonly known (and somewhat fashionable) Māori, the indigenous polynesian people of New Zealand who do in fact share a heritage with the Moriori, and who played an essential part in their history.

 It was said that the Māori of New Zealand were in search of new resources and territories to conquer. It was also said that “Europeans introduced the Māori people to ‘modern’ weapons.” The Māori, and specifically the Taranaki tribe from the South Island, must have seen an easy target in the pacifist Moriori. Some 900 Taranaki invaded in November 1835, when the Moriori population was around 2,000 people. The Māori abandoned the Chatham Island by the 1870s.

 As the Māori landed on the beaches of Chatham, they found and killed a 12 year old girl, flayed her and displayed her flesh on posts. Such brutal acts of war are a tactic employed by fierce warriors to strike fear in their enemies. The Māori were after all, ferocious warriors, complete with a ritualistic dance meant to terrify everyone in their path.

“Parties of warriors armed with muskets, clubs and tomahawks, led by their chiefs, walked through Moriori tribal territories and settlements without warning, permission or greeting. If the districts were wanted by the invaders, they curtly informed the inhabitants that their land had been taken and the Moriori living there were now vassals.”

 As warriors, the Māori had no compunction about invasion and death.

But the Moriori genocide was not warfare. It was a peaceful people who refused, even as they were being slaughtered, to fight. Not condoning the atrocities of war, or playing with the semantics of the “conduct, rules, or etiquette of warfare," but if two sides are doing battle, there is some moral sense that the fight was “fair.”

 In realizing that a Māori tribe committed a terrible atrocity, is it then prudent to disavow the entire culture? Should university students in New Zealand take up protest against all Māori traditions? Should fans at a rugby match (or attendees at wedding and funerals) turn their backs during the Haka?

 Howard Zinn said it best. "My point, is not to grieve for the victims, and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger cast into the past deplete our moral energy for the present. And the lines are not always clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also the victim. In the short run … the victims themselves, desperate and tainted with a culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims."

 What do we do now? How do we move forward? We, as a species must simply acknowledge what happen. We can be honest about it. We can speak of it with no moral ambiguity — it was not the consequence of warfare or a part of a larger tradition. It was murder and brutality. It was extermination.

 We cannot mourn for the the victims, as Zinn said, but we can acknowledge what happen to them, and we can admit, that in our modern world, we find such an act disgusting. And this simple concession, this acceptance is part of something larger, powerfully relevant, and useful to us as a species now — it speaks to our moral standards, our sense of truth, and our empathy.