The British began to expand their settlements onto land that the Maori did not believe they had sold to the British (sounds like the American Indian experience). Just our of the Paihia harbor, the treaty site is around that flagpole in the middle right of this picture.īut there were soon disagreements about what the words of each document meant. The site near Paihia where those documents (in Maori and English) were signed hosts the annual ceremonies. With the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, the Maori were one of the few indigenous people to agree to become citizens of the British crown in exchange for allowing the British to be the only Europeans to purchase their land. Before European contact, most Maori were nomadic but they always returned to their canoe landing site. Each Maori family traces its origins to the site where the double hulled ocean canoe of their ancestors landed in NZ (somewhere between 1,200 and 800 years ago). In Rotorua, the Maori proudly pointed out that while Europeans still believed the world was flat, their ancestors were navigating by the stars and populating the south pacific. We just had trouble remembering that Z is pronounced ZED.
My Cherokee ancestors called the NC mountains the Land of the Blue Mist while my European ancestors named those same mountains the Blue Ridge. The Maori call it Aotearoa, which literally means Land of the Long White Cloud. “N Zed” is how the 70% of the population that identify as European refer to their country (just as we say the US). Pictures are a poor substitute since they do not capture the 360 degree view, the smell of the bush and wind, or the dampness in the clouds. NZ played the part brilliantly and the movies brought the natural beauty of NZ to the attention of the rest of the world.
It’s landscape can be starkly beautiful, which is why Native son, Peter Jackson, cast it as Middle Earth for the Lord of the Rings movies. New Zealand is young (and still growing with every earthquake). The aboriginal people have been there for over 30,000 years. We began our journey in Australia, the oldest subcontinent on Earth, so distant from evolution elsewhere that its only native non-human mammals are marsupials.