On Thursday after bringing a motion to call for urgent steps towards a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters made a demonstrably incorrect claim in the House: that the last Moriori died decades ago.
“Some of us might remember who they were because the last one died – and I happen to be privileged to have gone to the home in which he died. But the last few Moriori died in 1936,” Peters said.
It is a claim Maui Solomon has been fighting against for the past 40 years. Solomon, who is the grandson of Tommy Solomon, one of the last so-called full-blooded Moriori, was living and breathing in Rēkohu (Chatham Islands) about 800km east from Wellington as the claim was made.
Hearing the deputy prime minister repeat the “myth” that there are no more Moriroi people was disappointing, he said, as someone who has made it his life’s work to give Moriori a voice. But he has been hearing it since he was a teenager.
“I have been spending 40 years of my life battling to have the truth told about Moriori,” he said.
It was also at-odds with the November 2021 settlement package between Moriori and the Crown, which included a Crown apology for historical breaches of Te Tiriti o Waitangi for matters such as the Crown’s failure to act to end the enslavement of Moriori, the failure to protect Moriori from becoming virtually landless, and the Crown’s contribution to the stigmatisation of Moriori as a racially inferior people who became extinct.
Peters’ words had extra weight against Moriori who were seeking to recover their identity and the stigma around the idea Moriori were a racially inferior people who became extinct as a result, Solomon said. He was the chief negotiator over the Bill.
They also fed into a lack of action over decades towards the marginalisation of Moriori people in society, history and even archaeology.
“It is time to move on from this narrative,” he said.
Rēkohu has a dark history. Moriori karāpuna (ancestors) arrived in on the island, Rangihaute, and other nearby islands sometime between 1000 and 1400 Common Era, according to the Moriori Claims Settlement Bill.
In 1835, two iwi driven out of Taranaki by the New Zealand Land Wars sailed to the islands on British ships and invaded. Moriori made a conscious decision not to retaliate with violence, and about 300 Moriori were slaughtered while hundreds more were enslaved and later died. Some were killed by their captors and others died of ‘kongenge’ despair.
According to Moriori records, 1561 Moriori died between 1835 and 1863 when they were released from slavery, while many more succumbed to diseases introduced by Europeans and in 1862 only 101 remained.
Rēkohu and the surrounding islands were annexed to New Zealand in 1842 as the Chatham Islands, but the Crown took no action before the late 1850s to alleviate the conditions of Moriori enslavement, and by 1870 Moriori were left landless after the Native Land Court awarded more than 97% of the land to the recently arrived Māori and less than three per cent to Moriori.
In the early 20th century, prominent ethnographers portrayed Moriori as an extinct group of people who were inferior to Māori. The Crown contributed to the dissemination of this myth through the publication of the School Journal in 1916 and 1946.
Moriori descendants have been working to rebuild their identity and culture.