Māori Oral Tradition He Kōrero nō te Ao Tawhito Jane McRae First published 2017 Auckland University Press University of Auckland Private Bag 92019 Auckland 1142 New Zealand www.press.auckland.ac.nz © Jane McRae, 2017 ISBN 978 1 86940 861 9 eISBN 978 177558 907 5 Publication is assisted by A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand This book is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior permission of the publisher. The moral rights of the author have been asserted. Book design by Katrina Duncan Cover design by Johnson Witehira The tiki or human figures on the cover are based on those of the Tairuku Pōtaka pātaka (storehouse), one of the oldest and most significant carved Māori structures. In this design, the original taowaru or spear element is redrawn as a flute that binds the figures together through the waha (mouth), symbolising the passing on of knowledge orally and alluding to the music of waiata (songs). And the pattern, in the connecting, vertical arrangement of the figures, speaks of both kōrero (oral traditions handed down) and the descent lines of whakapapa (genealogies). Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Māori Oral Tradition / Kōrero Tuku Iho 11 Chapter 2. Genealogies and Lists / Whakapapa 42 Chapter 3. Proverbs and Historical Sayings / Whakataukī 79 Chapter 4. Narratives and Prose / Kōrero 115 Chapter 5. Songs and Chants / Waiata 152 Conclusion 196 Abbreviations 203 Notes 204 Bibliography 232 Index 245 Acknowledgements My first acknowledgement is of my lecturers in the Māori Studies Department of the University of Auckland. I am particularly indebted to Bruce Biggs and Pat Hohepa who, in postgraduate courses, taught us about the nature of the language and the cultural riches in the oral tradition and introduced us to its nineteenth-century record in manuscripts. I also remember gratefully fellow students and colleagues of Māori Studies, as well as students in my classes on the oral literature, who over many years have contributed to my understanding and appreciation of the traditional texts. In the 1980s, when studying the language, I worked from time to time at the Department of Māori Affairs in Whāngārei locating records of the tribal traditions of Te Tai Tokerau. In discussing manuscripts with tribal elders and attending meetings on marae, I came to realise that the knowledge captured in the old written record has an enduring relevancy to Māori and has always had an essential part in their oral arts. Those were unforgettable experiences, which have remained with me in my study of the oral litera- ture, and I wish to pay tribute to all the people who at that time shared with me their views and learning. During the research and writing for this book, I was fortunate to have material and scholarly assistance from the Te Ao Tawhito Research Project, which was funded by a Marsden Grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand. I wish to thank Anne Salmond, who led the project, for prompt- ing the manuscripts’ research, discussion about traditions and perceptive remarks on my chapters in progress. In the early stage of the project I had the benefit of Jeny Curnow’s wise thinking about the proposed topic. And I have an especial debt of gratitude to Robert Pouwhare, who shared the reading of many manuscripts, reflected with me on difficulties of meaning and translation, talked over the first draft of the book and gave me advice and encouragement. vii mĀori oral tradition The goodwill and interest of many people helped me along the way with observations and suggestions that were informative and useful. And I had the advantage of other colleagues who generously read and commented on my work. For that task, and for their questions, corrections, insights and support, I am very grateful to Gail Dallimore, Ngapare Hopa, Hēni Jacob, Joan Metge, and Christine Tremewan. In the manuscripts’ research, I received, as always, informed and consid- erate assistance from librarians at the Auckland City Libraries’ Sir George Grey Special Collections, the Auckland Museum Library, Alexander Turnbull Library, and Hocken Library. I am grateful for permission to include in the book quotations from manuscripts in their collections. Those invaluable documents of the tradition have a significant part in this study. The book represents my understanding of the character and style of the oral tradition. It is just one view, with all its limitations, written in the spirit of the enquiry and sharing of knowledge and ideas alluded to in the whakataukī: ‘Kōrerotia i runga i te marae, kia whitia e te rā, kia pūhia e te hau’ (Speak of it on the marae, in the open, that it may be shone on by the sun and blown about by the wind). I also wrote in acknowledgement and admiration of the writers and composers of that literary legacy, recalling with gratitude Māori and Pākehā who at different times have explored it with me, and out of a great respect for the oral tradition and its vital importance to Māori and value to us all. For the book in the hand, I thank Auckland University Press: Sam Elworthy for raising and supporting the idea of it, and all who worked on the production, with thanks in particular to Ginny Sullivan for copyedit- ing and the index, Katrina Duncan for design of the book, and Johnson Witehira for the cover. Heoi anō ko te mihi. E kui mā, e kara mā, e ōku hoamahi, koutou kua whetūrangitia, koutou anō ngā kanohi ora, tēnei te maioha, te mihi o te ngākau, te whakawhetai hoki ki a koutou. Tēnā koutou katoa. viii Introduction Māori oral tradition is the richly informative, poetic record of ngā kōrero tuku iho or the words that were remembered and handed down by voice over generations. The genres of whakapapa, whakataukī, kōrero and waiata (genealogies, sayings, narratives and prose, songs and chants), which make up the tradition, describe and picture the ancient and historical worlds: the gods, the Polynesian ancestors, their migration from the homeland of Hawaiki and the life of their Māori descendants in Aotearoa. The oral tradi- tion is also a repository of religious and philosophical thinking, customary practice and personal experience. It is long-standing, from te ao tawhito, the old world and oral society, in which there was no writing. But it is also contemporary. Today, in the twenty-first century, when Māori gather on their tribal marae (ceremonial meeting-grounds), the oral legacy can be heard in speeches, songs and prayers, and in the performative, metaphorical and esoteric character of their language. If a ceremony is held in an orna- mented meeting-house, its carvings and decorative panels are based on the store of knowledge preserved in the tradition. Even if a meeting-house is unadorned, its name, the name of the nearby dining-hall and ancestral names across the surrounding tribal landscape, together with the histories of what gave rise to them, have their source in ngā kōrero tuku iho. Māori who participate in ceremonies and meetings there, descendants of those who composed and passed on the ancient records, know the lineage of their forebears because of often quoted genealogies, which were also preserved in the oral tradition. 1 mĀori oral tradition The words handed down from the ancestors are cherished and kept current in various ways and through new media: in cultural rituals; in teaching, either locally by elders or at Māori schools and universities; in the modern composition of songs and stories; and by way of art, print, radio, film and the internet. Māori have preserved their oral traditions since their arrival in Aotearoa and, remarkably, through the vicissitudes of colonisation and near loss of their language. One means they used during the nineteenth century to ensure the survival of these traditions was by committing them to writing, creating a manuscript store of this once oral heritage. The literature that bears the closest relationship to the oral tradition in its original form are the texts that Māori first wrote down from memory or that were written for them as they dictated; these texts are testament to the singular style, art and beauty of the tradition and to the extraordinarily vivid portrait they give of the people and their society of old. This, largely unpublished, literature in Māori may be found in two places. One is in the private domain, in personal papers and manuscript books that Māori have inherited or continue to write; the other is in public libraries, in manuscripts written and collected by Māori and Pākehā (Europeans) from around the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century. This writing is the single most valuable material record of Māori oral tradition. There is also a published literature of reproduction, translation and inter- pretation of traditions. It began with Sir George Grey’s collections of songs, narratives and sayings in the 1850s. For the remainder of the nineteenth century, oral traditions became the subject of discussion and translation in works by collectors and ethnographers, such as Edward Shortland, Richard Taylor, John White, S. Percy Smith and Elsdon Best. From 1892, the Journal of the Polynesian Society, in particular, became a substantial source of knowledge about the tradition. Māori contributed information and writing to all that literature. And the Māori-language newspapers published from the 1840s to the early twentieth century became a printed forum in which they recorded, debated and quoted from their oral heritage. From the twentieth to the twenty-first century, the literature developed in new directions. There were English versions of mythologies and legends, such as are found in A. W. Reed’s many books and Antony Alpers’ Maori Myths and Tribal Legends; and of tribal histories that drew on and quoted from the traditional texts, such as Elsdon Best’s Tuhoe, Leslie G. Kelly’s Tainui 2