Table Of ContentMāori 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.
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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.
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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
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