Māori

Descendants of Polynesian voyagers, the Māori are the people who first settled New Zealand, which they call Aotearoa. Their ancestors sailed from eastern Polynesia in ocean-going canoes some seven centuries ago and, in long isolation, developed a distinctive language, art and social order. Today about one in five New Zealanders is of Māori descent, and Māori language and culture have revived strongly after a long decline.

When people first arrived is debated. Radiocarbon dates on bones of the Polynesian rat point to about 1280, a 2022 study suggested settlement of the North Island between 1250 and 1275, and no human remains or artefacts are securely dated before an eruption of Mount Tarawera around 1314. Many researchers place the main settlement in the first half of the fourteenth century, close to oral traditions of a planned migration by canoe, or waka, around 1350. The early settlers hunted moa, other large birds and seals. In the fifteenth century a group settled the Chatham Islands, and their descendants became the Moriori.

After about 1500, with a cooler climate and the moa gone, the culture archaeologists call Classic Māori took shape. People lived in villages of related whānau, or extended families, which formed hapū, or sub-tribes, and these in turn formed iwi, or tribes. Society was divided into chiefly families (rangatira), commoners and slaves, while tohunga held expert religious and craft knowledge. Fortified hilltop pā, finely worked greenstone, carved canoes and meeting houses mark the period. Ideas of tapu (sacred restriction), mana (authority) and wairua (spirit) shaped daily life.

Abel Tasman arrived in 1642 and James Cook in 1769, and both first encounters turned deadly. Māori adopted writing, the potato and muskets, and the intertribal Musket Wars of the early nineteenth century devastated many groups, while introduced diseases are estimated to have killed between a tenth and a half of the Māori population. In 1840 the British Crown and more than 500 chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi, first at Waitangi on 6 February and then at about 50 other gatherings. It made Māori British subjects and guaranteed their lands and authority in return for British sovereignty, but the English and Māori texts differ, and whether the Māori version ceded sovereignty remains disputed. In 1877 a court called the treaty a "simple nullity".

Disputed land sales and growing settler numbers led to the New Zealand Wars, fought between 1845 and 1872 by the colonial government, British troops and allied iwi against other Māori groups. Māori fought on both sides. The Kīngitanga, or Māori King movement, founded in the 1850s to halt land sales, was the target of the 1863 invasion of Waikato. Over the Taranaki and Waikato campaigns about 1,800 Māori and 800 Europeans died. The government confiscated large areas of land, and the Native Land Court turned communal holdings into individual titles that were easier to sell.

By 1896 the census counted 42,113 Māori, against perhaps 100,000 or more in the late eighteenth century, and many observers expected them to disappear. Instead numbers recovered. Schools long discouraged and punished the use of te reo Māori, and urban migration after the Second World War weakened it further: by the 1980s fewer than one in five Māori spoke it as fluently as native speakers.

From the 1960s a protest movement sought redress for lost land. The Waitangi Tribunal was set up in 1975 to hear grievances, and since the 1990s many iwi have negotiated settlements, though their adequacy remains contested. Language revival began with Māori Language Week in 1975 and the first kōhanga reo, or language nest, in 1982; the Māori Language Act 1987 made te reo an official language, Māori-medium kura kaupapa schools gained official support in 1989, and Māori Television began in 2004. At the 2023 census 887,493 people identified with the Māori ethnic group, and 978,246 people reported Māori descent; another 170,057 Māori lived in Australia in 2021.

Our maps label New Zealand as Māori territory from 1279 to 1815 and again in 1880 and 1900, an approximate outline covering both main islands; the later maps do not show the British colony established after 1840. Across the sea, the Tuʻi Tonga Empire is the nearest Polynesian state on the early maps.