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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 8, Issue 7 (November 1, 1933)

Customs of the Past

Customs of the Past.

Some pakehas who have had the privilege of Maori contacts all their lives and who have seen much of the real Maori in places remote from European influences, are sometimes better qualified to discuss native traditions and customs and ancient lore than the average young native of today, particularly the town-bred Maori, whose environment is chiefly European. The younger generation of Maori should not be above learning from such men, who knew and were helped and instructed by the splendid old learned ones of the race.

A short story of tribal customs told by “Tohunga” and reprinted in a Wellington paper, was quite misapprehended by a young reader, who did not like to be reminded of the fact that his ancestors had been cannibals now and then. The story really illustrated the innate courtesy, chivalry and chieftainlike feeling of the Maori even in war-time, and it was a genuine cross-section of the real old native life. It was related as described nearly forty years ago by a learned chief of the Ngati-Pikiao tribe, and it is moreover embodied in the records of evidence in the Native Land Court.

The eating of a foe after he was dead, a practice revived in the wars of the Sixties, was a mere nothing beside the things the pakeha did and the things he does. As for sensitiveness on the score of the past, what Englishman troubles to squirm over the fact that his forefathers used to hang women and children for stealing a handkerchief or a loaf of bread; or used to burn old women accused of the evil eye, or used to quarter the bodies of their enemies over the town gates? Remember, too, Ambrose Bierce's version of his own national anthem: “My Country ‘Tis of Thee”:

“Land where my fathers fried
Young witches, and applied
Whips to the Quaker's hide
And made him spring.”

Every race and nation has a barbarous past. The chief point of difference between the Maori and the races of the outer world is that while he has advanced, those races are so ultra-civilised that some of them have relapsed into a kind of highly scientific and therefore more horrible barbarism. Enough of that!