Land Tenure in the Cook Islands
The pattern of acquisition
The pattern of acquisition
No quantitative data is available from the pre-contact era to indicate the relative incidence of each of the various ways of acquiring land rights, but in one of the best documented of the early land cases witnesses incidentally name those persons who actually planted the block of land in question during the nineteenth century. Of a total of about 60 persons mentioned it has been possible to determine in 36 instances the persons from whom each acquired his right to plant. Of the 36, 19 acquired their rights from their fathers, 1 from his father by adoption, 5 from their mothers, 2 from classificatory elder brothers, 4 from their wives, 2 from wives of their brothers, and 3 by permissive occupation from persons apparently unrelated.2
2 Avaavaroa case - MB 1:107–39 NLC. It will be noted that the above persons were users and did not necessarily have proprietary rights in the land.
From evidence given in the Ngati Te Ora case1 data were compiled on all persons mentioned as actually owning and occupying (i.e. the primary right-holders in) one particular block of land prior to the advent of the Land Court. The data does not purport to be exhaustive, as almost all the persons mentioned were household heads, and those living within their households were not named though they were included by implication. A total of ten names was mentioned, and their relationship to the Te Ora lineage is as follows. Three were persons who held (at some stage) the title of Te Ora Rangatira, one was a brother of the rangatira and another a classificatory brother, three were heads of kiato within the lineage, one was a member of one of these kiato, one was a woman whose father married uxorilocally and who accordingly claimed through her maternal grandfather who was a kiato of the lineage. In addition to the above holders of both proprietary and usufructuary rights there were two persons who were granted permission to occupy by a kiato who travelled overseas, one who was given permission to occupy by the then Te Ora Rangatira (the latter a man who held two rangatira titles concurrently, and the person to whom he gave the permission was a kiato under him in his capacity as holder of the other title), and one was a son-in-law of the preceding. Thirteen of the fourteen persons named were males.
1 See appendix B.
1 E.g. MB 4:277 NLC.