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Important Judgments: Delivered in the Compensation Court and Native Land Court. 1866–1879.

Pedigrees

Pedigrees.

It will be at once apparent that the pedigrees of the suitors will be a matter of great importance in determining the questions arising in this trial. Mr. Gillies expresses an entire disbelief in them; thinks that they are of no value, and, in fact, neither genuine nor authentic, but are made up or compiled for each case as it comes on. Now, it is obvious that the Court must express a decided opinion on this question generally, for it has been largely imported into the evidence of many of the witnesses.

This Court has no common law to direct its steps by; in fact it has by its own operations to make its common law, and to establish "year-books" which may in the course of time afford a code of law to which appeal may be made for guidance in deciding all questions which may come before it And it has been the practice of this Court hitherto to inquire into pedigrees, giving them such weight page 60as they seemed entitled to from their intrinsic merits in each case. The general principle which should govern the Court as to pedigrees was laid down in a previous case;—"They must be received, not for the purpose of deciding tribal estates, but for the purpose of determining members of tribes." It is, no doubt, almost beyond the powers of members of a civilised race, who, possessing written documents, are not required, and are little accustomed to trust facts of importance to their memories, to believe that any person can remember from tradition a whole family, with all its branches, for twenty or even ten generations back; but in my experience as a Judge of this Court, I have received pedigrees which I have compared with pedigrees given sometimes by the same witness, sometimes by others, at other Courts, at distant periods of time, and have found the general concord perfectly astonishing. Now it appears to me that, if the natives generally admit these pedigrees—and themselves largely found on them their right as members of a tribe to join in the tribal estate—it is strictly according to native custom that this Court should entertain them as aids in discovering the owners of properties; of course, subject in all cases to the more visible and important facts of occupation or possession. Even if these pedigrees are all "a mass of invention," and the names therein are purely fictitious, their general value is not in my judgment affected, if all natives agree to have their claims, to a certain extent, decided by them. The reception of them, under such circumstances, has not only convenience to recommend it, but safety also, and the knowledge that in so doing the Court is best consulting native feelings or prejudices, and native manners, and consequently is best interpreting "Maori custom." In our case all the parties put in pedigrees, Mr. Hesketh almost entirely relying upon them, for the acts of ownership or occupation proved by his witnesses were (with one exception) of a very trivial character; and Mr. Gillies' client (Heteraka Takapuna) made three starts at his pedigree to connect himself and his friends with Waiohua, and evidently felt so anxious about the question that at the close of the case he made an application to be re-called, in order to put in another.

The Court does not therefore propose to depart from its precedents, but will, for the purpose laid down in previous Courts, give such weight to the pedigress as it thinks each is entitled to. And I may here state that, after much investigation and thought, I have not discovered any reason why any of them should be discredited—several little discrepancies, such as putting down Huakaiwaka as a woman and speaking afterwards of him as a man, not to my mind affording any ground for supposing that a person of that name never really existed, or for doubt whether he or she really occupied the allotted place in the pedigree.

I have, from the evidence, drawn out the pedigrees attached hereto, and will, in this judgment, allude to them hereafter when necessary, as evidence.