The Maori king movement; Unity and diversity in past and present

The indigenous people of New Zealand did not have a name for themselves as a people before European explorers and traders arrived in the late eighteenth century. The New Zealand 'Maori' people did not collectively distinguish themselves from other peoples. Distinctions were only made between various tribal groups and, accordingly, a multiplicity of tribal names existed. Colonial interaction, however, brought about the abstraction The Maori. Some thirty years after James Cook had initiated European contact with the indigenous inhabitants of New Zealand, the word maaoii was first recorded as an adjective of taangata, meaning 'usual', 'ordinary' or 'normal' 'people'. It was not until the 1830s that the word Maori was used as a noun. From then on, Europeans were referred to as Pakeha, which was derived from the adjective paakehaa, meaning 'foreign' (Williams 1971: 252). Over the course of the nineteenth century, the term Maori was gradually transformed from a purely ethnic marker into a political category. It became the central notion in the political process which aimed at uniting the various 'Maori' tribes in opposition to the imminent threat of colonial domination. In this article, I briefly describe the history of the first and foremost movement for the establishment of political unity among the various Maori tribes: the Maori King Movement. The political constitution of the movement was based on the model of a kingship which was derived from the British model of polity as well as from the Old Testament. In order to explain the historical background behind the drive for establishing a Maori monarchy, I begin with a preliminary account of the early colonial history of contact in New Zealand, with particular attention to the role of the Treaty of Waitangi. ' TOON VAN MEIJL is a graduate of the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and the Australian National University, from which he obtained his PhD in 1991. His doctoral dissertation, entitled Political Paradoxes and Timeless Traditions: Ideology and Social Change among the Tainui Maori, New Zealand, was based on 25 months of fieldwork among the Tainui Maori tribes, the main supporters of the Maori King Movement, on the central North Island of New Zealand. At present, he is a research fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is based at the Centre for Pacific Studies in Nijmegen, where he is preparing a monograph on the comparative study of kingships in the Pacific. Dr Van Meijl may be contacted at the Centre for Pacific Studies

Adjective · Colonialism · Constitution · Ethnology · Genealogy · Indigenous · Linguistics · Noun · Opposition (politics · Political science · Politics · Polity · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs · Law · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies · Philosophy

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