Sidestep: Were the Moriori from Aotearoa?
The designs of the Moriori are different to that of the Polynesian Maori.
As far back as 1879 the Moriori tribe is by tradition said to have occupied the New Zealand islands before the coming of the Maori. Modern teaching insists they were never on the main islands. If this is the case then how does one explain that the language of two peoples who apparently never met until around 1830, are almost identical?
How does one explain, than when two Taranaki tribes heard these people had been located by Europeans ships were keen to go over to the Chatham Islands to 'make amends'. Yes, there were historic wounds to be healed and they slaughtered many of them and enslaved the rest right up until 1863. Only 101 Moriori out of a population of about 2,000 were left alive by 1862.
With the two brief accounts above it is very clear that what was once told by Maori and accepted as history by Maori in the early 1800’s has been altered, changed and fabricated since. And if it can happen with something as simple as one tribe on a remote island…what else is accepted as truth now but never was?
Let’s find out if 63cm femurs are produced. What will the modern academics say then?
But back to the language…here is an excerpt from J.T Thomson in 1879…
"The vocabulary consists of 168 words, principally radical or primary. But, for the purposes of a comparative vocabulary and of these 115 are pure Maori; hence the Moriori can only be said to be a dialect of this Polynesian race which now inhabits New Zealand—it is distinctly not a separate language. Under these circumstances, it would be tedious and out of place to transcribe the whole of Mr. Deighton's valuable vocabulary. I have therefore confined myself to making a comparison of those Moriori words which are not pure Maori, showing where they are to be found amongst other Malagas-Malayo-Polynesian, or Barat races.
Coming to remarks on the comparison, it will be seen that there are thirty-nine out of the one hundred and fifty-five words which are not Maori, or else, if Maori, are variations of the language sufficient to claim distinctive notice. Of the first word, i.e., the personal pronoun I, the Moriori analogue is found in three of the principle groups in Polynesia, and also in fourteen of the tribes of Non-Aryan Hindostan. But the analysis of this portion of the subject will be best made, by such readers as are interested, for themselves. I shall therefore confine myself to generally stating, that there are fifteen Moriori words out of the thirty-nine which are not reproduced in the limited list of works which I possess.
Five words will be seen to belong to the Fijian Group, four to the Samoan, twelve to the Hawaiian, two to the Murihiku dialect of New Zealand, eleven to the Malay, two the Malagasi, seven to the Non-Aryan tribes of Hindostan, but, stating it differently, these seven words are found seventy-seven times in these Barat tribes."
It is our belief that the Moriori were long time residents of the Southern Island once known as Aotearoa and is now known as Te Wai Pounamu. It is our belief they were chased out or fled because they were a peaceful people, in fact part of the original group of three. If their artefacts are distinctly different from Maori but their language very similar, you can guess the sequence of events without explanation.
Based on the writing of Percy Smith and Elsdon Best, theories grew up that the Māori had displaced a more primitive pre-Māori population of Moriori in mainland New Zealand – and that the Chatham Island Moriori were the last remnant of this earlier race. These theories also had the advantage – from the view of the European settlers – of undermining the notion of the Māori as the indigenous people of New Zealand, making them just one in a neat progression of waves of migration and conquest by increasingly more civilised and technically able peoples. This in turn was used to justify racist stereotyping, colonisation and conquest by cultural "superiors". These theories were widely published in the early twentieth century, and crucially, this story was promoted in a series of three articles in the School Journal of 1916, and the 1934 A. W. Reed's schoolbook The Coming of the Maori to Ao-tea-roa —and therefore became familiar to generations of schoolchildren. A number of historians, anthropologists and ethnologists, however, examined and rejected the hypothesis of a racially distinct pre-Māori Moriori people. Among them, anthropologist H.D. Skinner in 1923, ethnologist Roger Duff in the 1940s, and historian and ethnographer Arthur Thomson in 1959, as did Michael King's Moriori: A People Rediscovered in 2000 and James Belich[34] and K.R. Howe in Te Ara.
The above is taken from Wikipedia. You will notice the writers accuse Europeans of saying the Moriori were from the mainland in order to 'undermine' the indigenous nature of Maori.
You see, the whole argument about land and millions and millions of dollars in reparation is not about cultural rights via a treaty, it is about who was here first. And if Maori receive money for the wrongs committed what are Taranaki Maori doing to compensate the Moriori? I'll tell you...nothing! For compensation and correcting wrongs does not travel in two directions...just one.
So what will 8' skeletons do to the whole industry once the word indigenous is transferred to others proven to be here first, by DNA and dating, but covered over so many times until finally what was hidden comes to light?
I'd say a battle of words bigger than any seen here in the last 240 years.
