Indigenous · History Classes · Grades 10–13 · College · University

Moriori and Aotearoa — The Near-Extermination That Failed

History Class · Level band: Grades 10–13 · College · University

DRAFT — CULTURAL REVIEW PENDING. These history classes are a publisher’s draft blend of the Collection’s Indigenous history research, standing on its own website. Indigenous cultural review precedes any public release of this strand. Readings carry the research labels unchanged: Documented Fact · Tradition — the people’s own account · Debated / Claim. This page carries no advertising.

English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site’s translation pattern; none is fabricated here.

For the teacher — teacher-facing guidance for this class stands in this box only; the reading below is the student reading. Senior band only. Three disciplines govern this class: (1) Moriori are never taught as extinct. Moriori are a living people with a mandated Trust, a marae, a Treaty settlement and a language in revival; the class is built as a near-extermination survived, and any worksheet, quiz or summary that files Moriori among vanished peoples repeats the exact falsehood the Crown apologised for in 2020. (2) Figures are taught as the sources carry them — ranges with their disagreements printed (the 1835 population, the 1896 census, the confiscation acreages) — never as single settled numbers. (3) The word “genocide” is taught at its classed weight in §6: the documented mechanisms at full strength, the Moriori leadership’s word as their stated position, and no official genocide determination claimed where none was issued. The companion class, Hawaiʻi and the Pacific, carries the rest of this region.

“The last Moriori” was not the last Moriori

Class: RESEARCH. Compiled documented record. This class follows two peoples of the New Zealand region through the closest approaches to extermination in their histories — and in both cases the ending that officials predicted, and in one case taught to schoolchildren as fact, did not happen. The lesson is double: what was done, documented figure by figure; and what a declaration of extinction itself does, when the people declared gone are still alive.

1. Rēkohu before 1835 — a people and a law (Documented Fact; Tradition as noted)

Moriori are the Indigenous people of Rēkohu and Rangihaute (the Chatham Islands), some 800 km east of mainland New Zealand, of Polynesian ancestry shared with Māori, with their own distinct culture developed in isolation — the Waitangi Tribunal (Rekohu Report, 2001) found Moriori had developed a “unique and distinct culture” and are the true Indigenous people of the islands. Their population at its height is estimated at about 2,000; a figure of about 2,500 for 1791 is also carried in the claim record, and the disagreement stands. Tradition — the people’s own account: under the ancestor Nunuku-whenua, Moriori adopted Nunuku’s Law, renouncing war, killing and cannibalism, with disputes settled by ritual fighting stopped at first blood. The law held for centuries. European sealers and whalers brought the first introduced diseases from the 1790s, killing Moriori before the invasion in numbers the record does not fix.

2. The invasion of 1835 (Documented Fact)

In November–December 1835, about 900 members of Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama, two Taranaki iwi themselves displaced by the Musket Wars, seized the brig Lord Rodney and sailed to Rēkohu with guns. Moriori outnumbered them almost two to one. Meeting in council at Te Awapātiki, Moriori resolved — the elders holding against the younger men — to keep Nunuku’s Law as a moral imperative, not a strategy to be set aside. The invaders killed about 300 Moriori in the initial slaughter. The survivors were enslaved: forbidden to speak their language, forbidden to marry among themselves or have children, forced to desecrate their own sacred sites. The Moriori elders’ own accounting stands in the primary record: their 1862 petition to Governor Grey listed by name 226 killed and 1,366 who had died of “despair.” The two accountings measure different things and are printed side by side, not reconciled.

3. The collapse, in sourced figures (Documented Fact, as ranges)

From ~2,000–2,500 before 1835, Moriori fell to about 101–120 alive in 1862 (the sources disagree and both figures stand) and ~100 by 1870 — a collapse of roughly 95%, the proportion printed as arithmetic on the sourced range. Enslavement was ended only in 1863, by a resident magistrate’s proclamation — some twenty years after the Crown annexed the islands in 1842, although Moriori had petitioned from the 1850s, most fully in the 131-page petition of 1862 prepared under Hirawanu Tapu, who had been enslaved at eleven and became the literate keeper of his people’s record.

4. The Crown’s failure, and the Court of 1870 (Documented Fact — official findings)

The Waitangi Tribunal’s Rekohu Report (Wai 64, 2001) found that slavery on Rēkohu was “contrary to human rights standards as recognised at the time, was contrary to law, and was contrary to Treaty promises of justice, protection, and equal citizenship”; that the Crown knew of Moriori’s plight and did not intervene though intervention was feasible; and that “the failure to intervene cost Moriori many lives, and prejudiced later land claims.” In 1870 the Native Land Court, applying its rule that those in occupation in 1840 held the greatest rights, awarded 97.3% of the land to Ngāti Mutunga — by then mostly returned to Taranaki — leaving Moriori some 1,500 hectares of largely poor reserves. The Tribunal found the award “patently wrong”: Moriori should have received at least half. The national encyclopedia’s verdict stands: the judgement “was the final blow for Moriori as a people and as a culture for the next 110 years.”

5. The language, and the living people (Documented Fact)

Ta rē Moriori, forbidden under enslavement, ceased to be transmitted; Hirawanu Tapu (d. 1900) stands among its last native speakers, and the Crown’s settlement apology fixes the official level: “By the beginning of the twentieth century ta rē Moriori as a living language had been lost.” A sleeping language inside a living people is dormant, not exterminated — the Hokotehi Moriori Trust and the University of Auckland are reconstructing its grammar from the written corpus, and the first Moriori Language Week was held in 2025. When Tommy Solomon, the last person of unmixed Moriori ancestry in the record’s phrasing, died in 1933, many believed Moriori extinct — and schoolbooks had taught a false history that they were a separate pre-Māori people who had vanished. He was not the last Moriori. Descendants endured; Kōpinga Marae opened in 2005 carrying the names of more than 1,500 ancestors alive in 1835; and the Moriori Claims Settlement Act 2021 carried a formal Crown apology — including for propagating the false history that Moriori were extinct — NZ$18 million, and the return of significant lands. Modern counts stand unreconciled, as the sources give them: 738 people of Moriori descent (2013 census); about 2,000 identifying as Moriori (2021); about 3,500 estimated (2017). The Hokotehi Moriori Trust today leads Moriori fisheries, conservation and culture, and the repatriation of Moriori ancestors from overseas museums.

6. The word “genocide” — at its classed weight

Documented: the invasion, the killing, the enslavement, the Crown’s twenty-year failure and the land award — found by the Tribunal as Treaty breaches and slavery contrary to law, and apologised for by the Crown. The Tribunal issued its findings in those terms; it is not quoted here as having issued a “genocide” determination, because that is not the finding it made. Claim — the people’s own leadership: Māui Solomon, chair of the Hokotehi Moriori Trust, in 2020: a fall “from about 2000 down to a mere 100 survivors… a population collapse of 95%. By international standards that is called genocide.” Debated: the word’s wider scholarly and public use for 1835 and after. The class carries all three at their weights, and merges none of them.

7. Māori — the wars, the land, the nadir (Documented Fact)

Māori numbered probably about 90,000 in the late 18th century (estimates run higher). The Treaty of Waitangi was signed from 6 February 1840. What followed, in mechanism order: introduced disease did most of the demographic work of the century; the New Zealand Wars (1845–1872) killed roughly 3,000 people in the standard estimates; raupatu — confiscation under the New Zealand Settlements Act 1863 — took more than 3,000,000 acres in the standard figure (Te Ara gives ~1.5 million hectares; Waikato alone finally lost 887,808 acres); and the Native Land Court (from 1865), converting communal title to individual title under a ten-owner rule, saw almost 10 million acres pass out of Māori ownership in its first thirty years — of ~66 million acres held in 1840, about 7 million remained by 1900. The census fixes the human line: 1896 was the nadir — 39,854 as first published, 42,113 as revised — and officials of the day predicted the end: Dr Isaac Featherston in 1856 called it the European duty to “smooth down… [the] dying pillow” of the Māori race, and Alfred Newman in 1881 wrote that “the disappearance of the race is scarcely subject for much regret.”

8. The recovery — the prediction falsified (Documented Fact)

The prediction failed. Māori health leaders — Māui Pōmare, Peter Buck — and Māori communities rebuilt the population line: 45,549 by 1901, and at Census 2023, 887,493 people in the Māori ethnic group and 978,246 of Māori descent. Te reo Māori, driven down through the 20th century, is in organised revival: 213,849 speakers in 2023, up from the 2013 low. The Waitangi Tribunal (1975; historical claims from 1840 added 1985) inquires and recommends — its findings are recommendations, not binding judgements, and are taught at that weight — and over 120 Treaty settlements have carried Crown apologies and partial redress. No official finding of genocide against Māori stands in the New Zealand record; the application of the word is Debated, and the documented mechanisms above stand at full strength without it. Māori are filed in the Collection’s census as what the record shows: a collapse, and a living people — survival, not extinction.

Sources for this class

Waitangi Tribunal, Rekohu Report (Wai 64, 2001), incl. the Moriori elders’ 1862 petition (226 killed; 1,366 dead of “despair”) • Davis & Solomon, “Moriori,” Te Ara — the Encyclopedia of New Zealand (1870 Court: 97.3%; 2013 census: 738 of Moriori descent) • King, Moriori: A People Rediscovered (1989) • Māui Solomon, “Moriori — Peace at All Costs,” Quaker Lecture 2020 • Moriori Claims Settlement Act 2021 and the Crown apology of 14 February 2020 • University of Waikato / Hokotehi Moriori Trust (2025), on Hirawanu Tapu and the language revival • Pool & Kukutai, “Taupori Māori,” Te Ara (~90,000; the 1896 low; Featherston 1856 and Newman 1881) • The 1896 census literature (39,854 published; 42,113 revised) • Stats NZ, Census 2023 (Māori ethnic group 887,493; Māori descent 978,246) • NZ History: the New Zealand Wars, raupatu (Waikato 887,808 acres final) and the Native Land Court (ten-owner rule); Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Mātou (1990) on the ~10 million acres • State of Te Reo Māori Report 2025 (213,849 speakers, 2023). Full research file: New Zealand and the Pacific — The Record Land by Land, Genocide Record, Region 2 file; census section: World Census — New Zealand and the Pacific.

Companion class: Hawaiʻi and the Pacific — Collapse, the Labour Trade, and the Peoples Who Stand

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