Musket Wars: the Moriori Genocide

“War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him . . . but to make him do what you want him to do.”

-- Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein

            Chances are, unless you’ve read Jared Diamond’s nonfiction book Guns, Germs and Steel or David Mitchell’s fictional Cloud Atlas, you’ve never heard of the Moriori. They were a Polynesian people, who inhabited the Chatham Islands, in the South Pacific, about 423 miles southeast of New Zealand, related to the Maori of that country.

            Unlike New Zealand, the Chatham Islands could not support the agricultural economy endemic to most Polynesian cultures. Climate, land area, and lack of resources worked against this, so the Moriori developed a hunter-gather lifestyle. Also, unlike their cousins to the northwest, the Moriori lived according to Nunuku’s Law, named after Nunuku-whenua, the chief who established it. It’s usually referred to as a pacifistic code, although I’d call it more of a non-lethal code.

            “. . . because men get angry and during such anger feel the will to strike, that so they may, but only with a rod the thickness of a thumb, and one stretch of the arms length . . .”

            However you want to describe it, in most other aspects, the code was geared toward settling differences through negotiation. Some theories see its development as an aspect of the Morioris’ environment.

            The Moriori and their islands remained isolated until the very late 1700s when the British survey vessel, HMS Chatham stumbled upon them. By 1830, alongside almost 2,000 Moriori, the islands were inhabited by a handful of Europeans and Maori. The latter had established a small colony, many of them intermarrying with the Moriori. For the most part after their discovery by Europeans, the Islands had remained a secret among outsiders, since most of the visitors were sealers who wanted to keep the large fur seal population to themselves.

              Unfortunately, things were changing rapidly to the west in New Zealand. Cue classic episode of the original Star Trek, “A Private Little War”, where on Neural, 3rd planet in the Zeta Bootis System, the Klingons start arming the Villagers with muskets and the Federation reluctantly responds by supplying muskets to their enemies, the Hill People.

Kirk: “Spock, ask Scotty how long it would take him to reproduce a hundred flintlocks.”

Scotty: “I didn't get that exactly, Captain; a hundred what?”

Kirk: “A hundred serpents; serpents for the Garden of Eden.”

            The situation was not exactly the same in New Zealand’s case. For one thing there were no stand-ins for the Klingons or Federation; just the British. For another, the Maori weren’t exactly the peaceful Hill People of Neural. They had been a warrior culture for some time, with intertribal warfare being common; the main goals being to gain territory, loot and slaves. But the scale of warfare was limited, since the Maori relied on weapons of stone, bone, and wood. They didn’t even have or use bows and arrows. You can only kill so many people with that kind of technology.

            But they were also possessed of one factor that contributed strongly to keeping them in that state; one that people who fetishize indigenous cultures -- usually also at the extreme ass-end of liberalism -- often forget about. The Maori were part of a very conservative, custom-bound culture, which was confident in its superiority over other peoples. I often think of a story I heard about a group of white, mainly European-American, socialist activists who were visiting some Chiapan Indians during the height of their insurgency against the Mexican government under the auspices of the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional (EZLN). The EZLN had issued a really, very progressive declaration called the Women’s Revolutionary Law that declared the rights of women as part of the movement. One of the activists, noticing the absence of anything relating to sexual orientation in the declaration, asked about the role of lesbians in the movement. The Indian women, devout Catholics, were aghast over the question, and doubtless a number of precious little hardcore progressive spirits where crushed by the cold boot heel of disillusionment that day. My point in all this being, don’t idealize other cultures, even if some aspects of them are -- or at least seem to be -- in line with your thinking on environmentalism, spirituality, and whatnot. Everybody’s shit stinks to one degree or another. Modern idealization of indigenous cultures is just as stupid as some Age of Reason French yahoos fawning over dreams of ‘noble savages’, although this idea goes at least all the way back to the Romans.

            This is not to say that some Maori, once presented with modern weapons weren’t willing to make a few changes; quite the contrary, which led to drastic changes in the balance of power among the Maori iwi (tribes). By the early 1820s, Hongi Hika, a rangatira (chief) on Te Ika-a-Maui, the northern of New Zealand’s two main islands, figured out fairly quickly that you could kill the hell out of a lot of the warriors of an enemy iwi when they came charging at you with their stone and wood clubs, if you met them with muskets. This was the beginning of what someone, in a fit of creativity, dubbed the Musket Wars.

            Hongi Hika had just returned from a visit to England where he had met King George IV and been given a suit of armor by his fellow monarch as a gift. More importantly than the acquisition of medieval defensive technology though, was that while there he had met Charles Philippe Hippolyte de Thierry, the son of French aristocrats who had immigrated to England one step ahead of the guillotine.

            A short aside to present a fun fact about the guillotine: one reason it was considered a more humane form of execution was that instead of hacking the head off, as was done in prior forms of execution involving decapitation, the guillotine blade slices the head off. The blade is angled so most of the force is applied to a smaller point and there is less chance of just crushing the neck instead of slicing through it. Try both methods with a carrot, and then ask yourself which carrot you’d rather be if it’s your last carrot moment on Earth; the one that gets sliced, or the one that gets hacked? The more you know.

            Back in England, De Thierry, like Hongi Hika was an ambitious man. Not satisfied with being the rich son of an emigre baron in England, he wanted to establish his own nation. But to do that he needed land, which Hongi Hika said he was willing to sell; 40,000 acres to be exact, and all for the low, low price of 500 muskets, plus powder and shot. A good deal, except for the fact that De Thierry got screwed in the end by waiting until 1837 to try and collect, by which time Hongi Hika had been dead for almost then years. The rangatira who had inherited the land denied de Thierry’s claim to it. But De Thierry wasn’t the only one to get screwed in the deal, and certainly not in the worst manner.

            In 1835, Maori of the Ngati Mutunga and Ngati Tama iwi,  who had been displaced from their traditional lands by the Musket Wars, and perhaps hearing of the islands whose people didn’t believe in fighting with anything bigger than a thumb-thick stick, hijacked a European vessel, loaded it up with 500 of their warriors, many armed with muskets, and sailed to the Chatham Islands. A second ship with another 400 Maori followed a month later. The invaders then proceeded to go about the islands, telling the Moriori, who outnumbered them two to one, that the Maori now owned the islands, and that they were the Maori’s slaves. Then the Maori killed about ten percent of the Moriori poulation, and ate a few just to drive the point home.

            In most historical attestations of cannibalism, you can safely be skeptical. You know people; they always say crazy shit about their neighbors who they don’t like, and many accusations of cannibalism don’t go beyond this. But with the Maori, it’s well witnessed and documented, and no one, even Maori, deny its existence. The latter though point out that, to quote Margaret Shirley Mutu, a Maori activist, whites do “. . . not understand the history of cannibalism . . .” Doubtless she is right, but regardless, in the case of the Moriori, the use of it is hard to consider anything other than shocking.

            So, there it is. Controlled violence; just like in the Heinlein quote at the head of this post. I’m sure the invading Maori only killed and ate as many Moriori as was necessary to get them to do what they wanted.

            The alarmed council of Moriori chiefs met to discuss resistance, but the principles of Nunuku won the debate, so the only choice left was to try to run and hide . . . on two islands that together were just a little bit bigger than the Five Boroughs of New York City.

            When it was all over, the Moriori survivors were all slaves. To quote one of the invaders, “Not one escaped.” Then the Maori set about in an extremely chilling manner, with eerie similarities to 20^th and 21^st century genocides, to eradicate all traces of Moriori culture. Their social structure was dismantled, their religious sites were defiled and destroyed, and their language was forbidden. And even though the Moriori had been utterly defeated and enslaved, their Maori conquerors were determined to breed them out of existence. Moriori were forbidden to marry each other. Moriori women were raped by their Maori masters so they would bear half-Maori children. Many more were killed. By 1862 only 101 Moriori were left alive. In 1933 the last full-blooded Moriori died; coincidentally, the same year that German President Paul von Hindenberg appointed Adolph Hitler as Chancellor of Germany.

            And so, our depressing history comes to an end. My conclusions: Captain Kirk shouldn’t have felt too guilty. The impulse of the Villagers to murder the Hill People was already there; the Klingon introduction of muskets just made their aspirations a reality. Once the Hill People realized what the deal was, they were just as ready to murder and destroy the Villagers. I’m not saying not to worry too much about the serpents, but there really is no such thing as the Garden of Eden, and the quicker we quite striving for that perfect goal, and learn to live with each others’ differences, under reasonable accommodations, we’ll be as close as we can get to it. Also, if I may be a little less philosophical; if friendly-seeming strangers ever show up on your shores, kill those bastards, hide the bodies, and get busy figuring out how you’re going to kill the next group that shows up, because they want all your stuff, and are sure as shit most likely to kill you all to get it.