Maori

Maori religious life runs on two linked ideas. Tapu is restriction, the state of a person, place or thing set apart and requiring care, and noa is its ordinary counterpart; the movement between the two is managed by ritual, most often involving water and food. Mana is standing and effective power, held by people, by groups and by places, and it can be increased, damaged or lost. Both are inherited and both are practical, governing who may enter, who may speak, and what must be done afterwards.

Whakapapa, genealogy, is the framework carrying all of it. It links a person to ancestors, to a hapu and an iwi, to a mountain and a river, and, extended backwards, to the atua and to the beginning of things, so that a recital of descent is at the same time a statement of rights and of relation to land. Karakia are the formal words used to open, to close, to lift tapu and to protect.

Recited genealogy is held as the property of the iwi, hapu or whanau it belongs to, and particular karakia are held as tapu by those who hold them, with authority resting at that level rather than nationally. That published collections of such material exist, and are old enough to be out of copyright, does not answer the custodial question.

Maori reached Aotearoa New Zealand from eastern Polynesia several centuries before European contact, and the accounts of that voyaging, the divisions of the country between iwi, and the relation of each group to its landscape are held by those groups themselves. The public framework, as Te Ara, the state encyclopedia, sets it out, begins with Ranginui and Papatuanuku, sky and earth, and their children, among them Tane, Tangaroa and Tumatauenga, who stand behind forest, sea and human conflict.

Christianity arrived with missionaries from 1814 and was widely adopted, and it was then reworked. The prophetic movements of the nineteenth century, Pai Marire and the Ringatu church founded by Te Kooti, and the Ratana movement in the twentieth, are Maori churches rather than Maori branches of European ones, and Ringatu and Ratana remain active today.

The Treaty of Waitangi of 1840, and the confiscations that followed the wars of the 1860s, are the ground of every subsequent claim, and the Waitangi Tribunal, established in 1975, has heard many of them. Religious consequences run directly through the settlements. A river and a former national park have been given legal personality in terms drawn from Maori understanding of them, and Matariki, the rising of the star cluster that opens the Maori year, became a public holiday in 2022.