Aotearoa likes to tell itself that it has the cleanest founding story of any settler nation. There was no Trail of Tears here. There were no slave plantations. The Treaty of Waitangi gave Māori the rights of British subjects in 1840 and laid the legal groundwork, however imperfectly applied, for a bicultural country. The country has had its share of historical wrongs and is still working through the long Treaty settlements process, but the worst of what colonialism produced elsewhere did not, by general consensus, happen here.
That story has a hole in it the size of an island group.
Between 1835 and 1863, on the Chatham Islands roughly 800 kilometres east of the New Zealand mainland, an indigenous Polynesian people called the Moriori were systematically destroyed. Around 300 were killed in the initial invasion. The rest, somewhere between 1,400 and 1,700 people, were enslaved and forbidden to marry one another or have children with one another. Their language was beaten out of them. Their sacred sites were desecrated. Their dead were eaten. Over the next twenty-eight years, more than 1,500 Moriori died of murder, neglect, disease, and a culturally specific affliction called kongenge, a deep despair of the spirit. By 1862 only 101 remained, of a population that had numbered around 2,000 before the invasion. The proportional death toll places it among the most concentrated genocides in the modern historical record.
The perpetrators were two iwi from the Taranaki region of the North Island, Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama, who had themselves been driven from their ancestral lands during the Musket Wars by Waikato iwi under the war leader Te Wherowhero, and who decided, in late 1835, to take an island to replace the one they had lost. The British vessel they used to get there was hijacked at gunpoint in Wellington Harbour. The British Crown did not assume sovereignty over New Zealand until 1840. After 1840, the Crown was made aware of the slavery on Rēkohu and chose, for twenty-three more years, to do nothing about it. When the Native Land Court eventually adjudicated the question of who owned the islands in 1870, it awarded 97.3 per cent of the land to the invaders, many of them the same men who had killed Moriori thirty-five years earlier and were still alive, and 2.7 per cent to the surviving Moriori. New Zealand school children were then taught, into the 1970s, that the Moriori had been a separate, inferior, pre-Māori race who had become extinct on the death of one Tommy Solomon in 1933.
This is the story of what actually happened, why it was forgotten, and what the country is now, very slowly, trying to do about it.
A People Apart
To understand what was destroyed, you have to understand that the Moriori were not strangers to the people who came to kill them. They were cousins. The same Polynesian voyaging tradition that had brought the ancestors of all Māori to Aotearoa in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries also produced, sometime between about 1400 and 1500, the migration that took a small group of those settlers another 800 kilometres east to the Chatham Islands. Some Moriori traditions hold that the settlement of Rēkohu came directly from eastern Polynesia. The dominant scholarly view is that the founding population came from mainland New Zealand, possibly with some later arrivals direct from the tropics. Either way, by the time of the migration, the people who became Moriori and the people who became Māori shared an ancestry, a language family, and a set of cultural origins.
What separated them was the Chatham Islands themselves. Rēkohu (Chatham Island), Rangihaute (Pitt Island), and the smaller islets of the group lie far enough south of the tropics that none of the Polynesian crops that supported mainland Māori agriculture would grow. Kūmara failed. Taro failed. The yam and the gourd failed. The only viable food economy was hunter-gathering, supplemented by the harvesting of fur seal pups, fish, eels, the fatty young of seabirds, fern root, and karaka berries. The islands were rich in marine life but poor in the resources, particularly greenstone and reliable timber, that mainland Māori built their material culture around. The settlers adapted. Their distinctive carved tree trunks (rakau momori), still standing in some pockets of the Chathams, are an artistic tradition that emerged in response to that scarcity.
The decisive cultural divergence came around the year 1500, in response to the inter-tribal violence that had followed the original settlement. Three groups of Moriori, descendants of the founding migrations and possibly later arrivals, had been at one another’s throats. A chief named Nunuku-whenua, of the Hamata tribe, intervened. The accounts of what he did vary in detail, but the substance is consistent across all of them. He stepped between two warring parties and proclaimed an end. “Listen all,” the version reported in Michael King’s foundational 1989 book Moriori, A People Rediscovered runs, “From now and forever, never again let there be war as this day has been. From today on forget the taste of human flesh.” For those who broke the proclamation, he laid down a curse. “May your bowels rot the day you disobey.”
Nunuku’s Law was not just a peace treaty. It was a covenant with the gods. To break it was a religious betrayal as well as a personal one, and the loss of mana that would follow was understood to be permanent and to extend to generations not yet born. From around 1500 to 1835, for roughly thirteen generations, the Moriori kept the covenant. Disputes were resolved through ritualised single combat, with rules that required the fighting to stop at first blood. Killing was forbidden. Cannibalism, which had been part of the original culture as it was on the New Zealand mainland, was abandoned. The membrane of distance, as Michael King put it, allowed the uninterrupted evolution of a culture organised around peace.
The population at its height was probably around 2,000 to 2,500 people, organised into nine tribes living in scattered settlements across the two main islands. They had their own gods, their own version of the broader Polynesian creation traditions, their own arts, and a language that had diverged from mainland te reo Māori far enough to be distinctive but close enough to remain partly mutually intelligible. They had no warriors. They had no military class. They had no formal weapons of war.
This was the society that found itself, in November 1835, looking out at a hijacked British brig anchored off its coast.
The Hijacking of the Lord Rodney
The story of how Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama came to be in a position to invade the Chatham Islands begins on the New Zealand mainland twenty years earlier. Both iwi were originally from northern Taranaki. Sections of both iwi had been driven out of their ancestral territories in the early 1820s and 1830s during the Musket Wars by Waikato iwi under the war leader Te Wherowhero, who launched a series of devastating invasions of Taranaki in 1822 and 1826 in the broader cycle of intertribal violence that had been triggered by Ngāpuhi’s early acquisition of muskets and that swept through the upper North Island for the better part of two decades. By the early 1830s the portions of Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama that had moved south had regrouped around Wellington Harbour (Te Whanganui-a-Tara), where they now found themselves competing with other displaced groups for limited land and resources. Other portions of both iwi had remained in Taranaki or returned there at various points. The 1835 invasion of Rēkohu involved only those members of each iwi who had ended up in the Wellington region.
The Chatham Islands had been on European charts since 1791, when HMS Chatham under Lieutenant William Broughton blundered into them and named them after the ship. From the early 1800s, sealers and whalers had been calling at the islands as a base for their operations, and Māori sailors and labourers had often crewed on those vessels. The reports those Māori brought back to Wellington were, from the perspective of a displaced and resource-stressed iwi, a description of a paradise. The islands were rich in seals, fish, eels, and seabirds. The local population was peaceful. They did not know how to fight.
In late October 1835, the British whaling brig Lord Rodney, a 28-year-old Bermuda-built vessel under Captain John Harewood, arrived in Wellington Harbour from Sydney. Four days after she anchored, she was seized. Armed parties of Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama warriors came aboard and took control of the ship. Captain Harewood and his crew were given a choice. They could sail the Rodney to the Chatham Islands, ferrying the iwi and their supplies across, or they could die. Harewood chose to sail.
The cargo loaded aboard was a colonial supply train. Seventy-eight tonnes of seed potatoes for planting. Twenty salted hogs. Seven large waka. Muskets, clubs, and hand-axes. The first shipload, on 19 November 1835, carried about 500 men, women, and children of Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama, led by the chief Pōmare Ngātata. Lord Rodney then sailed back to Wellington and made a second run on 5 December, this time with another 400 of the iwi. Around 900 invaders had now landed on islands inhabited by around 1,700 to 2,000 Moriori.
The Moriori, true to their tradition of hospitality to strangers, welcomed the new arrivals. They fed them. They cared for the ones who had arrived sick from the rough crossing. They watched as the visitors set up camp, planted their potatoes, and started behaving in ways that became progressively harder to misread. Within weeks of the second landing, parties of warriors had begun the practice known as takahi, walking the land. Walking through Moriori settlements, declaring the ground beneath their feet to be theirs by the act of stepping on it, and informing the inhabitants that they were no longer free people but vassals of the iwi that had now claimed their land.
A Moriori girl, twelve years old, was caught early in this campaign. She was killed, her body dismembered, and her remains suspended from a pole. Her name was not preserved in the surviving records. The signal her killing was meant to send was unambiguous. The peaceful coexistence the Moriori had been hoping for was not on the table.
The Council at Te Awapātiki
Between late 1835 and early 1836, the Moriori did what their ancestors had done for thirteen generations when faced with a crisis that demanded a collective response. They convened a council. The meeting place was Te Awapātiki, a sacred site at the entrance to Te Whanga Lagoon on the eastern side of the main island. It is one of the most spiritually significant places in the Moriori world, the location where the founding ancestor Rongomaiwhenua had placed the sacred pou that staked the Moriori claim to the land in the first place.
Around a thousand Moriori men gathered there. The debate ran for three days. The accounts that survive, recorded later from elderly survivors and reconstructed by the Moriori scribe Hirawanu Tapu in the second half of the nineteenth century, agree on the broad shape of the discussion. The young men, looking at the fact that Moriori outnumbered the invaders roughly two to one, argued for resistance. The elders, led by two senior figures named Tapata and Torea, argued for adherence to Nunuku’s Law. The covenant, they insisted, was a sacred pact entered into with the gods. To break it, even in self-defence, even in the face of annihilation, would be to betray the ancestors and to forfeit the mana of the Moriori people for all generations to come.
The elders prevailed. The decision was peace. Moriori would offer the invaders friendship and a share of the islands’ resources, as their custom dictated. They would not fight.
It is one of the more extraordinary moments in human history, and it is also one of the most ferociously debated. Was it pacifism in the philosophical sense practised later by Gandhi and Martin Luther King? Was it religious fidelity? Was it a tragic miscalculation about the nature of the invading force, an assumption that ritual non-violence would be reciprocated by an opponent operating under the same code? Was it, in the end, the only decision the elders could have made without abandoning the entire moral and spiritual order that had defined Moriori existence for thirteen generations?
What is not in doubt is that the decision was a moral choice, made deliberately, with knowledge of the likely consequences. Eyewitness accounts from survivors recorded later make clear that the council understood what the invaders had been doing on the mainland and what Moriori could expect if they did not resist. The decision was not naive. It was a refusal to surrender what the Moriori believed was most essential about themselves, even at the cost of their lives.
The invaders, observing the gathering at Te Awapātiki, drew their own conclusions. A council of a thousand men was, in their cultural framework, a war council. Whether they genuinely believed the Moriori were preparing to attack or whether they used the meeting as a convenient pretext is impossible to determine now. Either way, when the council members dispersed and walked back to their settlements, warriors were already moving against them.
The Killing
The invasion that began in early 1836 had two phases. The first was the initial massacre, which lasted weeks and killed around 300 Moriori outright. The second was the slavery system that followed, which killed around five times that number over the following twenty-eight years.
The pattern of the initial killings, as recorded in survivor testimony and Moriori oral history, is consistent across many separate accounts. Warriors arrived at Moriori settlements without warning. Some Moriori were killed where they stood. Some were chased into the bush, dragged from hiding places, and killed there. Some, particularly young men of fighting age, were killed and then eaten in ritual meals. The Moriori survivor Minarapa Tamahiwaha, who lived through the invasion as a young man and gave testimony to nineteenth century researchers, recalled the period in language that is hard to read even at this remove. Moriori, he said, were treated like sheep, killed at the convenience of their captors, with women and children suffering the same fate as men. Concealment in caves, in holes, and in the dense vegetation of the islands’ interior was the only protection, and it was thin.
The Ngāti Mutunga chief Te Rakatau Katihe gave his own version of events to the Native Land Court in 1870, by which point he was attempting to justify Ngāti Mutunga’s claim to the islands. “We took possession,” he said, “in accordance with our custom, and we caught all the people. Not one escaped. Some ran away from us, these we killed, and others also we killed, but what of that? It was in accordance with our custom. I am not aware of any of our people being killed by them.” The phrase “in accordance with our custom” is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. The custom referred to is take raupatu, the right of conquest, the principle in mainland Māori tikanga that land taken by force in war becomes the legitimate property of the conqueror. Whether take raupatu applied to a population that had refused to fight, that had explicitly invoked a different and older covenant of peace, was a question the Native Land Court did not interrogate when it accepted his testimony forty years later.
The killings stopped only when the invading force had run out of resistance to overcome and useful workers to capture. The surviving Moriori, perhaps 1,400 to 1,700 of them, were now the property of Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama.
The Slavery System
The conditions imposed on the surviving Moriori between 1836 and 1863 were severe even by the standards of nineteenth century slavery in any society. The standard mainland Māori practice with war captives was, by this period, gradually evolving toward integration. Slaves were absorbed into the host community over a generation or two, often through intermarriage. The practice on Rēkohu was different. The intent of the system imposed in 1836 was, on any reasonable reading, the elimination of Moriori as a distinct people.
Moriori were forbidden to marry one another. They were forbidden to have children with one another. The only sanctioned reproduction was between Māori men and Moriori women, with the resulting children belonging to the father’s iwi rather than to their mother’s people. The Moriori language was suppressed. Moriori were forced to participate in the desecration of their own sacred sites, with stories surviving of Moriori being made to urinate and defecate at sites of profound spiritual significance. The breaking of Moriori cultural practice was thorough and deliberate.
Beyond the cultural assault, the daily working conditions were brutal. Moriori were forced into hard physical labour, mostly in the seal hunting and food provisioning that supported the new Māori settlement and supplied trade with passing whaling ships. They were poorly housed. They were poorly fed. Beatings were routine. Killings continued at the discretion of individual masters, sometimes for offences as minor as walking the wrong way across a piece of ground.
A category of death recorded in Moriori sources but unfamiliar in European medical thinking is kongenge, a despair so deep it kills the body. Moriori elders attributing deaths to kongenge were describing what would now probably be called extreme depression compounded by malnutrition, exhaustion, and the cumulative trauma of having watched everything that mattered to them be destroyed. It was not a metaphor in their accounting. People stopped wanting to live, and they died.
The numerical picture is clear. From a pre-invasion Moriori population of around 1,700 to 2,000 in 1835, the population stood at 101 by 1862. The Moriori elders’ own enumeration, compiled at the time and presented in their petitions for relief, recorded 1,561 deaths between 1835 and 1863. Of those, around 226 were named individuals known to have been killed outright, many more were attributed to kongenge, and the remainder died of disease, of childbirth complications under the prohibition on Moriori-Moriori partnerships, of overwork, and of the cumulative effects of the system. Around 10 per cent of the Moriori population was killed in the first weeks. Around 95 per cent of the population was dead within thirty years.
Some Moriori were taken away from the islands altogether. Slave-raiding parties carried captives back to Wellington and to Taranaki. A few escaped to Australia or to Pacific Islands. Most who left did not return.
The Crown That Looked Away
The Treaty of Waitangi was signed at the Bay of Islands on 6 February 1840, four years and three months after the invasion of Rēkohu began. By Article 3 of the Treaty, every Māori became a British subject with the rights and protections of British law. By the same article, those rights and protections logically extended to the Moriori as well, since they were inhabitants of territory the Crown was now claiming sovereignty over. By the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, slavery had been illegal across the British Empire for seven years.
In 1842 the Crown formally extended its administration to the Chatham Islands. By that point Moriori had been enslaved on Rēkohu for six years. The Crown was, by its own admission in the 2020 Deed of Settlement, aware of this fact when it assumed responsibility. “The Crown was aware in 1842, when it assumed responsibility for the Chatham Islands,” the deed reads, “that Moriori were enslaved and many had died at the hands of their captors.” The Crown profoundly regrets, the deed continues, that “it failed for many years to take action to end Moriori enslavement, and that your karāpuna continued to suffer greatly in oppressive conditions which caused many more to die.”
The failure was not a matter of ignorance. Moriori themselves repeatedly tried to draw the Crown’s attention to their situation. They petitioned successive governors. They wrote to colonial officials. In 1862 a delegation of Moriori elders submitted a formal petition to Governor George Grey listing 226 named individuals who had been killed, naming 1,366 more who had died of kongenge, and asking for emancipation and the return of their lands. The petition was not acted on. The slavery continued for another year.
The eventual end of the slavery, in 1863, was a quiet local action by the resident magistrate of the Chatham Islands. The British government and the New Zealand colonial government did not declare the freeing of Moriori to be a matter of policy. They simply allowed the magistrate to issue a proclamation, under existing law, that recognised the slaves’ formal liberty. By that point the practical effect was negligible. Of the 101 Moriori still alive, almost all were elderly, broken, and tied by need to the Māori households they had served for a generation.
The Waitangi Tribunal, in its 2001 Rēkohu Report, assessed this prolonged inaction in the language of legal finding. The Tribunal concluded that the Crown’s failure to act to end Moriori enslavement was a breach of its Treaty obligations. The Crown had the legal authority. The Crown had the practical capacity. What the Crown lacked, in the Tribunal’s analysis, was the political will to interfere with the workings of an iwi that had, by the 1840s, become a useful ally on the Wellington frontier and an apparent example of the rapid civilising effect of British contact on Māori society. The peaceful, hospitable, and now nearly extinct Moriori made for poor political leverage. They were not interfering with land sales, not threatening settlers, not raising warriors. The Crown’s energies in the 1840s and 1850s were elsewhere.
When those energies finally did turn to the Chathams, in 1870, they produced one of the most remarkable judicial decisions in the country’s history.
The Native Land Court of 1870
By 1870 the political geography of the Chatham Islands had shifted again. Most of Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama, having served their purpose on the islands and finding the cold climate and limited agricultural prospects uncongenial, had already drifted back to Taranaki. Some had returned to mainland New Zealand to fight in the New Zealand Wars. Others had simply gone home. By the time the Native Land Court convened on Rēkohu to determine ownership of the Chatham Islands, the population of the islands consisted of approximately 100 surviving Moriori and a much smaller number of Māori, mostly absentees represented by agents.
The Court’s job, under the Native Lands Act 1865, was to determine which iwi had customary title to the islands at the date the Treaty took effect, 6 February 1840. The Moriori case, presented through Hirawanu Tapu and others, rested on prior occupation. They had been on the islands continuously for around 400 years. They had cultivated, named, mapped, and lived on every part of the territory. They had observed Nunuku’s Law throughout that time. The 1835 invasion had not extinguished their right of prior possession, since they had never agreed to relinquish it and had never accepted the legitimacy of take raupatu as a basis for land transfer.
The Ngāti Mutunga case, presented by Te Rakatau Katihe and others, rested on the application of mainland Māori custom. They had taken the land by conquest in 1835. They had been in occupation in 1840. Under take raupatu, the land was theirs.
The Court accepted the Ngāti Mutunga case. Of the total land area of the Chatham Islands, 97.3 per cent was awarded to Ngāti Mutunga and a smaller share to Ngāti Tama. Many of the named successful claimants were men who had themselves taken part in the 1835 killings and were still alive in 1870, including Te Rakatau Katihe, whose testimony quoted earlier describes his own actions in the first person. The remaining 2.7 per cent, fragmented across small reserves, was awarded to Moriori. No account was taken of the Moriori prior occupation. No account was taken of the religious and cultural framework under which the Moriori had observed peace for thirteen generations. No account was taken of the fact that the absentee Ngāti Mutunga claimants had not lived on the islands for years and in many cases were arguing for a title to land they did not even particularly want, except as a confirmation of the original conquest.
The 1870 judgement was, the Waitangi Tribunal would conclude in 2001, the legal step that completed the genocide. The killing had ended in the 1830s. The slavery had ended in 1863. But the dispossession of the Moriori from the land that defined them had not been finalised until a colonial court, applying mainland Māori custom in a context where it had no historical or moral validity, transferred almost all of their territory to the men who had killed and enslaved them, most of whom were still alive.
After 1870, with the surviving Moriori reduced to landless dependents in their own country, the conditions for the next phase of forgetting were complete.
The Manufactured Myth
What happened next has to be understood as a deliberate intellectual construction, undertaken largely in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by a small group of New Zealand ethnographers and educators, and propagated through schools and popular media across the entire colonial period. The Moriori, as actually existing human beings still living on the Chatham Islands, were quietly written out of the national story. In their place, a fictional Moriori was constructed for a particular set of political purposes.
The architect of the myth was Stephenson Percy Smith, the same colonial ethnographer who built the Great Fleet narrative of Māori migration. Smith’s Moriori, articulated in a series of late-nineteenth-century papers and embedded into school curricula by the early 1900s, was a separate, inferior, pre-Māori race who had originally inhabited mainland New Zealand and had been displaced to the Chatham Islands by the more vigorous Māori arrivals of the Great Fleet. They were variously described as small-statured, dark-skinned, possibly Melanesian in origin, mentally and physically inferior to Māori, and biologically destined for extinction.
The myth was useful to multiple constituencies. For European settlers, it provided a powerful rhetorical equivalence. What we have done to the Māori, the implicit argument ran, is no worse than what the Māori did to the Moriori before us. We are simply the latest in a series of conquests by more advanced races over less advanced ones. This argument, repeated in newspapers, parliamentary speeches, and school textbooks, served to delegitimise Māori claims to indigeneity and to relativise the violence of European colonisation. Letters to the editor of New Zealand newspapers throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries return to the theme repeatedly. The Maori displaced the Moriori. The Europeans now displace the Maori. It is the natural way of things.
For some Māori, particularly in the early twentieth century, the myth produced a defensive counter-response. If accepting that Moriori had been a real people implied accepting the European settler analogical argument about colonisation, the cleaner option was to deny that Moriori had ever existed. Some Māori voices began arguing that the Moriori of the Chathams had never been a separate people at all, that they were simply a remnant Māori group who had been absorbed in 1835. The denial was sincere and, as a defensive move, intelligible. It also had the effect of erasing an actual people for the convenience of a present-day political argument.
The Crown, through the official channel of the New Zealand school journal, became the most influential propagator of the myth. The 1916 issue of the school journal, used as a teaching text in primary schools across the country, presented the Smith account as established fact. A 1946 reissue did the same. Generations of New Zealand school children, including most adults alive in the country today over the age of about sixty, were taught that the Moriori were a vanished pre-Māori race who had been wiped out by Māori before Europeans arrived. The actual Moriori, still living on Rēkohu and adjacent areas of the mainland, were not mentioned.
When Tame Horomona Rehe (Tommy Solomon), the last Moriori of unmixed Moriori ancestry, died in March 1933, the Press Association obituary called him “the last pure-blood survivor of the ancient Moriori race.” New Zealand newspapers across the country reported the formal extinction of the Moriori. Schoolteachers updated their notes. The story closed.
Solomon had not, of course, been the last Moriori. He had been the last person of full Moriori parentage. He had four siblings who had also been of full Moriori descent. He had been married twice, both times to women of Kāi Tahu (mainland Māori) descent, and had five children, who were therefore of mixed Moriori and Māori ancestry. By 1933 there were several hundred Moriori descendants alive in the Chathams and on the New Zealand mainland, all of mixed ancestry, but Moriori in language, culture, family connection, and self-identification. The myth required them not to exist. So in the public record, they did not.
Michael King and the Reawakening
The myth survived, broadly intact, until 1980. The agent of its undoing was an unlikely combination of a television documentary, a family memorial, and a New Zealand historian of European descent who had grown up on the same false story everyone else had been taught.
In 1980 Television New Zealand broadcast a documentary by Bill Saunders simply titled Moriori. It was the first nationally distributed media account of who the Moriori actually were, where they had come from, what had happened to them in 1835, and that they were not in fact extinct. The documentary reached, on the available figures, a substantial portion of the New Zealand viewing public. It was, for many viewers, the first time they had heard any version of the actual history.
The Solomon family, descendants of Tommy Solomon, watched the documentary and decided to act. They commissioned a memorial statue of Tommy and began organising a Moriori family reunion to be held on Rēkohu. The young lawyer who took on the organisational role was Tommy’s grandson, Maui Solomon, who would go on to become the central figure in the Moriori revival of the next four decades. The historian who was approached to write a serious history of Moriori for the unveiling of the statue was Michael King, who at that point believed, like most New Zealanders, that he was being asked to write the history of an extinct people.
King’s investigations, leading to his 1989 book Moriori, A People Rediscovered, did several things at once. They established beyond serious dispute that Moriori and Māori shared a common Polynesian ancestry and that Moriori had not been a pre-Māori race in mainland New Zealand. They established that Moriori had developed a distinctive culture on Rēkohu through about thirteen generations of relatively isolated evolution. They established that Nunuku’s Law was a real cultural and religious tradition, not a romantic invention. They established that the 1835 invasion had been an act of mass killing and enslavement that met any reasonable definition of genocide. And they established that the Moriori, in the form of the descendants of the survivors, were still very much alive and still identifying as Moriori in defiance of a century of being told they did not exist.
The book reached an audience prepared, by the broader Treaty of Waitangi consciousness-raising of the 1970s and 1980s, to take it seriously. The political ground had shifted. New Zealanders of European descent, beginning to accept that the standard story of the country’s founding was incomplete, were also beginning to accept that the standard story of who else had lived here was incomplete. The Moriori reawakening rode that wave.
The first formal political step came in 1988, when Moriori descendants lodged a claim with the Waitangi Tribunal seeking recognition as the indigenous people of the Chatham Islands and redress for the Crown’s breaches of the Treaty after 1840. The claim raised an unprecedented difficulty. The Tribunal had been set up to adjudicate Māori claims against the Crown. Now it was being asked to adjudicate a claim by an indigenous people whose grievance was partly against the Crown, but whose original killers were Māori, who had themselves received Treaty settlements. The Tribunal proceeded carefully. Hearings ran through the 1990s. The Rēkohu Report was released in 2001.
The Tribunal’s findings were emphatic. The Crown had breached the Treaty by failing to act on the enslavement of Moriori after 1840. The Crown had breached the Treaty by allowing the Native Land Court in 1870 to apply take raupatu in a context where it had no historical legitimacy. The Crown had contributed to the long-running misrepresentation of Moriori as an inferior, extinct, pre-Māori race through the publication of false material in school journals over decades. The Tribunal recommended a full settlement.
It would take another nineteen years.
The Settlement
The Moriori Deed of Settlement was signed at Kōpinga Marae on Rēkohu on 14 February 2020. The Moriori Claims Settlement Bill passed its third reading in Parliament on 23 November 2021, becoming the Moriori Claims Settlement Act 2021.
The provisions of the settlement are, by Treaty settlement standards, modest in financial terms. Eighteen million dollars in financial redress. The transfer of culturally significant lands on Rēkohu and Rangihaute to Moriori ownership. Vesting of 50 per cent of Te Whanga Lagoon in joint Crown-Moriori management. Establishment of customary fisheries regulations and a joint planning committee for natural resources on the Chatham Islands. The repatriation of stolen Moriori ancestral remains held in museums around the world.
The most significant elements are not financial. They are the agreed historical account, embedded in the legislation, which sets out the Crown’s acknowledgement of what actually happened. They are the formal Crown apology, addressed in the Act to the Moriori people, tchakat henu (people of the land), and waina pono (original inhabitants) of Rēkohu. The apology specifically acknowledges the Crown’s failure to act on Moriori enslavement, its failure to protect Moriori from becoming virtually landless, and the Crown’s contribution to the propagation of the myth that Moriori were a racially inferior people who had become extinct. The text of the apology, as set out in the deed, is unusually direct for a Crown document. It is a formal statement, in the country’s law, that what was taught to generations of New Zealand school children about Moriori was false, that the Crown bears responsibility for that falsity, and that the Moriori people are alive, indigenous, and entitled to recognition.
Maui Solomon, who led the negotiations as chief negotiator for Moriori, has been the public face of the revival for forty years. Asked at the time of the settlement whether $18 million was enough, his answer was characteristic. “It’s never enough. How do you compensate genocide?”
A separate question hangs over the settlement and has produced fresh litigation as recently as 2025. The Crown has settled with Moriori. The Crown has also settled, separately, with Ngāti Mutunga o Wharekauri, the modern iwi descended from those involved in the 1835 invasion. The Ngāti Mutunga settlement compensates them for their own grievances against the Crown arising from later colonisation, which is reasonable enough on its own terms — the modern iwi bear no responsibility for 1835 and have valid grievances of their own. What has provoked Moriori legal action is a Crown proposal to formally recognise Ngāti Mutunga’s tino rangatiratanga (chiefly authority) over Rēkohu in the Ngāti Mutunga deed. Moriori argue, and have filed proceedings in the High Court at Wellington in 2025 to argue, that such recognition would effectively legitimise the 1835 invasion in law, would contradict the prior commitments the Crown made to Moriori in their own settlement, and would represent a serious failure of the Crown’s obligation to deal even-handedly with both peoples. The matter is, at the time of writing, before the courts.
Counting the Dead
The Moriori genocide deserves its name. The word genocide entered international law through the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, which defined the crime as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. The acts specified include killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. The 1835 to 1863 destruction of the Moriori meets every one of those criteria.
Around 300 Moriori killed in the initial massacres. Approximately 1,200 more dead in the slavery period from murder, beatings, neglect, disease in conditions of forced labour, and kongenge. The systematic prohibition on Moriori-Moriori reproduction, designed to prevent the next generation of Moriori from being born. The forcible incorporation of Moriori women into Māori households, with the resulting children belonging to the father’s iwi. The destruction of Moriori sacred sites. The suppression of the Moriori language. The eventual award, in 1870, of 97.3 per cent of Moriori ancestral land to the men who had carried out the invasion, most of them still alive.
Between 1835 and 1862 the Moriori population fell from around 2,000 to 101. That is a 95 per cent population loss in twenty-seven years. By proportional toll, it places the Moriori genocide alongside the worst recorded events of the twentieth century, the Cambodian genocide under the Khmer Rouge (around 25 per cent of the national population), the Rwandan genocide of 1994 (around 70 per cent of the Tutsi population), and a small handful of other cases. The Moriori case is older, smaller in absolute numbers, and conducted in a remoter location, but on the proportional measure that international historians use to compare the severity of group destruction events, it is among the most concentrated on record.
It happened on the territory of what is now New Zealand. It was carried out by two Māori iwi against a Polynesian people who shared their ancestry. It was prolonged and deepened by the inaction of the British Crown that became the Crown of New Zealand, which knew about the slavery from 1842 and chose not to act on it for twenty-one more years. And it was, for a hundred years afterwards, hidden behind a deliberately constructed myth that the Moriori had been an inferior, pre-Māori race destined for extinction.
The Living People
The most important fact about the Moriori, the one that the myth was designed to deny and that Maui Solomon has been correcting on radio, in courtrooms, in classrooms, and in private conversation for forty years, is that they are not extinct. The Hokotehi Moriori Trust, the central representative body, has around 1,800 registered members. Estimates of the actual descendant population, including unregistered members, run from 3,000 to 6,000. About 10 per cent of registered Moriori live on Rēkohu itself. The rest are scattered across the New Zealand mainland and overseas, reconnecting through the Trust to a homeland that for some has been part of family memory and for others is being recovered for the first time.
The Moriori language, te re Moriori, is no longer spoken fluently. The last fully fluent speaker died in 1900. Substantial written material survives, mostly recorded by Hirawanu Tapu and by the European ethnographer Alexander Shand in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, and revival work led by linguists working with the Hokotehi Trust is producing teaching materials and a working dictionary. The language will probably never return to full fluency among a community of native speakers. It is being recovered, partially, as a heritage language and a marker of cultural identity.
The cultural revival is more advanced. Kōpinga Marae, the central Moriori meeting house on Rēkohu, was opened in January 2005. The marae is named for the kopi tree groves that were sacred to Moriori, and it functions both as a working marae and as an international peace and conflict studies centre. The choice is deliberate. Moriori, having paid the price of pacifism in 1835 and having been written out of history for the next century and a half, have made the global advocacy of peace one of the central elements of their cultural revival. The 2011 Me Rongo Declaration, signed at Kōpinga, articulates a Moriori contribution to international peace-building work that draws explicitly on Nunuku’s Law as a still-living philosophical tradition.
The political recognition is in slow progress. The 2020 settlement gave Moriori legal acknowledgement as an indigenous people of New Zealand. The 2021 Act made the apology law. School curricula have been progressively updated since the 2010s to remove the worst of the old misinformation, with the Ministry of Education in 2011 issuing a formal correction of School Journal material that had still been teaching the pre-Māori Moriori myth into the post-war period. The new compulsory New Zealand history curriculum introduced from 2022 includes Moriori as a substantive topic, taught accurately for the first time in the country’s educational history.
The myth is not entirely dead. As recently as December 2023, the Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters made a public statement that included the assertion that there were no more Moriori, a position Maui Solomon corrected on national radio within hours by pointing out that Peters was talking to one. The persistence of the old story, a hundred and fifty years after Te Awapātiki and ninety years after Tommy Solomon’s funeral, is a measure of how deeply the original construction reached into the country’s self-understanding.
But the trajectory is clear. The Moriori, written out of New Zealand history for a century, have written themselves back in. The country has, finally, started to accept it.
What the Story Says About Us
The Moriori genocide is a reminder that the institution of take raupatu could in some specific historical instances produce results as severe as anything practised by European colonial powers. For New Zealanders of European descent, it is a reminder that the comforting story of New Zealand exceptionalism, the country that supposedly skipped the worst of colonialism’s history, was always partly a story of selective forgetting. For the Crown, it is a documented breach of its Treaty obligations, formally acknowledged in legislation, that the country took a hundred and eighty years to address.
It is also, perhaps most significantly, a story about how histories get hidden. The Moriori genocide was not lost to memory through accident or the simple passage of time. It was actively suppressed. It was suppressed by the construction of a myth that explained it away as a footnote in a different story, the inevitable replacement of one race by another. It was suppressed by school curricula that taught the myth as fact. It was suppressed by the public announcement, in 1933, that the people in question no longer existed. And it was suppressed by a polite national agreement, holding through most of the twentieth century, not to look too closely at what had happened on a small group of islands a long way east of the mainland.
The dismantling of that suppression has taken forty-five years and is not finished. It has involved a documentary, a statue, a book, a Tribunal report, a Deed of Settlement, an Act of Parliament, and a continuing High Court case. It has involved the unflagging public work of one extended family, generation after generation, refusing to let the country forget. It has involved a slow change in what New Zealand schools teach.
The forgetting was deliberate. The remembering has had to be deliberate too.
What the Moriori, on Rēkohu and on the mainland and overseas, are asking of the rest of the country is not very complicated. They are asking to be remembered as the people they actually were and the people they actually are. A small Polynesian society that lived on the eastern edge of the inhabited world, kept a covenant of peace for thirteen generations, and was destroyed almost entirely by an act of organised violence that this country took a hundred and eighty years to formally acknowledge. The story has been told now. The settlement is in law. The people are alive. The forgetting, if it continues, can no longer be the forgetting of those who did not know. It will have to be the forgetting of those who chose not to remember.
What do you know of the Moriori story? Were you taught the old “pre-Māori race” version at school? Tell us in the comments.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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