Thu, 08 Oct 2009 6:30a.m.
Auckland historian Hazel Petrie is mounting the first in-depth study of slavery in New Zealand.
Dr Petrie said today that war captives or "slaves" made up as much as 50 percent of the Maori population in the early nineteenth century but had been given little attention by academics.
She is taking up a $300,000 Marsden Fund grant, over three years, to investigate the purpose and function of war captives in Maori society.
Dr Petrie said there were apparently contradictory accounts of the status and role of Maori slaves, both before and after European contact.
Large numbers of war captives were released from the late 1820s.
But Moriori on the Chathams, enslaved by Ngati Mutunga and Ngati Tama from Taranaki in 1835, were not officially released from slavery until 1863, 23 years after the Treaty of Waitangi was signed.
Targets of her research include marriage between slaves and "free" Maori, and the rights of captives and their descendants.
Dr Petrie wants to know whether captives were taken for spiritual, political, or economic reasons, and whether they were treated differently according to their rank or gender.
The author of Chiefs of Industry, a history of Maori tribal enterprises in colonial New Zealand, Dr Petrie is also looking at the extent to which enslavement deprived individuals of their mana or personal tapu . In one rare case, a slave captured as a child and released at the age of about 20, in 1795, became Te Whaharoa, one of the nation's greatest war chiefs.
"Slavery" was an emotive term, and English terms such as "slave" might not have an exact equivalent Maori meaning, she said. It was possible that slaves and war captive should be seen as distinct social or economic institutions, unique to their own society.
NZPA
