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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“OUTCASTS OF THE
GODS? – The Struggle Over Slavery in Maori New Zealand” by Hazel Petrie (Auckland
University Press, $NZ45)
When we rise
above the popularisations, and get into real intellectual activity, there are
certain recognisable categories of New Zealand history book. There are the
sociological histories dependent on statistical surveys (see, for example, the
review of An Accidental Utopia? on
this blog); there are the stately and informative political biographies (see
Tom Brooking’s Richard Seddon, King ofGod’s Own); there are lively polemics, anathema to real academics, that use
history very selectively to preach a social message (see Chris Trotter’s No Left Turn); there are postmodernist
reconstructions of historical events, into which the author thrusts himself as
a main character (see Peter Wells’ Journeyto a Hanging); and there are history books with such a skewed and
wrong-headed interpretation of events that they call for a major corrective
(see Stevan Eldred-Grigg’s The GreatWrong War and compare it with its corrective, Steven Loveridge’s
better-informed Calls to Arms).
I could continue
my categorisation. But when I got to the end of Hazel Petrie’s Outcasts of the Gods?, I felt I had
discovered a new category of New Zealand history book. The very defensive
history book.
Let me make it
very clear from the start that this is a work of real scholarship. Its 340 large
pages of text are followed by 66 pages of endnotes, bibliography and index. It
is a work of wide research, frequently enlightening in what it has to say,
illuminating things from our history that are rarely discussed, and making some
shrewd judgments. The five sections of illustrations are well chosen and
relevant to the text. And yet it is still a very defensive work.
Hazel Petrie is
clearly riled by Pakeha and others who take limited negative aspects of
pre-European and early-contact Maori history, and use them as a means of
belittling or condemning Maori culture as a whole. Matters such as cannibalism
or the unhistorical notion that Maori had wiped out an “earlier” race, the
Moriori (this being based on a distortion of the 1835 slaughter of the Moriori
on the Chatham Islands). Her subject is slavery in the context of Maori
society, and her aim is to examine as closely as possible what “slavery” meant
in the Maori context.
From the very opening
of this substantial book, Petrie argues (in her Introduction) that most
so-called “slaves” in the Maori context were really “captives” taken in battle;
that it is wrong to see them as being “slaves” inasmuch as they were
essentially the same people (in terms of race, language and religion) as their
captors; and that they were therefore not analogous to the African slaves
caught up in the Atlantic trade or toiling on the plantations of Virginia. In
her view, to see Maori “captives” in the same light as the slaves of the Old
South is a category mistake. It is the result of Europeans, at the height of their
anti-slavery campaigns in the early nineteenth century, conflating the New
Zealand situation with a radically different situation that existed somewhere
else. Further, her Introduction tells us:
“… while the despair, the drudgery, and the
fragility of life that are said to have been the captive’s lot have frequently
been stressed, oral traditions tell of slaves as faithful companions, who
risked life and limb to save their masters and mistresses or facilitate the
path of true love. Such stories contain their own biases, of course, but
nineteenth-century accounts confirm the great variety of experience. There is
also evidence that those who abused war captives could be subjected to severe
censure or even banishment from their community….” (pp.2-3)
So Hazel Petrie
proceeds to a systematic survey of Maori “slavery” in a way that is designed to
answer the putative misapprehensions of early European observers. Skin colour,
she says (in Chapter 1) was not an issue in the taking of slaves by Maori – it
was not a racial thing. Yes, red was the colour associated with the chiefly
classes (rangatira) and black with the captives or slaves (taurekareka), But
these colours were purely symbolic of social status, not of race. She does
concede that blackness could have negative connotations in the traditional
Maori world, but she argues this was the universal connection of blackness with
darkness, not with skin colour. Thus:
“There can be little doubt that cosmology, a
lack of mana and tapu, and the common physical tradition of taurekareka, or
captives, were all embodied in explicit perceptions of them as black. So,
conceptually, they must have been connected. However, although semiotic
connotations are ever shifting, it does seem that in many, if not most,
contexts black has been a colour with negative connotations for Maori.
Connections between black and darkness on the one hand and white and lightness
on the other are very apparent in the Maori worldview and suggest that to be
‘enslaved’ was to enter a dark and gloomy world indeed.” (Chapter 1, p.38)
More
contentiously, she argues that it was early European visitors who taught Maori to
be conscious of black skin as a marker of inferiority. She surmises that Pakeha
treatment of “blackfellas” in Australia may have inspired Maori treatment of
Moriori on the Chathams.
Petrie outlines
(Chapter 2) how “captives”, generally being of lowlier social status, were not
tapu and were therefore free to undertake tasks that rangatira could not
undertake. Most captives taken in battle were not of the rangatira class.
Petrie says some have speculated that rangatira might have been happier to die
in battle than to be enslaved. But she says many rangatira were taken captive without damage to their mana, and were
used as hostages or bargaining chips with enemy tribes.
Captives (Chapter
3) were often well-treated and were allowed to move freely among the tribe that
had captured them. They were not allowed to be killed at the mere whim of their
captors. Nevertheless, it is clear that the killing of a slave was no cause for
utu (atonement; restitution; revenge). Slaves could be killed if they entered
into adulterous relationships with married non-slaves. And “less painfully than being killed or shipped
overseas, captives might be gifted as utu for crimes committed by others or for
loss of face.” (Chapter 3, p.98) Some slaves rose to eminence in the tribe
that had captured them, and there is evidence that vassals / captives / slaves
were allowed to cultivate their own allocated land. But runaways were treated
very harshly and the children of slaves could be killed if they stole kumara or
other essential food sources. Also:
“Captivity had important spiritual
ramifications but they were not necessarily permanent ones. Before the practice
of captive taking ended altogether, it is clear that there was no one way in
which captives were treated and that the lives they led and the status they
occupied while in captivity were closely related to their rank prior to capture
and their usefulness as members of their conquerors’ tribal group afterwards.
They were expected to help rather than hinder.” (Chapter 2, p.75)
The most openly
revisionist chapter is Chapter 4, wherein Petrie argues that the taking of
captives in large numbers was an historical aberration, which happened to occur
at the time Pakeha were arriving. It was therefore (wrongly) assumed by Pakeha to
be the ancient and established custom of all tribes. In her view, there had
been little inter-tribal warfare in the first six or seven hundred years of
Maori settlement. Only when the easily-caught and edible fauna had been
exhausted (moa driven to extinction etc.) did a warrior culture arise and pas
get built, circa 1500 AD. Iwi became competitors for dwindling food resources
and protectors of precious lands for cultivation. Even then, Petrie surmises,
the taking of captives as slaves was practised only on a limited scale. It was
only, she argues, when Pakeha introduced firearms, and the inter-tribal “musket
wars” of the 1810s and 1820s took place, that large numbers of captives were
taken.
“What we should remember… is that the ‘musket
wars’, which began late in the 1810s and continued to the early 1830s, were an
aberration in Maori warfare: in captive taking, numbers killed and eaten after
capture, and in many other ways, too. It is important to keep that in mind
because the end of the wars saw the release of many captives and, to a large
extent, the end of captive-taking by Maori. Yet, despite it[s] being a brief interlude in Maori history
and a very atypical one, most of our historical accounts concerning Maori
‘slavery’ are based on primary source material from that period.” (Chapter 4, p.154)
[Petrie reiterates
this theme in more detail in Chapter 8 at pp.243-244.]
By this stage,
too, some tribes began to deliberately seek out and take captives to undertake
skilled work which was no longer undertaken by their own tribes. (For example,
the Nga Puhi had lost the art of carving in the 18th century, and
therefore often captured skilled craftsmen from tribes further south.)
When she tackles
the theme of Maori women interacting with Pakeha sailors and others as
prostitutes (Chapter 5), Petrie argues that in the early stage of contact, such
women were often willing participants, seeing sexual relations in the light of
the tradition of an exchange of services for gifts. They were not slaves, even
if missionaries came to see the prostituting of Maori women as one of the
consequences of slavery. Often sexual relationships with Pakeha were more in
the nature of “temporary marriage” than real prostitution. Only later did a
real “sex trade” evolve, involving slaves – and again Petrie says this was
under the impact of the “musket wars”, as tribes sought a cheap and easy way of
getting cash for firearms.
Directly
addressing how early Pakeha observers saw Maori slavery (Chapter 6), Petrie
stresses that many such observers were missionaries who had been involved in
the contemporaneous campaign to abolish the Atlantic slave trade and the use of
slaves by British planters in the West Indies. She claims that when they wrote
their accounts of New Zealand, such observers often played up the idea of Maori
slavery (a.) to discourage commercial speculators, such as the Wakefield company,
from settling in New Zealand; and (b.) to create a sense of alarm that would
encourage the British government to intervene and annex New Zealand on
civilised and humanitarian principles (leading to the Treaty of Waitangi).
Now moving away
from a direct engagement with the topic of Maori slavery, Petrie proceeds
(Chapter 7) to examine the mentality of the missionaries, positing that many of
them saw the concepts of “slaves” and domestic servants as being
interchangeable in Maori society. Further, she claims, the missionaries’ idea
of redeeming slaves – in the literal sense of freeing them from slavery –
always involved the slaves’ redemption in the spiritual sense. In other words,
missionaries tended to believe they were “freeing” slaves by converting them to
Christianity. They thus took great credit for the diminution of slavery in the
Maori world. But Petrie insists that such credit was not really due to the
missionaries (Chapter 8), because the “musket wars” were already ending before
the missionaries had made much impact. Therefore, she claims, slavery would
have decreased anyway. While noting examples of missionaries genuinely
brokering peace between hostile tribes, Petrie comes close to saying (like a
latter-day Nietszche) that Christianity was essentially the religion of slaves
– after all, it freed slaves from the burden of tapu and their inferior social status.
So to her last
three chapters (9, 10, 11) in which Petrie constructs a moral argument against
the British colonists. She asks whether the British treated their own prisoners
of war any better or worse than the Maori did. She suggests that British horror
of what they construed as “slavery” in New Zealand really reflected their own
revulsion at the genuine slave trade in which they had for so long been
involved. She says that by undermining tapu and mana, the British undermined
the foundations of chiefly authority and therefore the very bases of Maori
society. Christianity swallowed tapu and the Pakeha taking of land swallowed
mana. Therefore, she concludes, the British in effect destroyed real Maori
freedom and enslaved Maori. The obvious implication is that if anyone was
guilty of practising slavery in the New Zealand context, it was the British. In
her final chapter she revisits the semantics of the various terms associated
with slavery and bondage, and repeats her opening arguments on the
misperception of these things by Pakeha observers.
I hope I have
made it clear that this is a weighty book of real scholarship, drawing on a
wide variety of sources.
But inevitably
it presents us with a number of problems.
First, like
anything that deals with pre-European (and pre-written language) Maori life, it
has to rely on much speculation to sustain Hazel Petrie’s thesis that the
taking of captives was on only a small scale prior to the “musket wars”. She is
thus forced frequently into statements such as the following [I have added the
emphases]:
“Because
there is limited specific evidence for times before European contact, it
may be impossible to make a sound judgment as to whether tribal groups were
always reluctant to be rejoined by kin previously captured in battle. Nor is it clear whether captives were
too humiliated to return or whether their kinfolk would not have welcomed them
if they had. Men were the warriors and, therefore, more directly implicated in
military defeat, so women and children may have suffered less shame and
loss of mana from being captured.” (Chapter 2, p.56)
“It seems safe to assume that prior to
the 1810s, only a modest number of captives were taken and that these were most
often women and children rather than men.” (Chapter 4, p.127)
There are many
other examples of a similar nature.
Second, there is
this very defensive tone throughout.
On the evidence
of Petrie’s own text, it is clear that Maori at various times did use
“captives” as slaves, did consign such captives to an inferior social position,
did sometimes send slave women to be prostitutes and did rigidly enforce their
slaves’ servitude. Certainly mitigating things can be said – that some slaves
were treated well; that there were gradations in types of slave; that some rose
to high social position; that they were allowed the wherewithal to live. But
many of these same things could be said of slaves in other parts of the world –
including the Deep South of the USA. There were some “kind” slave-owners there,
too. The bottom line is the one I have highlighted in the following sentence: “Dealing with one’s own captives was one
thing, but since their status was similar to that of other belongings,
it was not lawful to punish, let alone kill, someone else’s.” (Chapter 3,
p.103)
It was not
lawful to punish or kill somebody else’s ‘property” in the Deep South, either.
I am not
equating the long, established Atlantic slave-trade, practised on an industrial
scale, with the more piecemeal Maori practice of slavery. But I am saying that
the two phenomena had many things in common.
Under all her
real scholarship, what Petrie is really attempting to do is to deflect that
sort of Pakeha ignorance, which would claim that slavery (like the equally
historical cannibalism) was somehow the defining mark of pre-European society. It
was no more that than the Gulag and Holocaust were the defining features of
European society. And after all, one could say that the Holocaust was an
“aberration” in German history just as the “musket wars” and large-scale
slavery were, in Petrie’s view, an aberration in Maori history. Should we
therefore take a benign and forgiving attitude towards them? And does slavery
somehow cease to be slavery because the people enslaved were of the same race,
colour and religion as those who enslaved them? One could make a strong case,
from Petrie’s own text, that social caste acted in the Maori context in much
the same way that colour and race did in other situations of slavery. I have to
note too that, by sheeting this grim aspect of Maori history home to European
influence (Pakeha brought muskets and distorted Maori society etc.), Petrie is
in effect stripping Maori of responsibility for their own actions. This is the
very denial of “agency” that is so often deplored by historians who deal with
“first nations”.
Petrie often
deploys the Lytton Strachey variety of historical sarcasm when she refers to
missionaries’ motives, but this can sometimes reach an absurd level. Thus she
says: “Missionary writings were at their
most colourfully vitriolic when reporting the practice of eating enemies, but
they failed or chose not to comprehend its full significance.” (Chapter 2,
p.58). Does this mean that missionaries were foolish to condemn cannibalism or
foolish to be appalled by it? Or that they would have had totally different
attitudes had they only realised that eating enemies was a means of destroying
their mana?
Much of the
sarcasm, I fear, is misplaced.
It is good to
inform us of the varieties of slavery as practised by Maori. It is salutary to
be reminded that Europeans at various times practised slavery on a far vaster
scale. But Petrie’s tone too often suggests that she is offering a sort of
apologia for Maori slavery rather than seeing it as the degrading thing it was.
Fascinating review! Thank you, Nicholas!
ReplyDeleteThank you. I appear to have annoyed one reader who, despite my careful wording, is apparently under the impression that I have somehow slandered the Maori race.
ReplyDeleteGreat point about Maori agency. Needing to 'defend' them from Eurocentric interpretations seems paradoxically Eurocentric...
ReplyDeletere the alleged missionary failure to understand the "full significance" of eating enemies, she then goes on to refer to a variety of writers, including well known Maori, giving quite differing accounts of the meaning of eating enemies. Why should we think there was only one particular meaning to the action? RTL
ReplyDelete