Abstract
In 1891, in the Rees-Carroll Commission, James Carroll made an insightful comment about Maori population dynamics: ‘I am forced to the conclusion that it is a mistaken theory that the Native Race will rapidly decrease’. Carroll was probably the first prominent observer to predict a turnaround in Maori survival (AJHR 1891: G-1, Session II, xxix), due more to Maori ‘endurance’, as Mason Durie calls it, or to their ‘resilience and adaptability’, James Belich’s term (Durie 2005; Belich 2009: 180–181), than to pro-active policy. As history has subsequently shown, the 1890s were truly a ‘make or break’ decade for Maori. In terms of the stark biological reality of demographic survival, it was only in that period that Maori began to ‘make it’, whereas their material and social wellbeing, their development, was still ‘broken’, and would not start to ensure them a path towards a more secure future until well into the middle of the twentieth century. But, demographic survival determines a society’s ultimate destiny; it is the primal pre-condition for development. Conversely, a lack of real improvements in wellbeing works against declines in mortality rates. This was the situation Maori faced in the 1890s, when resource loss and other factors propelled them into an under-development trap. In turn, this predicament further delayed improvements in lifetable survivorship. The first real gains, initially driven by community health programmes guaranteeing their survival as a people, came in the first decade of the new century beyond the end-date for this book.
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Notes
- 1.
Durie sees both the pre-contact and subsequent history as a set of challenges to Maori, testing their endurance. He uses a tidal metaphor – of Maori society ebbing and flowing. But here I am suggesting something much more pro-active: not just ‘the ability to endure an unpleasant or difficult process or situation without giving way’, but also the capacity to formulate and implement strategies that eventually overcome these odds, or ‘to resist being affected by’ them (Oxford Dictionary of English, 2010: 580).
- 2.
These figures use Maori populations as denominators – the numerators are the land lost or retained; all other analyses I have seen use land areas as denominators. My objective is to show how the Maori people (as against their landholdings) were affected. My percentages were computed, after I had reconciled the Inquiry data to regional population data, as well as it was possible to do, from Ward (<CitationRef CitationID="CR42" >1997</Citation Ref>: v1, Appendix).
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Pool, I. (2015). Maori Resource Loss, Pakeha ‘Swamping’. In: Colonization and Development in New Zealand between 1769 and 1900. Demographic Transformation and Socio-Economic Development, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16904-0_10
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