Film Festival: The Feathers of Peace

By PETER CALDER

The images flicker and fracture, as if faded with time, though the truth of it is that they might have been shot yesterday.

Those are actors on the screen - the observant will recognise faces from television commercials and the professional theatre. But for the moment they inhabit a world which existed long ago and far away - as far, in fact, as you may go without leaving New Zealand.

When these men (or rather the characters they impersonate) made landfall there on November 29, 1791, the small group of islands lashed by sea and rain was known by its inhabitants as Rekohu, a word which in their language meant "misty sky."

The Royal Navy vessel didn't mean to land there. On its way to Tahiti it had been blown off course. But the captain, Lieutenant William Robert Broughton, was quick to claim the islands, which did not appear on admiralty charts. He named them after the shsip under his command, which he described on a lead sheet nailed to a tree to commemorate the visit as "His Brittanick Majesty's brig Chatham."

Like many an earlier landfall in unknown seas, the visit of the Chatham to the islands we now call the Chathams, had a bloody outcome. By the time the boat turned north and headed for Tahiti, one of the natives lay dead in the shallows. His name was Tamakaroro and his people were called Moriori.

Traditional wisdom and the archaeological record suggest that the Moriori arrived in the Chathams directly and not via mainland New Zealand, with which they had no contact for at least 500 years.

Certainly they are culturally distinct from Maori - their language is full of sounds far shorter and more guttural than Maori so that "tangata whenua," for example, becomes "tchakat henu" - and their tree and rock carvings are distinctive. But theirs is a story of a people twice invaded and pushed to the verge of extinction.

The fateful clash with the British brig opens the documentary feature The Feathers of Peace, which screens in film festivals throughout the country over the next two months and is later scheduled for general release.

The film is the work of writer and director Barry Barclay, who made the gently lyrical Ngati and the raw and passionate Te Rua. Employing the historical newsreel format pioneered by British film-maker Peter Watkins in the 60s with Culloden, it depicts the events as though they were torn from the headlines. And that first fatal contact between Moriori and European is only the beginning of a tragic story.

Much of the film is devoted to the 1835 invasion of Rekohu by dispossessed and rapacious Maori from Taranaki - Ngati Mutunga and Ngati Tama.

What follows in a few short years is nothing short of genocide. Publicity for the film calls the Chathams New Zealand's Kosovo. And the Moriori's extermination is made all the more tragic by the fact that they effectively colluded in it.

In short, they were the Pacific's original pacifists. Moriori tradition has it that an ancestor, Nunuku, sickened by bloodshed and cannibalism, outlawed both. Warriors might fight using wooden rods no thicker than a thumb, he decreed, but at the first sign of blood they had to consider honour satisfied.

The story of Nunuku's injunction may not be literally true, although Michael King makes the point in his 1989 book Moriori: A People Rediscovered that such a policy was "a sensible way of ensuring the survival of a viable population on two small islands" and a method of conflict resolution "that did not threaten annihilation."

In any event, the invaders from mainland New Zealand were considerably assisted by the natives' peaceable welcome. They arrived seasick, starving and dehydrated and the Moriori nursed them back to health and showed them to supplies of clean water.

As soon as the guests were strong enough they enslaved their hosts and then began killing and eating them.

In the initial slaughter, 226 Moriori were killed in a few short months. A further 1500 or more perished over the next 20 years from abuse, disease and despair. By 1860 barely 200 remained. The last known full-blooded Moriori, Tame Horomona Rehe, also known as Tommy Solomon, died in March, 1933.

To add insult to injury, an 1870 Native Land Court to which the Moriori had appealed for redress awarded 97.3 per cent of the island to Maori. The slaughter and seizure in the 1830s pre-dated the Treaty of Waitangi, the judge reasoned, and so the Maori invaders were guaranteed traditional rights of conquest and occupation.

Barclay's film - which relies heavily on King's book but is by no means a direct adaptation - seems certain to reignite smouldering disputes in the Chathams and on the mainland (which islanders call New Zealand).

An indication of how sensitively the history is still regarded could be inferred from the film-maker's low-key, even slightly secretive, visit to the Chathams in mid-May to show the film to a select audience that included Tommy Solomon's grandson, Denis.

After sitting in attentive and impressed silence through a screening of the film in his home at Te One, near the island's main settlement of Waitangi, Denis Solomon remarked mildly that "it might not be a good idea to show the film on the island at this stage."

In telling the story of the Moriori, The Feathers of Peace challenges several pieces of received wisdom. Foremost, and almost incidentally, it disposes of the ingrained reactionary fiction which persists despite the work of King and others, that the Moriori were pre-Maori inhabitants of New Zealand.

This idea, drummed into the heads of generations of last century's schoolchildren, gained particular favour from the 1980s, since it could seem to invalidate Maori land claims - they, after all, had stolen it too.

Barclay, who says he was "blown away" by King's book when he first read it, describes the destruction of the Moriori as "a suppressed story."

"And it's not as if it's been forgotten," he says. "It's been actively perverted and buried. It was convenient to say that they were primitive people who inhabited the country before they were driven into oblivion by superior people of which there seems to be no evidence at all.

"So it's kind of like burying the Holocaust - not just the specific invasion but in general the wave that swept over their lives."

Maui Solomon, a Wellington Moriori lawyer, is one who knows how long that wave has been breaking. Another of Tommy's grandsons, he is a member of Te Iwi Moriori Trust Board and has led the legal and political charge to have Moriori accorded their place in history.

By the end of the year the Waitangi tribunal is expected to give a decision on the Moriori claim for iwi status under the Treaty.

Maui Solomon says that the past 20 years have seen a Moriori renaissance. "I had teachers at school in Temuka telling me that we were a myth and didn't exist. When first learning about my Moriori heritage I felt this huge sense of injustice. Moriori had been criticised by Europeans as weak and inferior to Maori. They'd been called 'black fellas' by Ngati Mutunga and Ngati Tama invaders and treated very badly and written off.

"And yet here was a people who had outlawed warfare and cannibalism and had learned to live on the island sharing resources and living in peace for 500 years.

"Now, in my mind, that is worthy of the greatest respect. How many cultures and peoples in the world can say that they have achieved that?"

The death of Tommy Solomon did not mean the end of Moriori, his grandson says.

"We are our own people with our own set of values and cultural mores. I know who I am. I am Moriori. You don't have to be full-blooded. How many full-blooded Maori are there? It's a state of mind, how you feel spiritually and emotionally about who you are.

"My mother is Pakeha, so I carry English, Irish and German ancestry on my mother's side, and I'm also Ngai Tahu on my father's side. I am proud of all parts of my heritage but I identify most strongly with Moriori as my spiritual heritage and with the Chathams as my ancestral home."

That ancestral connection, being part of the historical and archaeological record, is not disputed - despite the persistent fictions about the Moriori. What is less widely accepted on the Chathams is the Moriori entitlement to status under the Treaty. Te Runanga ki Wharekauri Rekohu, a Ngati Mutunga group on the islands, unsuccessfully sought an injunction in 1994 to stop the tribunal from inquiring into the Moriori claim.

Timothy Gregory-Hunt, deputy chairman of the Runanga, says the Moriori were "men of their times" and they are not included in the Treaty.

"They were raupatu," he says, "a people beaten in warfare whose land was seized according to custom before the Treaty. They've got to face the truth: what was done was wrong but it is no good pretending that it was not done."

The tribunal's decision over the Sealords fisheries settlement in 1992 acknowledged that Moriori were Maori for purposes of the Treaty of Waitangi Act and Moriori are an iwi, Maui Solomon says.

"The real issue for the tribunal is what is the status of Moriori vis-a-vis Ngati Mutunga. We are the tangata whenua tuturu [permanent]. It was our ancestors who first set up the altars of worship to the gods and named all of the places on the islands and in the sea.

"Despite the so-called conquest the mana of our people wasn't extinguished, wasn't expunged."

Making matters more complicated still is that there are two Moriori groups on the islands and they struggle to agree on the basis of iwi membership.

One wants it open to anyone who believes they are Moriori and the other to all who can trace a Moriori ancestral connection to the island - what Maori call whakapapa and Moriori hokopapa.

Building a marae on the main island may prove a decisive force for unity. A budget blowout has stalled work on the huge and impressive structure, which perches like an albatross on one of the island's highest points, but Maui Solomon says money has been set aside to complete the main pentagonal meeting house, caretakers' units and a central post called a poutoko manawa.

"There is more than enough money if both groups get together," he says. "The marae is there for everyone, it's not just a trust board marae - it's for all Moriori. To have two marae would be a disgrace to our ancestors and ourselves. We can argue the toss about unity but at some stage we need to get past the talking and get into action."

For Barry Barclay, who calls his film "a koha to history" the Moriori story was one that demanded telling so that the past might illuminate the present. The people of Rekohu, he explains, "welcomed travellers as many indigenous people have done to their cost."

"But, over and above that, when the slaughtering began they made a deliberate decision not to take up arms. That was pretty rare and it is an example to all of us."

* The Feathers of Peace screens in the Auckland International Film Festival on July 23 and at Festivals in Hamilton, Tauranga and Napier during August.

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