Nonviolence by Mark Kurlansky Page A

are usually portrayed in movies as a gentle, peaceful people. But this was often not the case, and certainly not the case with the ones who settled New Zealand and called themselves the Maori, which means “Children of Heaven.” The Children of Heaven were armed with flat stone clubs that they wielded with deadly force from a thong attached to the handle. Competing Maori groups fought each other for control of the limited land. Defeated enemies were often enslaved and on rare occasions were eaten.
    The Maori resisted the British militarily and from 1845 to 1872 Europeans fought to destroy them and take over their land. Amemorial to the soldiers of that war in the Auckland War Museum, a museum dedicated to the glorification of war, says, “Through war they won the peace we know.” If they took out the word peace and replaced it with the word land, they would have had the truth. Toward the end of the war the government was paying bounties for heads, £5 for a regular head and £10 for a chief 's. To collect the bounty the killers would carry the sack of heads to the commanding officer's tent where they would dump it out, the heads rolling across the floor. White soldiers and pro-government Maori competed for heads; in one famous incident a Maori shot an insurgent and a white soldier ran up to the wounded man, still alive, and decapitated him to rob the Maori of the £5.
    In 1867, with the territory almost entirely under British control, and only about 40,000 Maori still alive in a land of half a million Europeans, a visionary Maori leader named Te Whiti emerged on the southern coast of New Zealand's northern island, in a place called Parihaka. As government troops hunted down the last of the resisters, some fled to Parihaka, where they were allowed to stay, on condition that their weapons were destroyed. The population of Parihaka was growing. In 1869 Te Whiti declared that this was to be “the Year of Trampling Underfoot.” The whites took this to mean their final victory, but Te Whiti was actually saying that 1869 was to be the year in which the people of power were to be humbled. He gave the pakeha, as the Maori called white people, the bad news: without using violence or force, it was his intention to negotiate a separate treaty between the pakeha and the Maori of his district, a treaty between equals. He said that lion and lamb, hawk and wren, cat and mouse, and the pakeha and the Maori would lie down together in peace. But the management of the land would remain in the hands of its owners, the Maori. White settlers could remain on the land they occupied and more could come if they wanted. But the Maori would remain the proprietors and no parcels were to be sold off.
    His intention in claiming the land peacefully was for the Maori fighters to give up their armed struggle. Many did, flocking to Parihakaand turning in their arms. White people came, too, and Te Whiti received them graciously. They marveled at the elegance and refinement of this broad-shouldered man with strong features and a premature white beard. Paying him what they considered the ultimate compliment, some said that he seemed like a white man.
    Like the American colonial revolutionaries before him and Gandhi after him, Te Whiti urged his people to make or grow everything they used and not buy British goods. The Maoris who came from all over New Zealand to hear Te Whiti stayed to grow food. They came with ploughs—more and more ploughs. For years white townspeople noticed Maori headed to Parihaka with ploughs.
    Finally, on May 26, 1879, ten years after Te Whiti's announcement, white farmers looked out their windows and saw why the Maori had been collecting ploughs. All over the district, white-held land—land that had not been disputed for decades since its Maori inhabitants had been killed or driven out—was being ploughed by Maori. When the white farmers would run up to them and shout, the Maori ploughmen, always unarmed, would remain calm and