Drawing biodiversity lessons from early Maori
When Maori arrived on New Zealand’s shores 800 years ago, it marked the end of millions of years of peaceful isolation in which our human and pestfree environment had thrived. Jamie Morton reports
EVEN at the dawn of settlement in New Zealand — centuries before Europeans and introduced pests began a wholesale transformation of our natural landscape — what was being lost was not going unnoticed.
That has been revealed by a firstofitskind study which combined ecology, linguistics, computational biology and matauranga Maori (knowledge) to shed light on some of the first references to biodiversity decline.
A team of researchers uncovered these by searching early Maori whakatauka, or ancestral sayings, that have been preserved by anthropologists.
Their analysis showed that early recognition was mostly spurred by losses of critical food species such as moa, which was hunted to extinction within two centuries.
But more importantly, the insights emphasised that Maori closely observed — and mourned — changes in their environment.
The researchers say their findings are just as relevant today, at a time when 1000 native species are close to the brink.
‘‘Aotearoa is famous for its large number of extinctions and we wanted to try to unravel how people perceived, and responded to, those extinctions,’’ Dr Cilla Wehi, a conservation biologist at Manaaki WhenuaLandcare Research, said.
‘‘Ultimately, the question is: how do we, as humans, perceive extinction risk and how do we react to that? Can we act in a timely way?’’
What was clear was that close observation of the environment is an important precursor to action — and that people observed and mourned the loss of species such as moa.
‘‘We always wondered what our ancestors thought about the extinction of moa,’’ said Dr Wehi, who teamed up with Associate Profs Hami Whaanga and Tom Roa, of Waikato University’s Faculty of Maori and Indigenous Studies, and Massey University’s Prof Murray Cox.
‘‘When we try and fail to look after our relatives in the natural world, what did we learn from that and how was that information passed from generation to generation?’’
The team turned to a collection of whakatauka published in the 1980s by Sir Hirini Moko Mead and Neil Grove, which included many examples first recorded in the mid19th century by ethnographers such as Sir George Grey and Elsdon Best.
The researchers searched for references to animals of any kind, and then discussed and analysed each one in turn, looking at the language features and meaning.
They also looked at overall patterns, such as which birds appeared most often, and whether this was related to their size.
Trying to date the whakatauka proved a challenge.
‘‘We started by thinking of language as DNA, where language changes were like heritable mutations that we could track to see how ideas changed through time,’’ Dr Wehi said.
‘‘Because we were working with a relatively small sample size, this was a bit frustrating and rather inconclusive.’’
The researchers then decided to take a broader approach, threading together a range of different sources of knowledge.
‘‘We had to align language cues, word use and vocabulary history, names and events, whakapapa, and old and modern usages of words to approximate the date that each whakatauka was first used,’’ Prof Whaanga explained.
‘‘We wanted to do this so we could see how people’s thinking and observations changed through time, and how extinction events and knowledge about those events entered this form of oral tradition.’’
The team was heartened to find that muchreferenced bird species matched up with those whose remains were commonly found at ancient middens — or sites where waste was dumped.
That indicated Maori likely spoke often about noticeable species, that were large, and important from a food point of view.
‘‘But it’s the exceptions to this pattern that are really interesting,’’ Prof Cox said.
For example, white herons (kotuku) and kaka were compared with chiefs, while moa were often used as a device for loss.
‘‘All the birds that are missing from the whakatauka raised a flag for us.’’
Closer analysis indicated the whakatauka showed language loss and knowledge about species was often related to their extinction.
Species that became extinct early after human arrival were mentioned rarely, or not at all, in the whakatauka that has been preserved today — and this was true even for the largest of extinct species, such as the native goose.
Yet that was not the case with moa, whose demise became a symbol of extinction.
Prof Roa noted that when Maori culture and people came under severe threat in the 19th century, whakatauka of the time referred back to the disappearance of moa.
Ultimately, the research team said its study was about values, how we enacted them, and how we sometimes failed.
By learning as much as possible from the past, it said, we could create a ‘‘blueprint’’ for saving the species we had left.
More than 80% of our native birds, threequarters of our freshwater fish and marine invertebrates, nearly 90% of reptiles, and more than a third of our vascular plants are all considered either threatened or near extinct.
The team pointed to the words of Sir Hirini, who remarked how the advice of ancestors was as valuable today as it was hundreds of years ago.
‘‘It is a rare privilege to be able to reach out to the ancestors and touch their minds,’’ the renowned writer and anthropologist once said.
‘‘We get an indication of what they valued and what they considered to be good.’’ — NZME