Page "Moriori people" Paragraph 19

Based on writing of Percy Smith and Elsdon Best, there grew theories that the Māori had displaced a more primitive pre-Māori population of Moriori ( sometimes described as a small-statured, dark-skinned race of possible Melanesian origin ), in mainland New Zealand-and that the Chatham Island Moriori were the last remnant of this earlier race.

Being based on the work of two widely respected experts, these theories also had the advantage-from a European settler view-of presenting a neat progression of waves of migration and conquest by increasingly more civilised and technically able peoples, and therefore justifying racist stereotyping and colonisation by cultural " superiors ".

These theories were widely published in the early twentieth century, and crucially, this story was promoted in a series of three articles in the School Journal of 1916, and the 1934 A. W. Reed's schoolbook The Coming of the Maori to Ao-tea-roa — and therefore became familiar to generations of schoolchildren.

Notably, the concept also undermines notions of the Māori as the indigenous people of New Zealand, by portraying them as conquerors.