In 1861 Rīria Hōhepa composed a letter to her husband Hōhepa Tamaihenga, informing him that ‘I am writing to you for you to hear’.1 He Reo Wāhine has followed Rīria’s lead: it has brought together a selection of Māori women’s words so that you may hear them speak about the issues that mattered to them.
Unsurprisingly, land is at the centre of Māori women’s writing, and is central to their testimony before official commissions of enquiry or in the Native Land Court, as well as in their many petitions. In their concern for land, theirs was an experience shared with their wider family and community, but in setting out their claims in writing, they testified to ways land loss affected them as women. As Pat Hohepa and David V. Williams note of the Native Land Court, women’s experiences in that institution have yet to be fully investigated by histor ians, but they suspect that it eroded women’s succession rights and economic independence, which they had customarily enjoyed. They assert that, ‘Maori customary dealings in land were not only subject to assimilationist practices but also gendered views on Mana Wahine. What assisted this was the fact that the Native Land Court was a colonially defined patriarchal institution both in the way it was organised and in its operations.’2
As examples from He Reo Wāhine demonstrate, some women did very well in the court, eventually acquiring large estates. Even so, as their petitioning demonstrates, most women did not gain advantage from the operations of the court, instead they experienced land loss, but unlike their male relatives, women’s economic freedoms relating to land and property, particularly if they were married, were severely constrained because of their gender. Some women tried to protect their interests, and those of their children, by making wills directing the future of their property. Women’s wills are valuable sources for shining light on their concerns, and deserve far greater attention than New Zealand historians have hitherto given them, for through the details of the accumulation and distribution of family wealth and property, they reveal insights into family relationships as well as their views about the Native Land Court itself.3
Although He Reo Wāhine does not focus on the intricacies by which the Native Land Court and related machinery of state undermined women’s status, we can see its reach and effects, in particular the dispossession of Māori lands, and the resulting marginalisation, poverty and vulnerability. As the state grew in size through the nineteenth century, Māori women were increasingly required to adhere to its dictates and requirements. In tracing women’s correspondence with politicians and public servants, and following cases as they wound through the system, we have brought to light the depth of the difficulties women faced in having their appeals for justice investigated. It is hard to comprehend the state’s reach and power in women’s lives, without viewing their words and testimonies, for these bring us close to their experiences, thoughts and feelings. As Bryony Cosgrove, writing about the Australian context, notes, ‘while literacy played a role in the loss of much Indigenous culture and language, it also equipped Indigenous communities with the means to negotiate with white authorities, albeit on an unequal footing.’4
This book is certainly not designed to be the final word on Māori women’s experiences, but it offers a few examples of what lies in some of New Zealand’s manuscript and archival collections, and perhaps opens the door to further historical research on individuals’ lives. It has been constrained somewhat by the limits we have set for ourselves, in terms of the period covered, and also that the women should be heard in their own first-person voices, however filtered or modified that voice might be. More broad topics would lend themselves to more liberal sweeps of archival and manuscript holdings.
In particular, the telling of Māori women’s history could benefit from more biographical work on tūpuna wahine. While there are short accounts of various Māori women in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, and The Book of New Zealand Women (many contributed by descendants), a number of women of mana, such as Te Paea Tīaho of Tainui, Takiora Dalton of Ngāti Ruanui, and Niniwa-i-te-rangi and Ārihi Te Nahu of Ngāti Kahungunu, left sufficient historical traces to allow much more expansive stories of their lives to be uncovered, and their imprint on the wider world to be assessed.5 Niniwa, in particular, was earnestly involved in writing for, and managing, Māori-language newspapers, although much of this activity occurred in the early twentieth century.
As Charlotte Macdonald has noted, Māori possessed a vigorous newspaper culture, and she speculates that: ‘the press was a way of women speaking in public that was less possible in the formal protocol of the marae or of the Paremata Māori sessions. Further investigation is needed of their columns.’6 We agree with Macdonald – work is needed to assess what Māori women’s contributions to this lively newspaper culture can reveal about their participation in political as well as intellectual debates. Niupepa also offer windows through which to see other aspects of Māori women’s lives. These discourses, including those of Māori and Pākehā males, not only cast light on how women lived, loved, laboured and passed away, but also illustrate the writers’ own attitudes to Māori women’s place within society. Advertisements tell little known histories of Māori women as consumers of colonial products, and as producers of their own pānuitanga.
Some women, as the material in He Reo Wāhine indicates, left a far greater imprint on the public record through sustained letter writing, petitioning campaigns, and engagement with newspapers, but the majority entered the written archive only fleetingly when they encountered the state, or its functionaries. Because of this, the written record is only one of many viable sources for examining Māori women’s colonial experience. Throughout He Reo Wāhine we have stressed the interconnection between Māori orality and textuality, or voice and text, because for much of the period covered by this volume, the metaphors and allusions common to the oral world were also present in women’s writing, especially their letters. Māori took up print for their own reasons, many in order to put their histories and whakapapa on paper. Women’s oral compositions, notably waiata, were an area in which they were expert. Capacity and willingness to use both Māori oral sources, such as waiata, and to read textual sources in light of oral conventions, is required if historians are to produce fully textured and nuanced accounts of Māori women’s experiences.
Just as importantly, historians should engage more with te reo Māori, either by improving their language ability, or by collaborating with scholars with the necessary skills. For most nineteenth-century Māori, te reo was their primary and often only means of communication, and this is reflected in He Reo Wāhine. Government forms women completed and signed were printed in Māori, and their correspondence as well as their oral testimony was largely provided in te reo. Although contemporary officials rendered much of this material into English, and a small number of scholars today have continued translating texts, a massive number of documents remain untranslated to this day, a valuable resource that historians ignore at their peril.
New Zealand scholarship draws heavily upon the public collections of manuscript materials, and especially records of the state, but historians have not always paid close attention to wāhine Māori, even though their writings are numerous. Paying attention to Māori women’s words, wherever they might appear – in waiata, archival collections or on public monuments – enriches and broadens New Zealand’s historical scholarship.7 For instance, being attentive to women’s words brings different experiences to light: Hinemoa’s words, and her fateful decision, for example. Hers is not the kind of experience that usually appears in historical treatments of the Māori past or colonial history, nor used by scholars interested in Māori engagement in writing. A suicide note does not fit in with the argument that Māori wrote mainly for political purposes, or to express tribal identity. As this volume shows, women wrote, and spoke, for a variety of reasons, on war, land, love and sorrow, whakapapa, for their own benefit or for their children, whānau, hapū or iwi. Writing was used for creative expression, and women corresponded in order to maintain familial ties. In their petitions, letters and testimonies, women’s imprint on the colonial archives is significant, and attests to the many strategies they took to manage their interests, care for whānau, and give voice to their political views.