Chathams' first people

By PETER CALDER

One of the less palatable facts of our history is that the myths about the Chatham Islands native people persisted long after the last full-blooded Moriori perished in the 1930s.

Generations of schoolchildren were taught that Moriori were a backward, degenerate race who occupied the New Zealand mainland until the Maori arrived and displaced them.

But recent evidence has set the record straight: the Moriori were the indigenous people of the Chathams who settled those islands about the same time as the canoes of the Great Migration arrived on these shores.

They were almost exterminated in a few brief years when dispossessed and rapacious Taranaki Maori invaded in the 1830s.

The islands are littered with evidence of the Moriori culture: the many tree and rock carvings are rapidly fading in the salt-laden wind and middens proliferate in shellbanks on the shore.

Most spectacularly, at Whangatete on the main island's west side, pentagonal basalt columns mark the quarry where Moriori fashioned adzes and spearheads.

The mountainous Tommy Solomon, the last pure-blooded Moriori, died in 1933. He rests in the urupa at Chatham Island's eastern tip. Nearby, a life-size cement likeness stands in his memory.

It seems to stare out towards the mainland, where the question of whether Moriori have iwi status under the Treaty of Waitangi awaits determination by the courts.