Running Head: MAORI Page 1

The Mighty Maori
Ericka Silva
ANT101 Intro to Cultural Anthropology
Katie Custer
Mar. 4, 2013

Running Head: MAORI Page 2
The Mighty Maori The Maori were people that were said to have come from Tahiti and arrived in New Zealand in the 14th Century time frame. They came in what was called “the seven canoes of the great fleet”. (Latham, C; 1996) They are considered to be Polynesians and originally had found their home in the top parts of New Zealand. They are what we call “foragers” in the Anthropology world. Foragers are those cultures that hunt and gather from the land in which they live on. (Nowak, B/Laird, P; 2010) In the following pages I will describe how this culture lived and survived. I will describe how their ways of life were and events that came about. In 1350 they were a tribe that migrated from the Polynesian islands and had made their way to New Zealand. These foragers came in a mass group and were mostly hunters and fishermen. When they migrated they had brought their own plants and animals that they had domesticated themselves. Unfortunately most of it did not make it through the travel because the climates were too different and the animals and plants were not used to the new land. For many centuries these people survived and flourished in their new land. The Maori have a unique way of believing that there are supernatural ways that help them. They believed in the spiritual aspect of things from this world. The Maori thought that an object or even a person could possess a psychic power or “mana”. They called this “tapu”. These were done by what they considered being touched or inherited. But this only happened once a life or spirit of someone was gone and their life had ended. The Maori believed that all men who were free were tapu and this gave them a certain part in their