Maori Fairy Tales I

In this book, ProMosaik Children introduces 14 Māori fairy tales. The Māori are a people of immigrants who reached today's New Zealand as expert navigators on their canoes coming from Polynesia towards the end of the 13th century. The Classic epoch of Māori culture began around 1500 with the shift of the population to agriculture. The society was organized into tribes. European colonialism began with the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1642, followed by the British Captain James Cook who reached New Zealand in 1769. British colonialism resulted in wars, land conflicts, and mass confiscation of Māori land. Stripped of their economic base and vulnerable to disease, the Māori population plummeted sharply from an estimated 100,000–120,000 at contact to roughly 40,000 by 1900. After the robbery of their land, the introduction of diseases, and the alienation in the cities, the colonial power went a step further, by stealing Māori families their children. Journalist Aaron Smale describes these violations against children’s rights in his article published on al-Jazeera (Smale Aaron: A Quiet Genocide: The Legacy of Stolen indigenous Children) where he interviews the victim Tyrone Marks who was taken to a so-called welfare home when he was six. Years of abuse followed. This phenomenon the journalist calls “childhood incarceration” was the culmination of colonization. Children were abducted to white institutions where they were whipped, sexually abused, and electrocuted. ProMosaik dedicates this book to these victims. Fairy tales are an important aspect of Māori culture, as it is the case of poetry.Howes (1872-1954), a New Zealand author and educator, collected these fairy tales and published them in 1913 in London. The Māori understanding of the development of the universe was expressed in genealogical form. There are fairy tales about the creation of the universe and of the human being and others about morality and cooperation in society.