Part three of Newsroom’s six-part video series looking at the Māori economy, now a $70 billion sector, focuses on its historical context.
Tēnā koutou ngā tāngata katoa o Aotearoa, Niu Tīrene. Nau mai haere mai ki te wāhanga tuatoru o te pakipūmeka mō te 'Māori Economy'. Ko tēnei wāhanga e kōrero mō ngā hītori o Te Taiōhanga Māori.
The first iteration of the Māori Economy is often cited as having started when early whalers and settlers arrived, and the consequent trade that took place between the parties.
However, trading for Māori was an embedded part of pre-colonial New Zealand. Trading routes between Iwi and hapu were well established and facilitated the trade of resources abundant in some areas and not others e.g. pounamu (greenstone), kai moana (seafood), preserved birds.
When early settlers arrived, Māori embraced the new and different trade opportunities, and associated technologies. Quickly establishing themselves as the primary manufacturers of wheat, flour and vegetable produce. Māori not only dominated food production in meeting the dietary needs of settlers but also the distribution chain of the produce they were producing - owning and operating the majority of trade ships that transported their produce to the proliferating colonies of Aotearoa, and Australia.
“We were growing food and selling food, specifically for the first wave of Europeans that were coming here. Like most whānau and hapu around the country, we’ve always been commercial” says Kerensa Johnston, CE of Nelson based Wakatū Incorporation.
The 1840s-1860s epoch of Māori entrepreneurship is fundamental to what New Zealand was to become. Māori were directly responsible for the provision of the resources that enabled early settlers.
The tipping point for the Māori economy, for Māori, occurred when the settler population out-numbered that of Māori. What followed was years of dispossession and alienation of Māori from land and resources.
This six-part documentary was produced for Newsroom by Hinge Productions and is presented by Māori business analyst Joshua Hitchcock of Te Atiawa.
* Made with the support of NZ on Air *
