Mäori oral traditions in print
The history of publication of Mäori oral traditions, of the
narratives, songs, sayings, and genealogies handed down over generations
is, as some historians of literacy might expect, marked by length and
quality of experience of literacy. The transition of the oral traditions
to print would make a fascinating history. There is ample material for
such research, as Williams's Bibliography ,
C.R.H. Taylor's excellent Bibliography of Publications
on the New Zealand Maori (1972) and Jane McRae's
'Mäori literature: a survey' (1991) attest. It would be
important to an examination of Mäori response to writing and
print, and might support McKenzie's contention that the nature of
Mäori literacy needs reassessment (1985). At least with regard
to traditional knowledge, Mäori have retained many customs of
an oral tradition.
When the oral
traditions have come to print there have been mediators between the very
different repositories of the Mäori memory and literature.
Päkehä published the first books of oral traditions in
the 19th century from manuscripts written by Mäori. They
encouraged Mäori into print as contributors to serials in the
19th century, and as authors of books and journals in the 20th century.
By that time Mäori were encouraging Mäori into print.
In the 19th century one motive for publication by
Päkehä was to preserve the traditional knowledge which
must have seemed dangerously ephemeral, not only oral but of a dying
race. But there was also intelligent pleasure in the artistic
compositions and some, like the typographer Coupland Harding who made it
the subject of an article in Transactions and
Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute (1892), appreciated
the comparison between Mäori, Greek and Roman oral literature.
Sir George Grey was
the first mediator. In the 1850s he produced four books of songs,
narratives and sayings, all in Mäori. The sayings also had
English translations and the narratives a separate English edition. He
was therefore the first to decide how the oral texts, the form of songs,
sayings and genealogies, should be laid out in print. (Some scholars of
oral traditions suggest that the way in which narratives are printed may
alter how they are understood.) Grey was also a source of printed oral
texts, the reason for speeches and songs in Maori
Mementos (Davis, 1855) which were composed when he left the
country in 1853. The relationship between newly literate Mäori
and Päkehä publishers and Mäori opinion on
this exercise are exemplified in Jenifer Curnow's 'Wiremu Maihi Te
Rangikaheke: his life and work' (1985) about one of Grey's principal
writers, and Michael Reilly's articles (1989) concerning John White's
collecting for his six-volume bilingual Ancient
History of the Maori (1887-90).
The complexities of
the shift to print can be envisaged from the history of S. Percy Smith's
bilingual The Lore of the Whare-wananga (1913,
1915) of edited versions of manuscripts believed to be transcripts of
teachings by Wairarapa elders in the 1860s made to preserve their
knowledge. The provenance of these manuscripts and the scribal role in
copying them are explored in Biggs and Simmons's 'The sources of "The
Lore of the Whare-wananga"' (1970), and will be further elaborated by
Agathe Thornton in a forthcoming book with interesting comparison with a
similar transition in Greek oral traditions. These studies, along with
evidence from unpublished manuscripts, also raise questions about the
work of Mäori scribes apprenticed to elders or
Päkehä publishers.
If bibliographers are
correct in saying that form affects meaning, then there is reason to
examine the impact of print on the oral traditions. A little of this has
been done. Close comparison of Grey's published narratives with the
Mäori manuscripts reveals him as an intrusive editor by late
20th-century standards. Perhaps to please readers unfamiliar with oral
style, he changed words, names, grammar, the order of events. Editing
for a reader shifts the emphasis from the ear to the eye, and the
isolated reader requires an explicitness unusual to the oral texts which
were typically, although comprehensibly to tribal kin, oblique and
elliptical. The public purpose of print pressed changes on that style.
Print also brought translation to the oral traditions; it is rare for
the oral literature to be only in Mäori. Grey started that way,
although he wrote prefaces in English. Almost all subsequent work has
been bilingual, or a new literature retold in English. This rewriting
began at the turn of the century and attracted Päkehä
enthusiasts of Mäori culture (A.W. Reed was a prolific writer),
but little has been done since the 1970s. For most publishing an English
rather than Mäori readership has been expected.
Publication also saw a
shift from a tribal to a consolidated Mäori content, and
therefore fragmentation of the unified local tradition. As Simmons has
shown (1966), Grey began what was to become a common practice of
knitting together tribal versions of stories into a printed
Mäori whole. As the alphabet obscured dialect, so print masked
tribal identity in the oral traditions and this prevailed until later
this century when Mäori began their own publishing. The
literary practice of subject studies also saw intricately interconnected
tribal knowledge excerpted, in Mäori or English, to illustrate
ethnographic and other literature about Mäori society. Tribal
control over traditional knowledge was relinquished with its transition
to the very accessible medium of print.
Publishing of the oral
traditions ensued from another practice of literacy, analysis and
commentary. By this kind of work linguists and literary historians such
as Bruce Biggs, Margaret Orbell and Agathe Thornton have accorded these
texts the interest given to classics of European literature, but few
Mäori have taken up such analysis. Some have objected to it,
claiming that it exploits and misrepresents the oral traditions.
Government agencies such as the Mäori Land Court have been said
to have forced written and printed recording of the oral evidence of
tribal history. But that record in turn has been used by Mäori
for their own publications— Karanga
Hokianga (1986) is the Motuti community's edited version of
court-related committee minute books.
How Mäori
regarded, if they purchased, whether they read, early printed works of
oral traditions remains to be known. Many provided material for books
but were selective about what they offered. For some there were symbolic
and practical aspects to publication—pride, preservation.
Mäori first published their traditional texts in 19th-century
Mäori newspapers and journals. At the turn of the century both
Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand
Institute and the Journal of the Polynesian
Society had Mäori contributors, often in partnership
with Päkehä translators such as S. Percy Smith and
Elsdon Best who were instrumental in this publishing. In the 1920s the
Board of Mäori Ethnological Research started a journal, Te Wananga , with the express intention of
printing traditions, although it ran only two issues.
The production of
books by Mäori has been limited and invariably the work of
Mäori scholars, knowledgeable elders or those whose
professions—in the church, university,
government—required literate scholarship. This raises
interesting questions about the nature of Mäori literacy, of
the kind explored in Norman Simms's Points of
Contact (1991). Early in the century Apirana Ngata of
Ngäti Porou made an exceptional contribution to the oral
literature. Maybe it was, as Johannes Andersen put it, his 'scientific
mind and literary spirit', as well as his desire to revive the oral
arts, that led him to collect hundreds of songs and chants for
publication. Ngata tested out his enterprise by publishing first in
instalments in Te Toa Takitini and the Journal of the Polynesian Society between 1924
and 1951. The three volumes of translated and annotated songs, Nga Moteatea (1959-70), resulted after another
scholar, Pei Te Hurinui Jones of Ngäti Maniapoto, carried on
the work after Ngata's death. Of all the oral traditions the songs are
most visible in writing and print. There are hundreds in manuscripts,
typescripts assist groups learning them; books record and analyse them;
oral archives keep them. Yet as Mervyn McLean notes in his study Maori Music (1996), songs are commonly learned
from individuals, and for some there are rituals to follow in the
copying and use of song books. However, some composers have refused to
have their compositions published.
Since Grey's 1857
collection, there has been regular publication of lists of sayings by
Mäori and Päkehä, a major bilingual
collection being published in parts by Neil Grove and Hirini Moko Mead
(1994). Narratives published by Mäori have usually been from
their own tribes: Anaru Reedy's annotated transcription and translation
of ancestral writing Ngä Körero a
Mohi Ruatapu (1993), Jones and Biggs's Nga
Iwi o Tainui (1995). These printed reproductions of the
ancient texts recall the repetition of an oral tradition, but do not
have the creative reworking that characterised oral performance. There
is a little such innovation, as in the rewriting of the Täwhaki
legend (in Mäori and English) by Hirini Moko Mead (1996). For
this kind of publishing a primary consideration has been to support
language learning, a secondary one to preserve the knowledge, a third to
attract general interest.
There is no way of
knowing whether, the circumstances being different, Mäori would
have printed more or less of their traditional knowledge. There is still
adherence to the thinking and ways of an oral tradition. Few
Mäori have sought to publish their manuscript histories,
perhaps because print serves a public who has long been indifferent to
Mäori culture, perhaps because they are family histories. There
is sentimental attachment to the voice and face-to-face communication, a
point made by Ngata in 'The Maori and printed matter' (1940). As the
marae exemplifies, there is a preference for company, exchange of talk
and performance, over the silent, solitary occupation of reading about
traditions. Print cannot equal the warmth and intimacy of the human
voice or the association of words on the breath which come from and link
to the gods and ancestral world. But literacy combines with that
tradition: elders use books to supplement their knowledge, quotations
from the Bible and other literature are heard in songs and speeches. A
danger in this interaction is that, as much of the oral literature are
out of print, and the language and oral tradition are not sufficiently
habitual to maintain the texts, they may disappear in the gap between
orality and literacy.
Mäori react
variously to publication. The most conservative refuse. Others value it
as a means of preservation, a voice to future generations, a way of
communicating world wide. More research could identify the scope and
aspirations of Mäori publishing, and discover whether the
relatively limited publishing is a consequence of a recent history of
literacy, colonisation, language loss, or religious views about the
traditional knowledge, and whether use of print is essentially response
to a crisis, to save this knowledge for the next generations of
Mäori. If this is the motive, it is quite different from an
active choice of print to publish for common knowledge.