Individual waka – individual iwi
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Transcript
- Teacher from Darfield High School
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So then when they came over, you would probably lead us to believe that Tākitimu, Mātaatua, Kurahaupō, Tākitimu , were the lead canoes, and there were other canoes with them, yes?
- Basil
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Not necessarily. That kind of gets tied up with a lot of what happened in the early 1900s, with people like Percy Smith, and Elsdon Best, where they put together all the different individual waka traditions, and tried to form a whole story around it. And that’s what people now know as the great fleet – so this idea that they all travelled side by side. But if you go back into the traditions for each iwi, a lot of the times they don’t mention some of the other waka. So that’s a sort of a constructed story, and I think with most of those traditions you know, they are best left in their own context, and within their own iwi, rather than trying to draw them together with all the other various iwi. And it kind of goes with that saying you know, “Waiho mā Ngāti Kahungunu, a Ngāti Kahungunu kōrero;” you know, “Waiho mā Ngāti Porou, a Ngāti Porou kōrero.”