Māori

The Māori are the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand, descended from East Polynesian voyagers who reached the islands in ocean-going canoes between roughly 1320 and 1350. In the fifteenth century a branch moved to the Chatham Islands and became the Moriori. Māori society was built on extended families, clans and tribes; rival tribes competed for land and prestige from fortified hill villages, or pā.

European contact began in the eighteenth century, and Māori quickly took up iron tools, potatoes and firearms. The musket trade fed the Musket Wars that opened in 1806, in which twenty to forty thousand people died and tens of thousands were enslaved, redrawing the tribal map.

The Ngāpuhi chief Hongi Hika launched great raids from 1818, and in 1835 invading tribes destroyed the Moriori community on the Chatham Islands.