KIA ora, my name is Jack Karetai-Barrett, and I’m a year 10 student at Whakatāne High School.

Last month, I wrote an article about the introduction of pest species into Aotearoa. Some people contacted my mum, questioning my use of “Polynesian” instead of “Māori” when talking about the Polynesian kiore rat.

So, I wanted to talk about how we became known as Māori.

Prior to contact with the Europeans, we indigenous people of Aotearoa had no need for a single word to describe us as a collective; individual iwi or hapū were named and identified.

The word that has become the common descriptor today – Māori – originally meant “normal” or “ordinary”, providing a distinction between things natural to Aotearoa (people, plants, animals etc.) and something foreign, introduced, or unknown.

It is likely that when asked who we were, we would have declared ourselves tangata Māori, or normal people.

Along with this, the term “tangata whenua”, meaning “people of the land”, framed the deep attachment of the people to their respective regions.

It was only with the coming of the Europeans that there was any real necessity to have such a broad term distinguishing us from the new arrivals.

Over time, this term “Māori” became the common name for the collective indigenous people of Aotearoa.

The term “tangata whenua” has continued to highlight our relationship with the land.

As we all know, Māori belong to the greater Polynesian triangle, sharing an ancestral connection with other Polynesians right across the Pacific, including Hawaii, Tahiti, and Samoa.

Therefore, something being referred to as “Polynesian” in origin, such as the kiore, may be historically and culturally correct, even though such usage has obviously raised some eyebrows with people who are less familiar with what has been a distinction between the broader category of Polynesians, and Māori as a specific group.

It’s worth noting that within Māori society, the concepts of iwi and hapū remain fundamental to connection and identity.

Iwi, often translated as “tribe”, represents a larger collective of related people.

Iwi are sometimes named after waka, landmarks, natural features and ancestors.

For example, my iwi, Ngāi Tahu, meaning “people of Tahu”, is named after our ancestor, Tahu Pōtiki. Ngāti Awa, meaning “descendants of Awa”, tells us of Awanui-a-rangi, an ancestor the iwi Ngāti Awa is named after.

Hapū describes smaller groupings within an iwi. These groupings may be historic, and based off a shared ancestor or waka, or they may be more modern and related to treaty settlements.

The Government, in order to negotiate with hapū in the return of stolen land and resources, found it easier to deal with larger collectives, “iwi”, rather than with smaller individual hapū.

This still causes a lot of suffering among hapū, who in a way have to give up their identity and their autonomy to become part of groups that they may not necessarily had belonged to before. This has become yet another form of colonisation.

Both iwi and hapū are based on whakapapa (genealogy), and both iwi and hapū continue to form significant parts of Māori cultural, social, and political life today.

These groupings provided the framework for identity and social organisation before there was any need for a collective term such as “Māori”, and they remain important today in Māori society.

While as Māori, we are a single source people in that we all came from the same place.

Over many generations we evolved our individual cultural practices and dialects related to the regions we call home.

I’ll expand on this in my next article in October.