Life+in+a+Maori+tribe

= Kaihautu – Espen Selfors = My name is Kaihautu and I’m the Tokanui tribe’s leader. My name actually means ‘leader’ which I think is a bit stupid, but it was chosen by the elders so I can’t protest it. Our village lies on New Zealand, or Aotearo which is our name for New Zealand. Aotearo means The Land of the Long White Cloud. Our tribe isn’t much of a big tribe. We only consist of a few hunters, the women and the elders. As the chieftain of the Tokanui tribe I have a lot of daily duties, including daily meeting with the elders, peace-talks with other tribes and making sure everything is done correctly in the village. I have learnt most of the things I know from my father, he was the chieftain before me, but he died in a tragic hunting accident which made me the chieftain when I was only sixteen years old. Since we’re such a small village everyone knows everyone and I have to control what **everyone** does **every** day. Yes, it’s kind of boring, uninteresting and you might say unnecessary but it’s just what I’m used to. I’ve been doing this every day since I were about sixteen years old. We don’t really have much contact with ‘outsiders’, but there were some people here. They came last spring and they asked us a lot of questions about our life, how we have developed over the years and our religion. They mainly focused on me, but they tried to ask some of our other tribe members too. That didn’t end as planned, especially when they wanted one of the hunters to show them around town. He freaked out because the ‘outsiders’ didn’t know about something that is important in our religion, tapu. Tapu briefly explained: Tapu is a form of system which says that you cannot touch belongings of higher or lower ranked tribe members. If you break the tapu you can be seriously punished, even though it was a lot worse earlier. Now the priests and the elders decide what the punishment is going to be, earlier it could, in a worst case scenario, be death. Since I was thirteen years old I’ve been married to Miriama. We’re not a really close since it was our parents who decided everything for us; we just stood by and were spectators. Before I was crowned chieftain, the shaman blessed me. After that blessing I’m supposed to be protected by Tangaroa, the ocean god, and Tāne, the forest god. The shaman died a few months later after that, without having trained any apprentice, so now I’m both the leader **and** the spiritual leader of the village. This adds even more tasks to my daily activities. Let me tell you this; being chieftain is no easy job. Now I’m going to tell you a story from when I was fifteen years old and was going hunting with my father, for the first time. It was a sunny spring-morning and dad, two hunters from the village and me were going to see if we could find some geese. The type of goose is now extinct but earlier it was a rare but widely accepted gourmet meal. Before we went out we were sure to get the shaman’s blessing as the tradition was, and still is. We hiked for hours to the most remote places of our beautiful island. Just as the sun was going down we found a goose. We snuck closer and closer to it. In the end we were almost close enough to pat it, which is also one of the reasons why it’s extinct; it was not shy at all and almost curious about people. We got closer and closer but eventually it noticed us. We didn’t find any other animal, so it lead to that we had to go home without any food. My father didn’t like this at all, and blamed it on the shaman’s blessing. Since my father was chieftain too, he sentenced the shaman to death penalty, and the former shaman’s apprentice took over. That apprentice was the last shaman before I had to take over. You might think that is a harsh decision by my father, but that’s the way we’ve always done it here. Whenever we are celebrating the birth of a new Maori or something other special we usually invite some of our neighboring tribes and set up a big party. Then we have one area for the chieftain, one for the hunter and so on, but the females just make the food, clean up after the men and eat the leftovers. Earlier I mentioned that we had some ‘outsider’ visitors, they especially criticized that the women had such a passive role, almost as servants, they said. When I’m done with all the daily duties I mentioned earlier I don’t really have a lot of hobbies but I enjoy hunting and I don’t mind watching others working. I think relaxing is great, and it’s the only thing that is keeping me from retiring as chief. I don’t know what I would do if I wasn’t able to just relax in shade while doing my work. Now you got to know a lot about my life and village. I would love to hear something about your life in Norway too. We are an endangered civilization, but we’re doing the best we can to keep up our traditions and not leave our lifestyle behind just because the other world has been more industrialized.

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