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The Last Full-blooded Moriori
24 March 1933
Resident Magistrate Ryan Holmes:
“Friends.
We are gathered here today, as you are all aware, to pay our last
tributes and respects to the memory of our departed friend, Tame
Horomona Rehe, better known to all of us by the name Tommy Solomon. The
passing of our friend as an individual is a matter more of interest and
regret than usually associated with the passing away of an ordinary
individual . . . It means not only the passing away by death of our late
friend, but the passing away of a race of people. It is, therefore, a
unique and historic occasion, and one that seldom arises in the history
of mankind.
The
deceased was the last surviving Moriori of full blood. A
race of people
who were the original inhabitants of these islands. Like most people who
possess something uncommon, he had come to be regarded by us as
something unusual, and we prided ourselves on the fact. Now. . . around
this open grave . . . we are conscious that something has happened, and
. . . we realise the loss sustained by his death. This large gathering
amply suggests the esteem in which he was held by island residents. We
all remember his genial expression and love of repartee. He liked sport.
. . and always received the result whether he won or lost with the same
broad smile . . . He attracted notice wherever he went, and the press
made the most of his periodic visits to the mainland to announce his
presence there.
Now he
is gone, and the race, as a race, is extinct.”
Twilight
faded into darkness, a journalist noted subsequently, ‘and the dull roar
of the ocean breakers echoed along the lonely sandhills as it had echoed
before the Moriori came to his new home . . . and as it would continue
to echo though he no longer heard its call’.
Within a
week a school of blackfish hurled themselves on to Hourangi Beach to the
north, as they were reputed to have done when Moriori died in
pre-European times and were sat in the sand looking out to sea to draw
these mammals ashore.
The noble
sentiments expressed by Ryan Holmes and journalist Frank Simpson,
repeated by some New Zealand newspapers and magazines, were well meant
and sincerely held. But, representing a flow of emotion over judgment,
they were not quite accurate. They added further confusion to a public
mind already bewildered about who the Moriori were and where they came
from.
Holmes was wrong to call them a
race: the Moriori were Polynesian like the New Zealand Maori, Tongans,
Samoans, Hawaiians and the inhabitants of Easter Island. He was wrong to
suggest that, with Solomon’s death, the Moriori people had become
extinct: descendants of Moriori would continue to identify with that
part of their genetic and cultural inheritance in succeeding
generations. He was also wrong to imply that Moriori culture died with
Tommy Solomon. It would have been more plausible to argue that it had
died much earlier, along with the guardians of Moriori language and
traditions in the nineteenth century; or that it remained alive in the
values and aspirations of Moriori descendants.
But it is
true that Tame Horomona Rehe, born 7 May 1884, died 19 March 1933 was
the last full-blooded descendant of the original inhabitants of the
Chatham Islands. And it is also true that four generations of New
Zealanders have been taught to vilify Solomon’s people, referring to
them as a degenerate race, deficient in intelligence and morals,
alleging that they were driven out of New Zealand by the racially and
intellectually superior Maori, to take final refuge in the Chathams as a
pitiful remnant of a primitive and vanquished people.
Nobody in New Zealand — and few elsewhere in the world, has been
subjected to group slander as intense and as damaging as that heaped
upon the Moriori. They were regarded by many Victorians as the lowest in
God’s hierarchy.
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