MAORI


 * THIS IS A STORY FROM A PERSON IN THE MAORI-TRIBE.**

“Kill those maggots”! , our chief warrior demanded.’’ Make them want to go to hell- and stay there”!, he continued. But the tough and brave words from our chief didn’t do any good. Our spears and bows and arrows were no match against the enemies new killing machine, and even though many of us were brave hearted, we couldn’t resist the rain of bullets from the enemy. We are at war against another Maori tribe, and the war isn’t turning our way. After the newcomers from Britain settled in and around our island, the wars against the Iwi- tribe have been a bloody mess. The casualties are very high, hundreds have been killed and thousands have been injured. The reason is simple; the settlers brought something terrible to our island, a machine that can kill hundreds of our soldiers from long distances, and can pack a big punch in our defence-lines. I am talking about something that the newcomers from Europe call the gun. Our major enemy has seen the advantage in this weapon, and they have captured hundreds of this weapon which is literally slaughtering our tribe. Luckily for me(and the my tribe), the war is now currently over, so now I am staying at home, healing my injuries and licking my wounds after the bloody fights. The tribe that I belong to is a part of the big Maori tribe, and the name of our tribe is Tokanui. My task in the tribe is to be a warrior. My mission is to protect our tribe from hostile attacks and also to engage the opponents and hit them hard. People in the tribe call me Huna, but my whole name is Hunapo, which means hidden darkness. I live with my wife Awa which means the river and my two kids Kaihautu and Hahona which means leader and healer. My wife Awa is a wonderful woman and if it hadn’t been for her, I probably had died. She washes my clothes, supports me with food and is a great person to talk to. Having a wonderful woman like this is very helpful when you are a warrior, because seeing all the killing and the blood in the war can for somebody be very tough. When talking about my family, I must not forget to talk about my two kids, because they are also wonderful. They are six and seven years old and both are very unlike each other. My youngest boy Kaihautu wants to follow my footsteps and wants to become a great warrior like me, but my oldest son Hahona will on the other hand become something totally different from us. He is dreaming of becoming a medical person who can heal sick and ill people. I think he will become a great medic, because like the rest of the Maoris’, he is considered to be a smart person. Due to the new settlers in and around the island, I find it important to have competent people in this occupation because the immigrants have and will continue to bring terrible deceases that we are not immune against to our island. People like my oldest son are therefore    a must on our island. Nowadays the other warriors in our tribe and I train to perform better in the combats against our enemies. We practise every day and I think it is important for us to have strong warriors because then we can protect our major values like women and children. When we are going out in battle, we have a ritual. The ritual that I am talking about is called the Haka dance, and is meant to encourage the warriors and prepare them for the combat. The dance is a very virile dance and consists mainly of jumping around and slapping the arms against the ties and the breast. Yelling and screaming is also a big part of this ritual. Many people will probably find this dance strange, but we find it very helpful and I think that we can perform better in combat after performing this dance. Our training and exercises are not just to perform better in war, we also use our experience and our skills from the practise to go hunting and support our tribe with food. The reason why I wanted to become a hunter and a warrior was because of something very sad that happened many years ago: I t was a cold and windy autumn day, and my grandfather wanted to hunt because of the ideal weather. My father also joined the hunt and I remember them taking their spears and going in the woods. This seemingly happy situation had unfortunately a very unhappy ending. My grandfather had managed to kill a bird with his spear but he was surprised when he saw that the bird had two spears in it when he found it. The reason was that another hunter from the Iwi-tribe also had seen the bird and thrown his spear against it. Then the inevitable thing happened, they didn’t know who the bird belonged to. They had a fight and in the end the Iwi-tribe member killed my grandfather and ran away. When our tribe accused the Iwi-tribe for killing one of our best men, they denied the accident and accused us for lying. We tried to make a deal, but in their anger of the accusations, they attacked us and killed two of our best men’s- my father and his brother. First I was very sad of loosing my father and my uncle, but later on the anger inside me grew, and I wanted to have payback time. Then hell broke loos. We attacked them and we managed to kill some of them, but it didn’t ease the pain of my dead uncle and father. The two tribes fought together at several years until a couple of days ago. Then we found out that killing was not the answer so we stopped the bloody fights. So now I hope that we can be friends with the Iwi-tribe, but I will never forgive them for killing my dear beloved father and uncle.