Part D: The Practice

15. Utu and muru

Utu

utu — usually translated “revenge”, and the translation is wrong.

The root means “to reciprocate, to balance, to pay”. And it applies equally:

To gifts — a gift requires a counter-gift
To hospitality
To insults
To killings

It is the principle of restoring balance — in either direction.

A generous gift requires utu as much as an insult does. And the failure to reciprocate diminishes your mana — whether a gift or a harm is involved.

Muru

muru — ritual plunder.

When someone committed a transgression — including negligence or even an accident that showed carelessness — a group would come and take his belongings: food, canoes, tools, equipment.

And here is the striking thing

The plunder was expected, accepted, and in some cases welcomed.

The reason:

It closed the matter. After muru, the account was paid
It did not dishonour. The person who received muru kept his place
Refusal was worse — it meant the matter stayed open
And the scale of muru was indicative of his mana: the more important the person, the greater the plunder

The system is restorative, not punitive

Note what is absent: no imprisonment, no guilt as inner state, no correction.

There is an imbalance that must be corrected, and a public procedure that corrects it.

And the modern continuation

This did not stay history.

New Zealand instituted in 1989 a system for youth offending based on family group conference: the victim, the offender, the families and the community meet and agree on how the harm will be repaired.

It was directly inspired by Māori practice, and became the starting point of the restorative justice movement internationally — adopted, with variations, in dozens of countries.

A pre-colonial practice of managing harm became New Zealand law and then an exportable model.

16. Karakia

karakia — translated “prayer”, and closer to correct utterance.

What it is

It is not primarily petition. It is accurate recitation that sets a state in order: opens, closes, protects, neutralises tapu, consecrates.

Where it is used

Almost everywhere, and today equally:

At the opening and closing of every meeting — and this applies in schools, hospitals, ministries, companies
Before food
Before entering a forest or taking anything from it
Before launching a canoe, before building, before travel
At birth and in illness
In whakanoa

And the critical feature

Accuracy counts absolutely.

Error in recitation was traditionally considered dangerous for the one reciting — in some formulations, lethal.

The power does not lie in the intensity of intention nor the holiness of the speaker. It lies in correct, complete, uninterrupted utterance.

This is different from many systems of prayer, and worth noting: it is not relation, it is execution.

And today

A large portion of contemporary karakia has Christian elements, and the two coexist without problem for most.

And the practice is institutionally present: opening a meeting with karakia is absolutely common in New Zealand public life, by everyone.

17. Rongoā

rongoā Māori — the therapeutic tradition. And it has three inseparable parts.

1. Rongoā rākau — the plants

The pharmacopoeia rests on endemic species, among them:

kawakawa — among the most used; leaves for pain, skin, digestion
harakeke — New Zealand “flax”; the root and sap for wounds, and the fibres for every other use
kūmarahou, koromiko, mānuka, horopito, rātā

2. Mirimiri and romiromi — the somatic

Massage, pressure, manipulations. A separate specialty.

3. Karakia — the spiritual

And it is considered inseparable. The plant without the utterance is not the same treatment.

The collection protocol

And here the tapu shows again:

Karakia before taking anything
Take only as much as you need
Do not take from the first plant you find
There are restrictions on who collects and when
The collection itself is a tapu state, and closes with whakanoa

The tohunga

tohunga — specialist, in any field. Not only healer:

tohunga whakairo — the master of wood carving
tohunga tā moko — the artist of moko
tohunga ahurewa — the priest of high grade

The word means “the one who has mastered”. Every tohunga is in heightened tapu because of the work.

And the contemporary, which is noteworthy

Rongoā is state-funded today.

The Ministry of Health supports rongoā services, and — more significantly — the national accident compensation body began from 2020 to cover rongoā Māori as a recognised service.

That is: traditional therapy with state funding, inside a Western health system. Chapter 20 shows how this became possible.

18. Mate Māori and rāhui

The distinction

mate Māori — “Māori sickness”: illness that arises from breach of tapu, from mākutu (curse), from ancestral displeasure.

mate Pākehā — “sickness of the foreigners”: the ordinary, the imported, the one for which you go to the doctor.

And the distinction itself is post-contact — its name says so. It is a pragmatic dual system: for one you go to the hospital, for the other to the tohunga, and many use both without contradiction.

The diagnostic move

You do not ask “what is it?”. You ask “what was breached, by whom, and when?”

And the answer is often locatable in a specific act: you entered a cemetery and then ate without washing; you took something from a restricted place; you breached a rāhui.

Rāhui

And here lies the liveliest example of the whole system.

rāhui — temporary restriction placed on an area. It is used:

After a drowning or death — the shore or river is closed, usually for days or weeks
For resource recovery — a fishing ground is closed to replenish
After pollution or other damage

And it is observed.

Today, when a rāhui is placed after a drowning, the local authorities often announce it officially, and it is widely respected also by non-Māori New Zealanders — fishers, swimmers, tourist operators.

It is simultaneously mourning, resource management and public safety — with one tool.

And it is the clearest proof that tapu is not superstition but a functional system of temporary access regulation.

19. The 1907 Act

The “what failed” of this document — and the failure does not belong to the tradition.

The context

The Māori population collapsed after contact. From perhaps a hundred thousand or more, it fell to approximately 42,000 by 1896 — mostly from imported diseases, and secondarily from wars and confiscations.

The dominant European narrative of the time spoke of “a dying race”.

The law

In 1907 the Tohunga Suppression Act was passed: it criminalised the practice of the profession of tohunga.

And the uncomfortable complexity

It was not simple colonial imposition.

The law was promoted by Māori parliamentarians — among them one who was himself a physician — and was supported by Māori modernisers.

Their logic: under conditions of epidemics that were decimating the population, some practices were genuinely harmful — and some who presented themselves as tohunga were charlatans. They considered that the survival of the people required Western medicine.

And the result

Five decades of interrupted transmission.

The law pushed the practice into illegality. Apprenticeship was broken. Knowledge that passed from person to person was lost with the people.

It was repealed only in 1962.

And not only this

In parallel, the language was suppressed in schools. Children were physically punished for speaking te reo Māori, up to the mid-20th century.

By the 1970s, the language was in real danger of extinction.

The reversal

And then something happened that does not happen often:

1982 — the kōhanga reo, “language nests”: nursery centres where only Māori is spoken, with the grandmothers as teachers
1985 — the kura kaupapa, schools of full Māori education
1987 — te reo Māori becomes an official language
2004 — Māori television

The language was not fully saved — but the fall was arrested, and speaker numbers are growing.

And the important thing for this text: the recovery of Part E is not continuity. It is reconstitution after a rupture of fifty-five years — and the fact is part of the honest description.