In this lecture Sir (Tā) Tipene traces the origins of contemporary Ngāi Tahu with some thoughts on the evolution of Māori social organization within Te Waipounamu (the South Island of New Zealand). He tracks the historical journey of the people who became known as ‘Ngāi Tahu’, from their origins, conflicts, and migrations to the perfidious 19th-century colonial land purchases by the Crown. Tā Tipene provides rich detail concerning the tribal migrations from the north, rooted in ‘traditional history’, into an era of measured, quantified, chronologized historicity in which southern tribespeople engaged with acquisitive northern invaders and then white settlers and, with the latter, Western history as we know it.
O’Regan et al. (Fri,) studied this question.