Once Were Warriors

Duff painstakingly showcases how the assimilative projects and biased historical accounts enforced by the British Crown and the New Zealand government create a distortion in how Māori have come to view themselves. Through the novel’s resolution, he also explores how, with effort, they might come together as a cohesive community once more. Denied their proper history, Duff portrays the men of Pine Block as people who confound the fundamental concept of Māori warriorhood with unadulterated, tantrum-prone violence. Jake is one such example when he uses violence to assert his social standing among his community. He makes light of beating Beth when she refuses to take his friends’ food requests during his party: “Man must’ve been tired from all them late drinking nights (and giving his wife a hiding, hahaha!)” (46). Though Jake has a complicated relationship with his Māori ancestry, “giving [one’s] wife a hiding” is a common practice among most Māori men of Pine Block. Duff hence suggests that these men have a distorted view of themselves as “warriors” with violence in their nature. As Beth explains, however, such behavior is not part of their culture:

The hell you mean, Maori way? You call yourselves Maoris? […] The Maori of old had a culture, and he had pride, and he had warriorhood, not this bullying, man-hitting-woman shet, you call that manhood? It’s not manhood, and it sure as hell ain’t Maori warriorhood. So ask yourselves what you are (22).

Her opinion is later corroborated by Te Tupaea, the paramount chief. Although he blames the men’s alcohol addictions, he still announces” “And this […] beer, it has you beat up your wives, your children, turn against each other. Yet you dare call yourselves Maori? Pah!” (175). His final “Pah” is plosive to reflect his immense disgust.

These conflicts in the novel raise the question of what it means to be Māori. It is a question that many characters struggle to answer. The public education that children receive is not presented as a good basis for cultural understanding since it actively undermines Māori history by privileging dates, facts, and people relevant to British colonialism. Often, words escape both Beth and Jake when they try to sum up something important to their community. Their hesitancy is usually a result of their alcohol consumption: “Yet we’re good people. […] And we have this… Beth thinking hard, trying to match up instinctive understanding with a suitable word—passion” (37). Her struggle to find a word in English relates to her disconnection from her culture and history: She has an “instinctive understanding” but only the colonizer’s language with which to express it.

Words, and by extension, books, are a recurring symbol in the narrative and a source of great cultural anxiety for Beth. No one that she knows in Pine Block has books. She calls Māori a “bookless society” since “they didn’t have a written language before the white man arrived” (4). What literature her children do consume depicts unrealistic fantasies, like Nig’s pornography magazines, or has no commonality with Māori, like Grace and Polly’s teenage girl magazines with pictures of only white girls. The narrator shows that Māori did actually have a written way to communicate, but what “books” there are to learn about themselves are inaccessible to most Pine Blockers. Māori books, Beth remarks, aren’t written on pages. Like their moko, they are chiseled and carved:

Every pace a carved wooden slab of wall column, depicting an illustrious ancestor, the legends of the people; the lore of the tribe etched out in intricate (but secret) detail. […] Two main centre support poles, each an elaborately carved totem of massive log. A bookless society’s equivalent of several volumes. If you knew how to translate it, that is (115).

Few characters can “translate it,” including Beth. Access to this unfiltered version of their history is limited to a few who still know their language, spoken and carved. Assimilative efforts have been effective: Beth and most of her community do not speak te reo, let alone recognize the meanings behind the carved history in her clan’s wharenui. They know only English. Without access to the cultural touchstones of their identity, Pine Blockers effectively do become “The Lost Tribe,” as Grace perceives them: an insecure group that has lost its way and is slowly disappearing from sight, like the Tūrehu clan of Māori lore. By the end of the novel, community events begin to reverse these disconnections and distortions.