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On my way for a month’s leave in the States I went by Sydney, Fiji and Tonga, carrying the old tapa back along the course it must have followed centuries ago. At Tonga I unwrapped it and showed it to Queen Salote. She looked it over carefully, and so did the wise old ones. They all said that it must have come from Futuna, one of the French Polynesian islands just north and west of Tonga; they told me that it was of a type made nowhere else. “It must be very old,” Salote said, “because it was not pounded with a stone, as they do it nowadays. It was scraped with a shell, and that gives it the velvet texture. And the stenciling is finer than the modern style.” She marked out the graceful feather design, almost indistinguishable. “They never made feather designs in Tonga. Tapa is still scraped in Samoa,” she said, “but this one is a double tapa, and they do not make that kind.” The old people pointed out the thin reddish color that still tinted the surface and said that it was lengo, which is turmeric, a sacred plant-juice worn only by chiefs. Futuna was on the old route where traders brought in turmeric for the body and garments of royal personages. “The feather design is royal too,” the old people said. “This tapa was worn by a king. So a king must have visited Efate.”
I went on my way, carrying something that amounted to a lost crown jewel, a proof that Tongafiti conquerors had once touched the New Hebrides. When I reached New York I sent that tapa with Mr. Paton’s letter to Mr. Rockefeller, who dropped me a note saying that he was putting the relic in a museum. I hope he did. I hope it wasn’t tucked in the family attic where a housekeeper would junk it someday among unidentified family scraps. If that should happen, the Rockefeller estate would lose a unique treasure.
CHAPTER VI
NEW ZEALAND’S LITTLE SISTER
Before I take you into the Cook Islands, where our war on disease landed me late in 1925, I must deal briefly with Polynesia’s humane and thoughtful big sister, New Zealand. The kinship of her native Maoris with those she was called upon to govern in the Cooks is so close that one can scarcely refrain from naming the two in the same breath. I have made several visits to the Dominion, both to learn and to teach, and have written hundreds of pages of reports, never without admiration for the Government’s progress in rehabilitating a magnificent race which, but for a generous conqueror, might have perished from the earth.
I grant you that their program for education and health has been marked by errors of judgment, and that their pioneering was like most Pacific conquests, selfishly concerned with taking away a native people’s God-given right to its own land and its own way of life. Perhaps New Zealand’s temperate climate worked on the temperate mind of the Anglo-Saxon when he finally set himself to govern the greatest number of Polynesians in any of Oceania’s racial zones. This might have brought about the bright change. But I am more inclined to believe that it came largely through the native Maori’s natural genius for government.
Consider the lusty fighting Maori of two centuries ago. They numbered perhaps between 200,000 and 300,000 souls. In 1896, when Government conscience awoke, the Maoris had fallen to 40,000. Then came the resurgence, forced through channels of education and public health, so that today the Polynesians on the mainland have passed the 85,000 mark and are steadily increasing. In the year 1937 the Dominion spent well over £1,000,000 on education, building, sanitary improvements and pensions for the Maoris. Public schools were thrown open to their children. Industrial training fostered the Maori’s natural ingenuity with tools. Too much, perhaps, was being done for the native; it is only human for a spoon-fed people to do as little as possible to lift the spoon.
On the Pacific New Zealand is unique: her million-and-a-half Europeans outnumber her natives by tremendous odds. This may sound easy for the Dominion, but Government, every step of the way, has been forced to tackle a variety of problems: ancient and well-earned grudges against the Pakeha (white man), a tendency to lean on a dole, carefree indifference to modern hygiene—a hundred and one cross-currents. I have seen the subsidized Maori farmer on the East Coast, dressed in British clothes, looking like any tanned European and proud of modern farm machinery. I have seen the model dwelling houses which the authorities set in the back yards of native schools to inspire the Maori housekeeper. I have seen British ladies striving to teach back native arts which the natives had forgotten. I have seen lazy boys playing pool during work hours and pertly asking, “Why work when the Pakeha pays?” And all this time, in the primitive village which he ruled with a rod of fear, Rua the Prophet lay dying of a rival witch’s curse; when he died his followers sat for days, expecting him to rise again.
In 1926 New Zealand was governing her own Maoris, their cousins on the Cook Islands and beautiful Niue, and had control of Western Samoa. She was ruling 152,000 Polynesians. It would be better for the Polynesians, I think, if she were to govern them all.