Me+in+the+Maori-tribe

 Maori woman and English woman My name is Awa. Awa means river. I am sixteen years old and the oldest of three siblings. I have long brown hair and my eyes are blue like the ocean. I live in a tribe called Tokanui and we speak Maori. Maori means normal or usual. In our religion we believe in our ancestors. We believe they help us perform magic, because my grandmother has told me that every time she lifts her hands and yells “Help us, one of our soldiers are hurt. It is really bad. Can you help us?” After a while it starts blowing and the skies are covering the sky. She also tells us that she often hear voices whispering: “My child, we are here to help you!”

The Christianity came to us in 1813. It took a while before we got used to the idea of having a new religion with us Maori. In the beginning many people was critical to it, but after a while people started respecting the Christian people for who they were. My great great-grandfather was a Christian and he married my great great-grandmother which wasn’t a Christian at all, but they didn’t care about what religion they believed in. They stayed together regardless over that they had different denomination. We Maori women uses light skirts with stripes, blue or red tops and we don’t use shoes. The Maori men uses shorter shirts than us Maori women and they don’t use tops. When we have big parties and feasts we paint ourselves with different colours all over our body.

We live in New Zealand. We came in three different periods from the eastern Polynesia to New Zealand. The first was in 950, then in 1150 and the most known one in 1350.

My Great-grandfather has told me lots of stories through the years. When he was only seventeen years old he joined the fights against the Englishmen. They used black paint in their faces and showed a fight dance before they started the fight with the Englishmen. My great-grandfather was lucky and unlike many others he survived. When my grandmother was young she had to work all her life on their farm, washing clothes, looking after her younger siblings and so on. She told me about her life when I was ten years old. She said to me that she really wanted to be a nurse, but she couldn’t because she had to help at home, while her parents were working day and night to keep food on the table. When she was only eighteen years old she married my grandfather and started a family so there was no room for an education.

As you can see, my grandmother had a hard life growing up. It was a bit easier for my mother when she grew up because she didn’t have to stay home working at the farm all her life. My grandmother convinced my grandfather to let my mother live her dreams, unlike my grandmother did. My mother first had to work a while to make some money to take the education she wanted, because my grandparents didn`t have the money to get her to school. She moved when she was eighteen and started to study. Since her childhood she always wanted to be a schoolteacher. She often played with her dolls made out of wood. She placed them around in the woods and started the teaching. When she was twenty-three years old she married my father. My farther wasn’t a Maori man. He was a real Englishman. When my mother had finished her education they both moved home to the Tokanui tribe. My mother knew that it would be trouble when her parents found out that she had married an Englishman, but she didn`t care because she was in love and her parents could say what they wanted, but she was not going to end the relationship. After a while my grandfather and grandmother accepted my father as their daughter’s husband and he became a part of the Tokanui tribe.

After they had settled down and my father had learned a bit about our culture they had me. I have been in England with my parents. There I have visited my father’s parents, uncles and aunts and my cousins. It is so fun to be there. It is so different from the Maori. We can for an example go to a thing called a restaurant and a person comes over to us and takes orders. We don’t even have to lift a finger. After a while the food comes. I love to eat chips. It is so crispy and good. In the Tokanui tribe we have to make the food ourselves and it is not the best you can get, but it’s ok. We live after the old tradition in our tribe. More and more Maori lives in the modern world in England and some have even moved to Norway, but we still live after the old tradition, living in the woods in houses made out of leaves from trees and anything else useful we can find in the woods. In England they have big and beautiful houses. My grandparents own a big and white house with a pool in the backyard. I always bath there, it is so awesome. My grandmother loves to bake. She always bakes lots of cakes and good food when we visit them. My favourite is apple cake. It smells so good. It is even better if you pour vanilla sauce on. It’s like heaven.

When I turn eighteen I want to move to England. I want to try a new life where we live in fancy houses and uses cool clothes and my dream job will be to go to different schools and tell about us Maori. I want the English people to know a bit about our culture. I also want to start a business where we can arrange trips to the Maori so people can try out our culture. I bet they wouldn’t regret it. So I am in a way both Maori woman and an English woman. I will move to England when im older and my job will be telling about us Maoris and how we live. As you can see my grandmother stayed in the Tokanui tribe all her life, my mother moved away to study, but she came home again. Now she is teaching the kids in the Tokanui tribe about Math, History, Music and Natural science. My father is a hunter. Every Tuesday and Friday my father and some of the other men in the tribe are hunting deer, squirrels and bears. But I’m going to live in England but maybe someday I will return to the Tokanui tribe. This is my life being a Maori and an English woman and how my future can be.

Sources:  []  []  []

Back to main page 