This is a remarkable pole with the names of roughly 1,600 Moriori who were alive in the 1830s written on it. The names were collected from surviving elders in the 1860s by an indigenous Moriori ethnographer named Hirawanu Tapu, who was a boy in the 1830s when his people were conquered by Māori from mainland New Zealand. By the 1860s the numbers of the Moriori had been greatly reduced by disease, massacre, land loss and a ban on marriage to other Moriori. Life on the Chatham Islands became more normal after that date but the numbers of Moriori of unmixed parentage continued to decline, until the last died in 1930. There are nearly 1,000 people who claim some Moriori descent, however. Here's a link to my first blog post (of 3) on the Chathams: [ Ссылка ] .

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