Pre-Māori settlement of New Zealand theories
Pseudohistorical theories of New Zealand settlemsnt / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Since the early 1900s the fact that Polynesians (who became the Māori) were the first ethnic group to settle in New Zealand (first proposed by Captain James Cook) has been accepted by archaeologists and anthropologists.[1][2] Before that time and until the 1920s, however, a small group of prominent anthropologists proposed that the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands represented a pre-Māori group of people from Melanesia, who once lived across all of New Zealand and were replaced by the Māori.[3] While this claim was soon disproven by academics, it was widely and controversially incorporated into school textbooks during the 20th century, most notably in the School Journal. This theory subsequently spawned modern claims of a pre-Māori settlement of New Zealand by various ethnic groups, many conspiratorial in nature. Today, such theories are considered to be pseudohistorical and negationist by scholars and historians,[4][5] and racist by many observers, with the Moriori myth having been used to justify settler colonalism.[6][better source needed][5][7]
In recent times, a greater variety of speculation of New Zealand's first settlers has occurred outside of academia. These ideas typically incorporate aspects of conspiracy theories as they are in opposition to the last 100 years of academic research.[8][9][10] The common acceptance of these unsubstantiated theories has been used by prominent politicians and public figures to attack Māori politics and culture.[3][11]