Editing Moriori Genocide

After members of the Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama tribes were displaced from their homelands in Taranaki during the intertribal Musket Wars, they hijacked two European ships and headed off from Wellington to the Chatham Islands. Upon arriving on the beaches of Port Hutt, the Moriori welcomed the Māori, to which the invaders murdered a 12-year-old girl and displayed her flesh on posts. After the incident, the Māori invaders declared that the islands were now Māori property and that the Moriori were now vassals.  

During a council at Te Awapatiki, the Moriori debated on whether or not to fight back against the invaders, but the elders told them to remain pacifistic in accordance to a peaceful code known as Nunuku's Law, which prohibited violence. However, this only led to more individuals getting killed, cannibalized, and prohibited from marrying to have children. Those who were not killed were enslaved by the Māori invaders, forbidden to speak their native language, and forced to abandon their sacred sites by urinating and defecating on them. Many women and children were staked on the beaches and were left there to die in great pain for several days. The introduction of European diseases also contributed to the Moriori's decline.

In 1870, the Native Land Court declared that since the Māori have conquered the Moriori population, the Māori were the ones who could have ownership of the Chatham Islands, even though the invaders returned to Taranaki. Their native language has died out in 1898 and the last full-blooded individual, Tommy Solomon, died in 1933. The British also constructed a myth suggesting that the Moriori were displaced by the Māori from their original homelands in mainland New Zealand and that they were inferior beings, due to their pacifistic nature. Though the Moriori were regarded as extinct at this point, they were finally recognized as an indigenous people in the 1990's and they were granted rights to their lands in the Chatham Islands.