1/9 In 2018 Joan Druett published a sympathetic, revisionist history of slaver & paedophile Bully Hayes. Reviewers criticised Druett for her lack of awareness of indigenous history & contemporary scholarship. Druett's piece on Matauranga Maori has similar flaws.
2/9 Writing for Stuff late last year, Druett paid tribute to Polynesian seafaring feats & to the achievement of Maori in settling Aotearoa, but suggested that 'pigs & chickens' did not survive the voyage to these islands.
3/9 Druett seems to imagine the settlement of Aotearoa as the result of a one-off journey. This view was common amongst scholars for much of the 20th C, & is reflected in Goldie's powerful but inaccurate painting 'The Arrival of the Maoris in New Zealand'.
4/9 But oral traditions speak of organised settlement by many waka, & contemporary research backs this view up. Adele Whyte's DNA tests have revealed that Aotearoa's founding population included between 190 & 400 women.
5/9 In his book The Pathway of the Birds Andrew Crowe estimates that 20-40 waka must have visited Aotearoa to establish such a large founding population of females. It seems difficult to believe that Polynesians could not have brought pigs & chickens here.
6/9 Crowe suggests that early settlers of Aotearoa chose not to bring pigs & chickens with them, because their new home was filled with large & docile sources of protein, like moa.
7/9 Druett pays tribute to the aquatechnology of Polynesians, but says there were 'gaps' in their knowledge. They did not have, she says, any understanding of physics. But Polynesian boat-building & seafaring relied on a profound knowledge of physics.
8/9 As they developed more efficient & robust craft over the centuries, Polynesians developed an ever greater knowledge of fluid hydraulics & aerodynamics, two subjects that are today considered part of physics.
9/9 Through trial & error, Polynesians learned how to make vessels that moved smoothly & securely through the open ocean. They minimised friction between their hulls & the water, & between their sails & the air.
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