EUROPEANS DISCOVER, COLONIZE AND ANNEX NEW ZEALAND 6.
3 THE LAND WARS AND THE KING MOVEMENT 8.
This work deals with New Zealand's natives, the Maori, which simply means "human being-. I am going to report on their history, including the discovery and colonization of New Zealand or, as the Maori call it: "the land of the long white cloud-. Another aspect of this paper is the first contact with the Europeans and their relationship to the Maori. But not only is the past treated, also their life in the 20th century till today is topic, as is their culture, including their spiritual world full of believes and legends. I fear I won't be able to do justice concerning Maori culture. It would fill books as their culture includes a vast amount of different undoubtedly very interesting facets. .
To get a feeling for Maori language I sometimes have added Maori translations, which are, once explained, used in the text. .
1.3 The research.
On my search for information I visited three libraries, the city library Krefeld, the university library Duisburg and the one in Dusseldorf. Though there were many books about New Zealand, only one contained a little amount of useful and informative material to gain insight. I found this book in each of the three facilities, but nothing further but masses of travel guides in which the Maori were rarely mentioned. So I tried the next source of knowledge, the Internet where I found various homepages about this theme. Many of these pages are run by Maori tribes, who want to inform about themselves and their history.
On the whole, this work is mainly a product of a vast Internet research, only containing cross-checked facts. Worth mentioning is that some well-known encyclopaedialike Microsoft's Encarta contain false or inaccurate information about the Maori and their history. For example it's said that the Maori quickly learned to read and write (in this context, English language is meant).