History turns through power’s circle, reminding that liberation begins when we learn to heal instead of dominate.

When the Oppressed Become Oppressors: The Forgotten Story of the Moriori

History often divides the world into victims and perpetrators, as if those categories were stable. Oppression functions as a shifting social relation that appears whenever power is unevenly distributed. The story of the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands, near New Zealand, reveals this uncomfortable truth. In the early nineteenth century, the Moriori -a small Indigenous Polynesian community devoted to peace under Nunuku’s Law- were invaded, enslaved, and nearly exterminated by the Maori, another Indigenous group who themselves had endured colonial dispossession. The massacre of the Moriori by the Maori is rarely remembered because it disrupts the comforting binaries of modern memory that separate virtue and violence.

When two Maori tribes, Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama, arrived on the Chatham Islands in 1835, they brought with them the traumas of colonization. British settlement, warfare, and land loss had already fractured Maori society. Historian Michael King (2000) notes that around 900 Maori refugees seized a European ship to reach the Chathams, seeking new land after displacement. What followed was a brutal campaign of domination. The Moriori, who believed violence was forbidden by ancestral law, welcomed the newcomers peacefully, unaware that their openness would lead to devastation. Within days, hundreds were massacred, and the survivors enslaved. For years, they were forced to work without rights or kinship, forbidden to marry or reproduce freely. By 1862, only about 100 Moriori remained. European colonizers, who soon expanded control over both groups, documented but largely ignored the genocide. The Moriori became doubly invisible; first erased by Maori conquest, then by colonial historiography that preferred to portray all Indigenous peoples as unified victims of European expansion.

The Moriori genocide complicates moral categories. As Fanon (1963) wrote, colonialism dehumanizes everyone it touches, including those who have been colonized. The Maori, themselves dispossessed and brutalized by imperial intrusion, reproduced domination when they encountered those weaker than themselves. This reflected not individual or cultural failure, but the structural violence shaping their world. Fanon warned that liberation movements that fail to transform material conditions risk reproducing the same hierarchies they fought against. The Maori conquest of the Chathams demonstrates this: colonial disruption and scarcity pushed an oppressed people to act through the logic of the very system that dehumanized them.

To read this history through an anti-orientalist lens, as Said (1978) might suggest, is to avoid reducing it to “native savagery.” The focus lies in understanding the structural contagion of domination rather than attributing moral pathology to Indigenous peoples. Benjamin (1968) reminds us that “every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism,” meaning that no culture remains untouched once it becomes entangled with power. The Maori, like any human collective, were capable of cruelty when survival, land, and recognition were at stake. Their violence emerged within a colonial world system where scarcity and hierarchy had already been normalized. To condemn them without context would simply continue the orientalist reasoning that historically framed colonized peoples as primitive. The task, instead, is to understand how empire implants its own violence into the very fabric of those it subjugates.

Marx and Engels (1932) described history as the struggle over material reproduction, where social relations are shaped by the mode of production. Their framework helps clarify this tragedy. The Maori invasion developed from the political economy of dispossession rather than inherent aggression. The British colonial presence on New Zealand’s North Island had destabilized food systems and social relations. Displacement and hunger created conditions where expansion became a survival strategy. Oppression reappears as a historical consequence shaped by material conditions. As King (2000) argues, the Moriori represented an alternative vision of life -a communal order based on peace and restraint- but that vision was annihilated in a moment when war had become the prevailing logic of existence. Their extinction was not inevitable; it resulted from competing survival within a system already distorted by colonial scarcity.

The erasure of the Moriori genocide from popular consciousness exposes how history manages collective guilt. Western narratives, eager to present colonized peoples as pure victims, often omit stories that complicate that moral clarity. Recognizing that the oppressed can also exercise domination exposes how power operates universally. As Benjamin (1968) would insist, history is written by the victors; but sometimes also rewritten by those who need innocence to sustain their moral order. The Moriori story resists both. It forces a reckoning with the uncomfortable idea that liberation, unless it transforms the structures of scarcity and power, can mutate into new forms of control.

Today, the descendants of the Moriori are rebuilding their community and language, pursuing recognition and cultural renewal. Their revival carries profound political meaning. It reminds us that justice depends on dismantling the systems that continually recreate hierarchies. Remembering the Moriori means understanding oppression as a condition to overcome through transformation, not as an identity to preserve. The struggle of the oppressed must always include the vigilance to prevent becoming what they once resisted.

References

Benjamin, W. (1968). Theses on the philosophy of history. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (pp. 253–264). Schocken Books.

Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth (R. Philcox, Trans.). Grove Press.

King, M. (2000). Moriori: A people rediscovered. Viking Press.

Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1932). The German Ideology (Written 1845–1846). International Publishers. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/

Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon Books.