They crossed the Pacific a century before Columbus, signed a treaty the British broke, and built the world’s most watched Indigenous renaissance.
The Māori are the Indigenous Polynesian people of Aotearoa — New Zealand — descendants of voyagers who crossed the Pacific around 1300 CE. Today numbering nearly 900,000, about 17 percent of New Zealand’s population, they stand at the center of one of the world’s most closely watched experiments in Indigenous rights and reconciliation.
