The Māori are the indigenous Polynesian people of Aotearoa (New Zealand), descended from voyagers who reached the islands in ocean-going canoes around 1300 — the last major landmass humans settled. They built a society of iwi and hapū bound by mana, kinship, ritual, art, and warfare, signed with the British Crown the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 whose Māori and English texts still do not agree, lost most of their land in war and law, and then drove one of the great cultural revivals of the modern world.
In 1840 the British Crown and many Māori chiefs signed the same treaty in two languages, and the two languages promised different things. The English text said the chiefs ceded "sovereignty" to the Queen. The Māori text said they ceded "kāwanatanga," governance, while keeping "tino rangatiratanga," full chiefly authority over their lands and people. Most chiefs signed the Māori version. That gap between the two texts became the root of a century and a half of grievance, and it has never fully closed.