The call for a
national day to mark the New Zealand wars has been backed by claims that the
wars of rebellion against the national government were land wars, which “left
much of the country's indigenous population battered and bloodied, and facing
the prospect of dying out altogether within a few generations.”
This is quite
false. The reason for the Maori
population decrease of the nineteenth century is clear from the data – there
were too few young, too few women, following the disruption and killing of the
intertribal wars that preceded the Treaty.
