Ps. As the counter to “plains people”, the Amis REALLY dislike being called mountian people 
Demand?
I see!
Did the Maori displace earlier indigenous people when they first came to the islands, or were they like there forever?
In the end it’s all about the power. You got the power, you name the land whatever the hell you want. Or seen backwards, if the Maori are successful in getting everyone to use Aotearoa, it probably means they got some power.
I think they were the first people recorded there, maybe 10,000 years back as part of the Polynesian expansion.
Incidentally, once I read an interesting history about a band of Maori who obtained firearms in the 1800’s and embarked on a brutal program of conquest on several unfortunate outlying islands. But nothing to do with the above question of course.
The Maori were the first people to reach the islands around 700 years ago, making New Zealand the last major landmass to be discovered by the human race.
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Based on that logic, why are people so up in a huff about european colonists?
Check out the mass extinctions and extirpations of species in New Zealand. In the end, people are all the same, regardless of skin pigmentations and superstitions.
And the deforestation. Maori settlers burnt forest down so they had better sight lines of approaching enemy tribes.
John Oliver had a fun little piece on that, didn’t he? 
I think that one’s already taken. 
The term “mountain compatriots” (ROC racialized/spatialized lingo) has thankfully—through Indigenous efforts in the 1980s—been thrown into the garbage can of history.
But it oddly lives on, with the mountain / plains binary into which the ROC continues to categorized Indigenous people here.
Given the way people move around, it’s (how to put this politely?) . . . not exactly accurate or adequate.
Guy
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The Queen Charlotte Islands in British Columbia were renamed Haida Gwaii in 2010.
The Moriori Genocide. The Moriori were descendants of Maoris living on the Chatham Islands. They had adopted pacifism. A group of Maoris (definitely not pacifists) arrived on a hijacked European ship, and enslaved and eventually murdered the Moriori.
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“We’re only called mountain people because those bastards stole all the good land on the plains.”
When I first moved to Taitung in 1990 ‘shan di ren’ was common among both Han and aborigines. It got politically incorrect much quicker than the term ‘Indian’ in Canada and the U.S.
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Big faux pas to pluralize Maori these days. For some reason it’s now always Maori as a collective noun.
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Except for theMoa and Haast eagles that hunted them , most species survived fine until Pakeha introduced a bunch of invasive species.
Most giant species around the world were hunted to extinction. That’s we we don’t see Mammoths or woolly rhinos roaming around Eurasia.
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I guess I knew that somehow. That makes up for my mistake about the date 
Or the Americas, I always assume. Though it is somewhat controversial I understand.
Thank Columbus for that one.
Imagine if we still had the Moa. What a tourist attraction. Biggest fuckoff bird in the world.
Nightmare for driving though. 250kgs and 2 meters tall.
Maybe one day we can clone them back into existence.