Maori reached Aotearoa New Zealand from eastern Polynesia several centuries before European contact, and the accounts of that voyaging, the divisions of the country between iwi, and the relation of each group to its landscape are held by those groups themselves. The public framework, as Te Ara, the state encyclopedia, sets it out, begins with Ranginui and Papatuanuku, sky and earth, and their children, among them Tane, Tangaroa and Tumatauenga, who stand behind forest, sea and human conflict.
Christianity arrived with missionaries from 1814 and was widely adopted, and it was then reworked. The prophetic movements of the nineteenth century, Pai Marire and the Ringatu church founded by Te Kooti, and the Ratana movement in the twentieth, are Maori churches rather than Maori branches of European ones, and Ringatu and Ratana remain active today.
The Treaty of Waitangi of 1840, and the confiscations that followed the wars of the 1860s, are the ground of every subsequent claim, and the Waitangi Tribunal, established in 1975, has heard many of them. Religious consequences run directly through the settlements. A river and a former national park have been given legal personality in terms drawn from Maori understanding of them, and Matariki, the rising of the star cluster that opens the Maori year, became a public holiday in 2022.