The best scriptorium was a courtroom

Claim (verbatim)

The largest single body of fixed Māori tradition was produced by neither missionaries nor ethnographers but by a land registry with adversarial procedure. From 1865 the Native Land Court required claimants to prove rights by recited descent and occupation history — before judges, opponents and clerks; witnesses recited whakapapa across ten and more generations, named battles, boundaries, migrations and marriages, and the minute-takers wrote it down, hearing after hearing, for decades, across hundreds of manuscript minute books. Every historian who has worked the books — Angela Ballara's Iwi (1998) is the standard demonstration — knows both the scale and the torque: the court compelled fixation at a volume no ethnographic programme approached, and it torqued what it fixed, because testimony was strategy in a contest for title. Both properties are quantifiable, and the first has never been put beside the collections that conventionally define ‘the sources’. The conjecture is that the courtroom archive exceeds the whole ethnographic canon by an order of magnitude — and covers iwi the canon barely touched, because litigation, unlike collecting, was compulsory and eventually universal: the fullest archive of a colonized people's memory, assembled as a by-product of taking their land. Prediction: a page census of whakapapa and tribal-history testimony in Native Land Court minute books 1865–1910 will exceed the aggregate Māori-language and tradition content of the Grey collection, the McLean papers, White's Ancient History of the Maori and Ngā Mōteatea combined by at least ten to one, and iwi with marginal presence in those collections will each show hundreds of testimony pages in the minute books (primary clause: the ten-to-one page ratio; the verdict follows it). Kill (not yet built, from real sources): a page census over the Māori Land Court minute book series via the Minute Book Index (University of Auckland Library) and the Archives New Zealand microfilms, against page counts for GNZMMSS (Auckland Libraries), the McLean papers (Alexander Turnbull Library), White's Ancient History of the Maori (1887–90) and Ngā Mōteatea.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: a page census of whakapapa and tribal-history testimony in Native Land Court minute books 1865–1910 will exceed the aggregate Māori-language and tradition content of the Grey collection, the McLean papers, White's Ancient History of the Maori and Ngā Mōteatea combined by at least ten to one, and iwi with marginal presence in those collections will each show hundreds of testimony pages in the minute books (primary clause: the ten-to-one page ratio; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill (not yet built, from real sources): a page census over the Māori Land Court minute book series via the Minute Book Index (University of Auckland Library) and the Archives New Zealand microfilms, against page counts for GNZMMSS (Auckland Libraries), the McLean papers (Alexander Turnbull Library), White's Ancient History of the Maori (1887–90) and Ngā Mōteatea.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Ballara's Iwi (1998) is the standard demonstration that the Native Land Court minute books compelled fixation at a volume no ethnographic programme approached and torqued what they fixed, so the scale and the bias are both recognized in print (with David Williams' history of the court as a further neighbour). But the primary clause is a concrete page census — whakapapa and tribal-history testimony 1865–1910 exceeding the Grey collection, McLean papers, White and Nga Moteatea combined by at least ten-to-one — and that count against those named collections was not located as ever having been run; Ballara asserts the disparity qualitatively rather than tabulating a ratio. The kill is honestly flagged not-yet-built. Adjacent.

• Angela Ballara, Iwi: The Dynamics of Maori Tribal Organisation from c.1769 to c.1945 (Victoria University Press, 1998)
• David V. Williams, 'Te Kooti Tango Whenua': The Native Land Court 1864–1909 (Huia Publishers, 1999)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.