The last full-blooded Moriori

The Anti-Nephi Lehites are a compelling narrative. A formerly violent people who lay down their swords to the point of being willingly massacred, and then a deus ex machina sort of happens and they are saved by the conscience of their attackers.  

But what happens if the attackers don’t stop? What happens if the angel doesn’t show up to save Isaac? We see a tragic case of this with the Moriori. Natives of the Chatham Islands in the South Pacific, they were facing invasion by mainland Maori, who they actually outnumbered. However, the elders held that their religion’s sacred principle of nonviolence was an inviolable oath to their Gods and could not be broken. Consequently, they were massacred, enslaved, cannibalized, and ritualistically tortured to death. The last full-blooded Moriori died in the early 20th-century. 

Pacifism is one of those things that sounds nice in theory but quickly runs into issues when you start to think of all-too-plausible hypotheticals. We all honor and respect Mahatma Gandhi, but his take that the Jews should have just offered themselves to the Nazis probably wasn’t the right one for that particular circumstance. That being said, I have a hard time critiquing pacifists morally, whether they’re the Anti-Nephi Lehites, Mahatma Gandhi, or the Moriori. I probably wouldn’t have done what they did nor do I agree with the principle of pacifism, but I have a hard time not honoring and respecting people who are willing to pay the last measure of devotion for their beliefs. 

Other Anti-Nephi Lehite examples. In the Qissa Khwani massacre British troops shot unarmed pacifist, Indian independence protestors. In the stomach-churning Gnadenhutten massacre American revolutionary soldiers raped and massacred a group of pacifist Native American converts to Christianity. Similar to the Anti-Nephi Lehites, they prayed and sang hymns to each other while they were being killed.

One soldier taunted an Indian by pretending to offer him his hatchet with the words, “Strike me dead!” When the man answered, “I strike no one dead!” the soldier swung at the Indian and “chopped his arm away.” All the while, the Indian kept singing [a hymn] “until another blow split his head.”

 One of the murderers who thought that the killing would assuage his grief from losing his own relatives had a similar experience as the Laminates: 

One Nathan Rollins & brother [who] had had a father & uncle killed took the lead in murdering the Indians, …& Nathan Rollins had tomahawked nineteen of the poor Moravians, & after it was over he sat down & cried, & said it was no satisfaction for the loss of his father & uncle after all.