What Do Data on Child-Woman Ratios Imply About The Early Demographic Effects of Colonisation on Maori?

Tahu Kukutai, The University of Waikato
John Bryant, Bayesian Demography Limited

The last fifty years has seen vigorous debate on the ‘fatal impact’ of European contact and conquest, as well as the extent and causes of post-contact Indigenous depopulation, and its long-term consequences. In Aotearoa New Zealand (Aotearoa), knowledge about past Maori populations is crucial to understanding the nation’s history of colonisation, particularly in the decades spanning the 1840 Tiriti o Waitangi (Treaty of Waitangi) to 1900. Much of the scholarship on nineteenth century Maori demography rests on analyses of child-woman ratios using adjusted data from colonial censuses. In this paper, we review the logic behind methods for inferring fertility and mortality rates from child-woman ratios, highlighting the important assumptions. We then apply the methods to data for nineteenth century Maori populations. Our motivation is to determine what these methods can tell us about the demographic conditions experienced by Maori in nineteenth century Aotearoa. We find that the ability to draw out the implications of data on child-woman ratios and growth rates reveals as much about the limits of the data as it does about fertility and mortality.

Keywords: The Demography of Indigenous Populations, Historical Demography, Census data

See extended abstract.