I absolutely love this picture, because everything about it screams abundance.

The picture was painted by Cuthbert Charles Clark, at a hakari (feast) held in the Bay of Islands in 1849, it is an enormous erected structure of a stage, where massive amounts of kai (food) were stored. Each section is about the height of a person and the hosts were effectively showing their generosity to their guests.

Why this picture is so important is because it gives us an indication about how well our economic system and way of living was for us. It signals the abundance by which we were living by. It signals an era of wealth.

What a lot of people don’t realise or give credit to, was just how well the Māori way of doing things provided sustenance for Māori. An economy is basically understanding how a society produces stuff and who benefits from that stuff. The…