LOL! The plural for "Maori" is "Maori". And it is almost never preceded with the article "the", unless used as an adjective.
Hey, I took a dig at your point, too. And made about the same amount of sense as you did.
To the extent that Maori have religion these days, most would profess to be Christian of some stripe or another.
There is the Ratana Church, of course, and Ringatu -- those might be the ones you mean. There is also the Destiny Church, which is something of a more modern, evangelical phenomenon.
My point is that the same "progressives" who gleefully rip the Bible to shreds in the name of "science" and "what we know now" would never ever in a zillion years cast aspersions on "indigenous pipples" interpreting their own creation myths every bit as literally as any Bible-thumper interprets Genesis.
The enlightened, iconoclastic scientist and the "noble savage" make a strange tag team. But a lifetime of watching professional rasslin' back in the days of kayfabe taught me that, however illogical it is, the "heels" never fight among themselves.