Māori newspapers online
I've found a Waikato University website with 19th century Māori newspapers online. The transcription of the first page of the first paper lacks punctuation, but each page includes a link to a photo of the page, and the punctuation can be copied (manually) from that. SO, I can start compiling a concordance.
The text is interesting. No macrons-it would be interesting to find when macrons were first used at all for Māori (e.g. in grammars) and when they began to be used for ordinary purposes. Also to get a relative chronology for regular use of macrons against Auckland University's use of double vowels. I can remember when Critic, the Otago University student newspaper, used double vowels to show length in Māori vowels. The tide swung back to macrons. One advantage of the macron is that Māori looks a lot less precious than Maaori in an English language context. Another is that words have the same alphabetical order with or without indication of length. It has the disadvantage that computers have to be twiddled or have special fonts installed to produce macroned vowels. And our newspapers don't have them-time they caught up.
My sister-in-law, Marie Copeland-Phillips of Ngāti Mutunga, once told me that one of her aunts is against macrons. Native Māori speakers automatically pronounce the words correctly, vowel-length and all. Latin didn't distinguish between long and short vowels in its writing system; this makes Latin poetry harder to scan than Greek, where the vowels o and e each had separate letters for the short and long sounds. Though in fact, the oldest Greek doesn't. West Greek and Old Attic used H (ēta) for the h sound. Ōmega was a later invention. Ionic didn't have the h sound, and used the letter for the long ē. Attic followed suit about 400 BC, and invented the rough and smooth breathings to distinguish words that began with an h sound from those that began with a vowel and no h sound. There is an early Greek inscription from Naxos, in which E is used for short e, and inherited long ē, and H is used for long ē that was originally long ā.
Another interesting feature of the text of the old Māori newspapers is that, like te Tiriti, it doesn't have the wh digraph; w is used in all instances-wakaaro, etc. This lines up with Jim Williams's statement that the k-dialect is closer to those of Taranaki, Northland and Cook Islands Māori. Taranaki also voices the wh. I'm not a hundred percent certain that it has totally merged with w. I have heard a recording (in English) on the story of Parihaka. The speaker pronounced most of his Māori wh's as f, but he pronounced the name Te Whiti with a voiced w sound, which seemed to me to have a slight fricative buzz to it-distinct from an ordinary w. I'm pretty sure he pronounced Parihaka with an h, not the Taranaki glottal stop. I don't know what Cook Island Māori does for f/wh. It doesn't have h.