Part of a research conversation with Claude (Anthropic), reproduced word for word.
.... "not a people's name" is the precise claim, and it matches what the page actually shows: the word "maori" turns up constantly in Polack's 1838 book, just always attached to a 'thing' (a man, a mat, a flax, an oven), never standing alone as what a whole group of people were called.
On the tribal-not-racial point — that's worth building into the page, because it's actually the sharper and more defensible version of your argument. It's not just that "Māori" hadn't been written down yet as a name; it's that there wasn't yet a single category for it to name. He Whakaputanga in 1835 sorts people by iwi and by rangatira, not by any collective racial label — because that's how identity actually worked at the time. A "name for a people" couldn't exist yet, in the modern sense, because "a people" in that unified, single-race sense wasn't yet the operative unit — tribes were. The word waited on the concept, not the other way round. That's a genuinely stronger claim than "the word hadn't been recorded," and it's one your own sources (the 1835 Declaration, Te Tiriti's own "tangata maori" phrasing) already support without needing anything extra.
Good question, and it actually gives your page a much bigger frame to sit inside — because you can now show that the "tribal, not racial" observation about pre-1840 New Zealand wasn't just a local quirk. Most of humanity organized itself the same way, right up until Europe invented the alternative.
There isn't one clean date, because "race" became operative in two different senses, on two different timelines:
As a legal, administrative category — first clearly in the English colonies of the Americas, mid-to-late 1600s. Virginia is the best-documented case: a 1662 statute made slave status inherited through the mother regardless of the father's status; a 1667 law severed the old escape route of converting to Christianity; and by 1682 Virginia law had merged Native Americans and Africans into a single legal category, "negroes and other slaves." By 1705 slaves were defined outright as property. That's the moment "race" stops being a loose descriptive word and starts being the actual axis the law sorts people by — replacing what had been divisions of nation, religion, and servitude contract.
As a scientific, taxonomic category — starting with François Bernier's 1684 essay "A New Division of the Earth," which was the first European attempt to sort all of humanity into a small number of "species or races" by physical traits rather than nation or religion. Linnaeus formalized this in Systema Naturae (four types, 1735/1767), Buffon pushed back with a climate-based theory in 1749, and Johann Blumenbach's five-race scheme (Caucasian, Mongolian, Malay, Ethiopian, American), settled by the 1790s, became the standard European racial taxonomy for the next century.
So put together: the "single-race sense" was roughly 150–160 years old in European thought by the time Cook reached New Zealand in 1769, and closer to 170 years old by the time Marsden's mission and later the Treaty era were underway. The British arriving in the Bay of Islands weren't inventing a racial frame on the spot — they were bringing an already-standardized one with them, and applying it to a society that was still, on its own terms, organized by iwi. That's arguably the real story behind why "Māori" only crystallizes into a name for "a people" in the 1830s–1840s: it's the point where the imported category finally needed a local word to attach itself to.
One caveat worth keeping in the back pocket if you use this: some historians trace an even earlier seed to Spain's "limpieza de sangre" (blood purity) statutes, starting at Toledo in 1449, which policed ancestry rather than religious practice — but that's contested ground; other historians argue it's still fundamentally religious/lineage discrimination, not race in the later biological sense, so I'd treat 1449 as "an early ancestor of the idea" rather than a clean starting date the way 1684 or the 1680s Virginia codes are.
Sources:
Early Classification of Nature (1680–1800) — Understanding Race
Scientific racism — Wikipedia
Colonial Authority (1600–1775) — Understanding Race
Limpieza de sangre — Wikipedia
François Bernier — Wikipedia
It's a sharp mirror of the "Māori" problem, actually — just running in the opposite direction. "Māori" started as an ordinary word and only later got promoted into the name of a people. "English" started as the name of a people and has since been demoted (or promoted, depending how you look at it) into a name mostly associated with a language billions of people use, most of whom have no connection to England at all.
The word traces back to the Engle — Anglicised as "Angles" — a Germanic tribe from the Angeln peninsula (in what's now northern Germany/southern Denmark), who crossed into Britain in the 5th century alongside the Saxons and Jutes. Their name gave "Englaland" (land of the Angles) → England, and their tongue "Englisc" → English. So the people came first, and the language is named after them, not the other way round.
The straightforward answer to your question is still just "the English" or "English people" — that demonym hasn't actually gone anywhere. What's changed is that the language slipped its leash from the people who named it, so "English" now does double duty: sometimes ethnic/national ("she's English"), sometimes purely linguistic ("English is spoken in Nigeria"). Context usually keeps the two apart well enough that nobody's proposed replacing the ethnonym.
But there is a word that exists specifically to solve the ambiguity you're pointing at: Anglophone — meaning "English-speaking," used precisely so that calling someone or somewhere English-speaking doesn't imply they're ethnically or nationally English. A Nigerian, a Jamaican, and a Singaporean are all Anglophone without being English. "Anglo" does similar work informally, especially in former colonies (Anglo-Australian, Anglo-American), where it marks English/British descent as distinct from the wider English-speaking population around it.
There's also a layer above that: "English" itself already sits inside a narrower/broader pair the same way — "English" (the people/nation specifically) versus "British" (the wider political umbrella covering English, Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish together). So the word had already been doing double duty as a national-versus-ethnic label well before the language went global; the worldwide spread of English just added a third, much wider ring around the outside of it.