Pakeha Deaconesses and the New Zealand Methodist Mission to Maori, 1893–1940

This paper focuses on the first three decades of deaconess involvement in the New Zealand Methodist Maori Mission. Drawing upon church policy statements, deaconess narratives of experience which entered the public domain, as well as reminiscences which did not, it situates the deaconess missionaries in relation to the assimilationist discourses and gender assumptions of their day. It considers how Pakeha (European) deaconesses' potential as cultural intermediaries and models of white femininity was shaped by the particular histories of the areas in which they worked, by their own anomalous status within their denomination and by the spread of competing, secular channels of influence. As the sisters added a social work role to evangelism and education, many were drawn into close association with Maori communities, acting as advocates for Maori causes and challenging derogatory Pakeha constructs of Maori lifestyles.     

The Systematisation of Tradition: Maori Culture as a Strategic Resource

In this article I discuss the systematisation of Maori tradition in New Zealand during the 1970s and 1980s. More particularly, my focus is on the politicisation and rationalisation of Maori tradition within the New Zealand state, these processes occurring partly in response to calls by Maori leaders for a dismantling of colonial and monocultural structures in New Zealand and reactive objectifications of Maori tradition which challenged the legitimacy of the post-colonial state administration. I begin with a consideration of the main objectives towards which the systematisation of tradition has been directed over the past two decades, and I examine the way in which priorities have shifted in response to reactive politicisations of ethnic identity. I then draw upon a number of specific examples to illustrate the ethnicisation and rationalisation of Maori tradition as aspects of the systematisation process within the New Zealand state.     

Gender,Work and Fears of a ‘Hybrid Race’ in 1920s New Zealand

The 1929 New Zealand Committee of Inquiry into the Employment of Maori on Market Gardens affords insight into the ways in which masculine fears of racial degradation through miscegenation – of a ‘hybrid’ Chinese/Maori race – operated within a hierarchy of race, gender and Iwi (tribal) interests. The participation of Maori men in national politics contributed to a new articulation of ‘National Manhood’, in which Maori men and white men combined to express fears about women's work and sexuality and young women's potential to undermine a fragile and contested hierarchy of racial purity. Maori women, silenced in the cacophony of voices lamenting their plight, were at the centre of debates between Maori men, Pakeha (white New Zealander) employers, Chinese market gardeners, Anglican and Methodist interests and Pakeha women's groups. I argue that the Inquiry was about commerce, both in a business and a sexual sense. As a historical episode, it also serves to complicate the picture of New Zealand as a historically bicultural society, made up only of Maori and Pakeha, by signalling the importance of the Chinese in debates about national belonging.     

Gendering resistance: British colonial narratives of wartime New Zealand

In 1850s New Zealand, the British Crown forced the purchase of indigenous Maori land at Taranaki, an event that hastened the brutal land wars of the 1860s. A group of British church and government officials and their wives voiced their opposition to this land confiscation, participating in what became known as the «pamphlet war» over Taranaki. The authors compare the anti-colonial writings of a number of prominent colonial men and women, drawing out the significance of both ideological and embodied gendered differences and the discursive representations of place produced out of them. In addition to differences and similarities in genre, content, and audience, the authors highlight the significance—and spatiality—of anti-colonial Maori testimony that appeared in one of the pivotal texts.     

Dixon,Skinner and Te Rangi Hiroa

In the early 1920s, Henry Devenish Skinner of the Otago Museum, Dunedin, New Zealand, entered into a correspondence with Roland Burrage Dixon of the Peabody Museum and Harvard University and with Te Rangi Hiroa, then Director of Maori Hygiene in Auckland, New Zealand. The correspondence centred on recent publications by Dixon that used an experimental craniological analysis of his own devising to construct a number of global racial types and to trace their prehistoric migrations. This work had a bearing on theories of the settlement of Polynesia, in particular of New Zealand, a subject of vital interest to Skinner and Te Rangi Hiroa. Although the weaknesses of Dixon's technique were well documented in subsequent reviews, both New Zealanders were initially swayed by his arguments. This paper looks at the details of and context for the interactions between the three scholars and the possible impact of this correspondence on later work.     

Ordained Ministry in Maori Christianity, 1853–1900

From 1853 an ordained clergy emerged in the Protestant (but not the Catholic) churches founded by missionary organisations in New Zealand in the first half of the nineteenth century. Ordained indigenous ministers succeeded and largely superseded an earlier large force of lay "teachers." Although the Maori churches might in other circumstances have been seen as progressing towards self–reliance and autonomy, the colonial context of the second half of the nineteenth century confined them and their clergy to a restricted place in the ecclesiastical life of New Zealand. The transition from "teachers" to "ministers" in the Church Missionary Society (Anglican) and Wesleyan missions is examined, and a study is made of the place of indigenous ministers in the Maori Anglican and Wesleyan churches, the Mormon church, and the Maori religious movements such as Ringatu.     

Pastoralism and politics: reinterpreting contests for territory in Auckland Province, New Zealand, 1853–1864

As colonial frontiers expanded in the nineteenth century, contests over access to land suitable for farming between pastoralists, small farmers and indigenous populations were the inevitable result. In colonial Auckland, this contest was particularly vigorous, firstly because the young settlement's economic survival was at stake, since environmental constraints largely prevented its participation in the lucrative New Zealand wool industry, and secondly, because the economic and military prowess of indigenous Maori meant that settlers had little room to move in. Auckland's wealthy pastoralists pinned their hopes on the occupation of Maori land to the south of Auckland, since this was more suitable for sheep than the settlement's immediate environs, but this required dispossessing the Maori population by force. Initially, this obstacle gave small farmers a political advantage over the pastoralists, but as firstly arable markets, and then plans for small farmers and Maori to rear sheep themselves, all faltered, the pastoralist cause became increasingly difficult for colonial authorities to resist. When these authorities finally turned against the Maori communities south of Auckland, and launched an imperial war against them, the pastoralists successfully lobbied for the lands they most coveted to be confiscated from Maori, an event that radically altered New Zealand's future economic geography.     

Maori Tribalism and Post‐settler Nationhood in New Zealand

In this article I begin by sketching the main events in a recent dispute over the allocation of fishing quota among Maori. I seek to shed some light on the ideological grounding of this dispute in the simultaneous individualisation and tribalisation of Maori society since the late 19th century. Because the New Zealand nation is now imagined as an essentially binary one (bicultural, or treaty‐based) there is no secure place for urban indigeneity which constitutes a third voice. The inability of urban Maori Authorities to gain a share of the fishing quota is a reflection of this binarism.     

Theorising 'Difference' in Aotearoa/New Zealand {1}

This paper discusses theoretical and political tensions that emerged for me as a result of exploring the implications of 'positionality'. The discussion is set in debates about the differences within and between women in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Many New Zealand feminists, both Maori and Pakeha, have become concerned with the task of establishing an autonomous existence premised on unique identities. While recognising the political imperative that informs this politics and theorising, my own work has led me to theoretical understandings about the constitution of identities that could easily be construed as antagonistic to local aspirations. My dilemma, therefore, is how to produce feminist theory that compromises neither political or intellectual credibility. Positionality, I argue, involves not just positioning in a theoretical and ideological place, but also in a geographical location and, by implication, the politics of that place.     

Nostalgia for ‘innocent homely pleasures’: The 1964 New Zealand Controversy over Washday at the Pa

In 1964, the New Zealand Department of Education withdrew and destroyed 38,000 copies of Washday at the Pa, a booklet depicting Maori family life, at the request of the Maori Women’s Welfare League. This essay explores the raced and gendered context of the ensuing uproar in the press, which debated aspects of New Zealand identity. It situates the Washday controversy in the context of post-war housing and differential standards of living experienced by Maori and pakeha. It argues that the League upheld claims to both modernity and tradition, while many pakeha used the occasion to express nostalgia for mother–centred domesticity.     

Anthropology, ‘Native Schooling’ and Maori: the Politics of ‘Cultural Adaptation’ Policies

This paper examines three policies of ‘cultural adaptation’ formulated in colonial contexts in the 1920s and 1930s — that of the British Colonial Office for education in Africa, that of the New Zealand Native Schools and that of Maori leaders. While clearly inter-related, these policies were developed and promoted by their respective proponents to serve widely different political goals. Particularly significant is the role played by anthropology in that context. Proponents of all three policies looked to anthropologists for insights and scientific validation of their political agendas. Anthropologists, in turn, not only accepted this role but, particularly in the case of the British Colonial education policy, actively claimed it, involving themselves in the processes of colonial control.     

Maori Hapu as a Whole Way of Struggle: 1840s–50s Before the Land Wars

Research in Maori land history, burgeoning under the influence of the Waitangi Tribunal since the mid-1980s, promises a better understanding of the history of Maori kinship as well as New Zealand political economy. It has often been merely assumed, for instance, that contemporary hapu are a (or the) traditional form. I argue that Maori kinship and especially hapu or their equivalent need to be better understood in historical perspective. This essay examines some evidence and issues arising from the first few decades of colonisation before the land wars of the 1860s.     

Survival properties of organic residues through the human digestive tract

In New Zealand the study of coprolites is seldom undertaken. It was felt that a good deal of basic research was necessary before detailed analyses of prehistoric specimens could be initiated. A short programme of practical research was designed to test the survival properties of a select few common foodstuffs relevant to the study of prehistoric Maori diet. Food items were consumed with a faecal marker, and relevant stools collected and treated with trisodium phosphate solution (0·4% w/v). Flotation was used to isolate the pertinent specimens which were identified microscopically. The results of this research are limited, but they demonstrate the potential value of further work in this field.     

Seaborne Ethnography and the Natural History of Man*

This paper examines intellectual interchanges between European theorists in the science of man and sailors, naturalists and artists on scientific voyages in Oceania during the century after 1750. I argue that travellers' narratives and ethnographic representations were not mere reflexes of dominant metropolitan discourses, but were also personal productions generated in the tensions and ambiguities of cross-cultural encounters. I identify countersigns of indigenous agency embedded in such materials and evaluate their trajectory from the interactions which provoked them, through varied genres and media of voyagers' representations, to their contorted appropriation by European savants. My examples are drawn from British and French accounts of visits to New Holland and Van Diemen's Land between 1770 and 1802. In this paper, Aboriginal Australians, especially Tasmanians, serve as synecdoche for the indigenous inhabitants of Oceania generally, using the regional term in its extended early 19th-century sense which encompassed the present Indonesia and Australia along with Papua New Guinea, Aotearoa/New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.     

Postcolonial Conservation and Kiekie Harvests at Morere New Zealand – Abstracting Indigenous Knowledge from Indigenous Polities

Conservation authorities and local Maori are engaged in a collaborative science project within the Morere Scenic Reserve (east coast of the North Island in New Zealand). Although the project was restricted initially to the integration of knowledge to support sustainable harvests of kiekie (Freycinetia baueriana), the illegitimacy of state agencies to manage competing Maori demands for that species led inadvertently to the devolution of harvest administration to a local tribe. The success of the Morere experiment is evident in widespread support for a subsequent decision to fallow the kiekie resource, suggesting that further experiments to activate Indigenous polities within conservation management are warranted. Nonetheless, ambivalence towards Maori development needs circumscribes the potential of devolved management and collaborative science.     

MAORI HEALERS IN NEW ZEALAND: THE TOHUNGA SUPPRESSION ACT 1907

This article discusses the role of traditional Maori healers (tohunga) and analyses an attempt by the New Zealand Government to suppress them by the enactment of legislation. As with colonial governments elsewhere this attempt to suppress indigenous practices by resort to law failed both to modify native beliefs and to prevent the people from consulting traditional healers.     

Introduction: Anthropology,Collecting and Colonial Governmentalities

This special issue contributes to an emerging literature on the materialities of colonial government by considering the changing relations between practices of data collecting, styles of anthropological knowing and modes of governing which target the conduct of colonial and metropolitan populations. Drawing on comparative studies from Australia; the Australian administered territory of Papua; France; French Indo-China; New Zealand; North America and the UK; the papers consider the implications of different forms of knowledge associated with practices of collecting—anthropology, archaeology, folklore studies, demography—in apparatuses of rule in various late nineteenth and early twentieth-century contexts. This introduction outlines the rationale for the volume and elaborates the concept of “anthropological assemblage” which helps focus the authors' explorations of the socio-technical agencements which connected museum, field, metropolis and colony during this period. In doing so, it points towards a series of broader themes—the relationship between pastoral power and ethnographic expertise; the Antipodean career of the Americanist culture concept; and the role of colonial centres of calculation in the circulation of knowledge, practices of collecting and regimes of governing—which suggest productive future lines of inquiry for “practical histories” of anthropology.     

The Waitangi tribunal in New Zealand

The Waitangi Tribunal has been initiating major changes in New Zealand in the relationships of Maori and Pakeha. It has helped to revitalise the Treaty of Waitangi to redress Maori grievances over land, fisheries and many other matters. The paper outlines the jurisdiction, composition and procedures of the Tribunal and discusses the Treaty briefly. The Treaty and Maori rights have been given little recognition in legislation until recently and consequently little recognition by the Courts. A major decision of the Appeal Court in 1987 in relation to land held by State‐owned enterprises is discussed, leading to a consideration of the partnership principle fundamental to the Treaty. Because the Tribunal is not exclusively concerned with judicial questions but has a political role as well, its relations with government and administration have to be considered in some detail. Notwithstanding criticism of it and the belief of some that it should have more power, the Tribunal is a major instrument of reform in New Zealand.