Multiple sites of Māori political participation

This article examines what might be included in a definition of Māori political participation that moves beyond a predominant focus on voting in New Zealand general elections. I suggest that the proliferation of Māori governance organisations in recent years means that Māori participation within these organisations must also be considered as part of wider political participation. In addition, I argue that Māori engagement with local authorities deserves further close examination to explore the multiple ways in which political participation occurs. Using a broader definition of Māori political participation and highlighting its many facets indicate that Māori engage in more varied ways in New Zealand politics than previously recognised.

在新西兰,普选的投票是关注的焦点,毛利的政治参与不在其内。本文讨论了毛利政治参与的界定还可以包括哪些内容。作者认为,毛利治理组织近些年的兴旺发达说明毛利人的参与这类组织,也应被视为更广泛的政治参与之一部分。另外,毛利人与地方当局的交往也值得密切的关注,需要探讨其政治参与的多重方式。广义地理解毛利人的政治参与,关注其多面多相,可以让我们看到,其实毛利人参与新西兰政治的途径要比以往我们所看到的丰富变化得多。     

The Politics of Knowledge: Anthropology and Māori Modernity in Mid-Twentieth-Century New Zealand

This article argues that growing confidence in anthropology as a tool for managing the adaptation of a resurgent Māori population to modernity shaped a “politics of knowledge” regarding New Zealand's indigenous people in the mid-twentieth century. We examine the relationship between anthropological discourse, state policy, and the Māori struggle to uphold traditional ways, through the prism of Ernest and Pearl Beaglehole's psycho-ethnographic study entitled Some Modern Māoris (Beaglehole, E., and P. Beaglehole. 1946. Some Modern Māoris. Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research). This paper demonstrates that the study was the product of a nexus between concerns for Māori welfare, a perceived need for empirical research that could be applied to the “problem” of indigenous adjustment to contemporary conditions, and American philanthropy. For this reason, and as a detailed record of a small community when Māori society was on the cusp of post-Second World War transformations, we contend that the study deserves to be recovered from historical obscurity.     

“Rooted in Demographic Reality”: The Contribution of New World Censuses to Indigenous Survival

One of the most powerful narratives deployed by colonists in the nineteenth century was that the colonized natives were inherently too weak to survive contact with those who were colonizing them—the Dying Native story. I argue that to understand the history of this story, we should differentiate between three senses in which it could be taken as true or false: physical destruction, genetic adulteration and loss of distinct culture. The physical destruction version of the “Dying Native” was contested by some settler-colonial governments as they developed the capacity to manage and measure the numbers of those whom they classified as “Indian” or “Māori” or “Aboriginal”. However, the “Dying Native” story persisted as a narrative of these peoples' loss of genetic and/or cultural distinction. One strategy of Indigenous intellectuals has been to assert that they have survived as “populations” by adapting as “peoples”. In this paper, I show how an authoritative demography of colonized Indigenous populations in North America and New Zealand afforded discursive opportunities to some Indigenous intellectuals.     

Intimate Relations: Kinship and the Economics of Shore Whaling in Southern New Zealand, 1820–1860

Recent scholarship has situated shore whaling as a key industry connecting southern New Zealand to the global economy and the imperial world during the mid-19th century. An economically-driven view of this period, however, tends to obscure the enduring importance of Māori forms of kinship in the establishment and success of this resource-based industry. In this article, we argue for the significance of Māori concepts such as whanaungatanga (connectedness) and whakapapa (genealogy) to understanding shore whaling in southern New Zealand. Kinship connections formed through marriage tied newcomer whalers to the region, as well as bringing Ngāi Tahu into the emerging coastal economy. The depth of these relationships went beyond the economic, creating enduring social bonds and mixed communities across generations.     

7. TOWARD A GENEALOGY OF THE RESEARCHER AS SUBJECT IN POST/DECOLONIAL PACIFIC HISTORIES

Recent discussion has drawn out some important differences between postcolonial and decolonial theories. The former are associated primarily with the work of South Asian scholars working in cultural, literary, or historical studies; decolonial scholarship, by contrast, is located in Latin America and has emerged from sociological critiques of dependency theory. Shifting the locus of debate to the Pacific centers another subject in globalizing critiques of colonialism: the historian in indigenous communities. In this article, I examine how the role of the researcher is conceptualized in Linda Tuhiwai Smith's landmark work Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999). Revealing tensions between objectivity and intersubjectivity, on the one hand, and between essentialist identity and hybridity, on the other, I ask why Smith's book hinges on dichotomizing nonindigenous and indigenous researchers, who are by turn enabled or constrained in a colonial present. I situate this late twentieth-century subject in a genealogy of indigenous engagement with history and anthropology in New Zealand and contemporary problems of historical justice.     

Some approaches to traditional Māori knowledge

In this essay I review two books of rather different focus, but with a common thread that is oral tradition: age-old tales passed orally down the generations to maintain the histories and used to educate the young. The focus of the Metge book is traditional methods of education, while McRae’s focus is on the stories themselves.     

The Whangaroa Incident, 16 July 1824 A European–Māori Encounter and Its Many Incarnations

ABSTRACT

This paper examines an incident in 1824 in which the Ngāti Pou of Whangaroa Harbour (New Zealand) boarded a European ship, holding its crew and three missionaries captive for two hours. During the 19th century the incident was retold approximately 30 times in Europe and America. This paper describes the original incident from primary sources and then discusses how the various incarnations of the story enabled different authors to draw diverse moral lessons. The changing narrative provides a window into various European attitudes towards the Indigenous peoples of New Zealand.     

Molluscan foraging efficiency and patterns of mobility amongst foraging agriculturalists: a case study from northern New Zealand

A New Zealand example illustrates the potential of foraging efficiency (FE) measures to inform not only on human-prey dynamics, but also to help identify situations where mobility is constrained or stimulated. Marked declines in Māori molluscan FE, coupled with increased shellfish usage, are identified over a ca. 450-year period at the coastal locality of Harataonga Beach, New Zealand. The potential effects of climate change are considered using newly available southwest Pacific multi-proxy records and temperature sensitive species, but correlations are lacking. The molluscan results signal possible restrictions on logistic and/or residential mobility in late prehistory, while evidence from the broader cultural landscape points to increasing agricultural investments and marked social competition. The Ideal Free Distribution model (IFD) is used to consider regional-scale interactions between foraging efficiency, agricultural developments, and competition, and their effects on mobility. Geographic and temporal variation in the patterning and causes of population movements is highlighted through this model, particularly differences between large game foragers in the south and populations with mixed economies in the north. In late prehistory, many northern areas including Harataonga apparently experienced reductions in the geographic scale of population movements, coupled with intensified intra-territorial mobility. The latter was an outcome of labour being widely dispatched across tribal territories, quasi-specialisation in subsistence tasks, and pooling and exchange of resources through a variety of social mechanisms which often involved population movements.     

AN INSCRIBED NABATAEAN BRONZE OBJECT DEDICATED TO OBODAS THE GOD FROM WĀDĪ MŪSĀ, SOUTHERN JORDAN

Abstract

A part of a Nabataean bronze inscribed object has been found recently in Wādī Mūsā, near Petra, Jordan. The text, which is dated to the reign of the last Nabataean king, Rabbel II (ad 70–106), is of great interest since it contains words that occur for the first time in Nabataean. It mentions a dedication made by a priest and his son to ‘Obodas the God’ in Gaia. In sum, it adds significant new data to our knowledge of the Nabataean kingdom and its religion.