The celebrated digital magazine e-Tangata is home to some of the most incisive and profound commentary on life in New Zealand. Māori, Pasifika and Pākehā writers grapple with topics that range from politics and social issues to history and popular culture. The best of these are collected together here into this BWB Text by the magazine’s editors, Tapu Misa and Gary Wilson.
'This book is about my making sense here, of my becoming and being Pākehā. Every Pākehā becomes a Pākehā in their own way, finding her or his own meaning for that Māori word. This is the story of what it means to me. I have written this book for Pākehā – and other New Zealanders – curious about their sense of identity and about the ambivalences we Pākehā often experience in our relationships with Māori.' A timely and perceptive memoir from award-winning author and academic Alison Jones. As questions of identity come to the fore once more in New Zealand, this frank and humane account of a life spent traversing Pākehā and Māori worlds offers important insights into our shared life on these islands.
While we may talk back to the empire, we can’t talk to each other. Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa is the great ocean continent. While it is common to understand the ocean as something that divides land, for those Indigenous to the Pacific or the Moana, it was traditionally a connector and an ancestor. Imperialism in the Moana, however, created false divides between islands and separated their peoples. In this BWB Text, Lana Lopesi argues that globalising technologies and the adaptability of Moana peoples are now turning the ocean back into the unifying continent that it once was.
Parihaka was a place and an event that could be lost and found, over and over. It moved into view, then disappeared, just like the mountain. In 1881, over 1,500 colonial troops invaded the village of Parihaka near the Taranaki coast. Many people were expelled, buildings destroyed, and chiefs Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi were jailed. In this BWB Text, Rachel Buchanan tells her own, deeply personal story of Parihaka. Beginning with the death of her father, a man with affiliations to many of Taranaki’s eight iwi, she describes her connection to Taranaki, the land and mountain; and the impact of confiscation. Buchanan discusses the apologies and settlements that have taken place since te pāhuatanga, the invasion of Parihaka.
An understanding of the ways of our tūpuna, coupled with the best of new thinking from New Zealand and abroad, has significant potential for sustainable housing models. Colonial settlement and the discriminatory policies of successive governments have challenged Māori connections to whenua and kāinga. Today, home ownership rates for Māori are well below the national average and Māori are over-represented in the statistics of substandard housing. Rebuilding the Kāinga charts the recent resurgence of contemporary papakāinga on whenua Māori. Reframing Māori housing as a Treaty issue, Kake envisions a future where Māori are supported to build businesses and affordable homes on whānau, hapū or Treaty settlement lands. The implications of this approach, Kake writes, are transformative.
The arrival of the Anglican Church with its claims to religious power was soon followed by British imperial claims to temporal power. Political, legal, economic and social institutions were designed to be the bastions of control across the British Empire. However, they were also places of contestation and engagement at a local and national level, and this was true of New Zealand. Māori culture was constantly capable of adaptation in the face of changing contexts. This ground-breaking book explores the emergence of Te Hāhi Mihinare – the Māori Anglican Church. Anglicanism, brought to New Zealand by English missionaries in 1814, was made widely known by Māori evangelists, as iwi adapted the religion to make it their own. The ways in which Mihinare (Māori Anglicans) engaged with the settler Anglican Church in New Zealand and created their own unique Church casts light on the broader question of how Māori interacted with and transformed European culture and institutions. Hirini Kaa vividly describes the quest for a Māori Anglican bishop, the translation into te reo of the prayer book, and the development of a distinctive Māori Anglican ministry for today’s world. Te Hāhi Mihinare uncovers a rich history that enhances our understanding of New Zealand’s past.
Decolonisation is a term that alarms some, and gives hope to others. It is an uncomfortable and often bewildering concept for many New Zealanders. This book seeks to demystify decolonisation using illuminating, real-life examples. By exploring the impact of colonisation on Māori and non-Māori alike, Imagining Decolonisation presents a transformative vision of a country that is fairer for all.
Sione, Lima, Tavita and Filipo are high school friends, uso or brothers. They are part of a special letter-writing project that helps to start a brave new conversation, an open and honest talanoa with themselves starting with the words, Dear Uso ... Here they share the cultural challenges they face, and without realising it, their need to belong, to be accepted and the impact this has on their wellbeing overall. Tama Sāmoa is not just a story of friendship, brotherhood and healing. Tama Sāmoa helps us all to reflect, reconnect and reunite in better supporting each other as who we are. It is also a story of self-discovery and hope for a new tama Sāmoa code to be created based on real talanoa and understanding. Also includes: - Study Questions For Students - The Tama Sāmoa Project: A space created for fourteen Samoan male students and educators to share their own boys-to-men stories, lessons and journeys to help today's tama Sāmoa, our tama Pasifika, to be better understood and supported in succeeding as themselves. Tama Sāmoa Project Contributing Authors: Isaac Sanele, Elijah Solomona, Simati Leala, Senio Sanele, Emmanuel Solomona, Aleki Leala, Okirano Tilaia, Israel Risati Sua-Taulelei, Saul Luamanuvae-Su'a, Atama Cassidy, Darcy Solia, Liko Alosio, Mikaele Savali, Dr. Sadat Muaiava
Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook, No. 29: With a Non-argument that’s Actually an Argument. Captain Cook? It’s all so very complex. I’m going to sit on the fence. (Whose fence? On whose land? Dividing what from what? You only have a fence when you fear something or when you’re trying to keep something in. Or, as a renovation show on TV informed me, when you want to upgrade your street appeal.) Alice Te Punga Somerville employs her deep research and dark humour to skilfully channel her response to Cook’s global colonial legacy in this revealing and defiant BWB Text.
By any measure, New Zealand must confront monumental issues in the years ahead. From the future of work to climate change, wealth inequality to new populism – these challenges are complex and even unprecedented. Yet why does New Zealand’s political discussion seem so diminished, and our political imagination unequal to the enormity of these issues? And why is this gulf particularly apparent to young New Zealanders? These questions sit at the centre of Max Harris’s ‘New Zealand project’. This book represents, from the perspective of a brilliant young New Zealander, a vision for confronting the challenges ahead. Unashamedly idealistic, The New Zealand Project arrives at a time of global upheaval that demands new conversations about our shared future.
