An Interview With Patricia Grace

New Zealand Bulletin of New Zealand Studies, 2010

2006

Dedication iii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents x List of Figures, maps, photographs, images, etc xii List of Tables, charts, whakapapa, pepeha, etc xiv Chronology of Betty Wark's Life xv Section One-Title Page 1 Chapter One Creating Context: Introducing Themes, Issues and Methodology 2 Chapter Two Biographical Research as an Appropriate Methodology for Māori Feminist Research 34 Chapter Three Biography as Genre and a Form of Cultural Production 62 Chapter Four Māori and Auto/Biography: Writing Ourselves 'Home' 80 Ko Taranaki toku maunga My mountain is Taranaki Ko Waitara toku awa My river is Waitara Ko Owae Whaitara toku marae My marae is Owae Whaitara Ko Tokomaru toku waka My canoe is Tokomaru Ko Te Atiawa me Ngati Ruanui oku iwi My tribes are Te Atiawa and Ngati Ruanui Ko Ngati Rahiri me Ngati Te Whiti oku hapu My sub tribes are Ngati Rahiri and Ngati Te Whiti Ko Helene Connor toku ingoa My name is Helene Connor My identity as Māori is positioned in terms of physical and cultural geographies, whakapapa and my tupuna (ancestors). Through the years of whakapapa research my cousin, Kim Skelton, has carried out, our whanau (family) has been able to trace our whakapapa links back ten generations to Whiti-o-Rongomai, founder of Ngati Te Whiti (Taranaki iwi). Our greatgreat-great-great-grandfather was Ngatata-i-te-Rangi (also known as Makoare Ngatata). Born around 1790, Ngatata-i-te-Rangi was the son of Te Rangiwhetiki and Pakanga. Through his mother, Pakanga, he was an influential rangatira (chief) in the Ngati Te Whiti hapu of Te Atiawa.

2009

had an intensely ambivalent relationship with the land of her birth. Despite receiving many accolades in New Zealand-including the country's major literary award 1-she claimed to have been rejected and persecuted, and regularly announced that her educational and literary achievements were unappreciated or insufficiently acknowledged by her compatriots. In her darkest moments, she railed against New Zealand and New Zealanders, even stating in one television interview: "I'm not a New Zealander!" 2 This book makes Sylvia's relationship with New Zealand its central focus.

A History of New Zealand Women, 2016

Postcolonial Text, 2013

s recent study Once Were Pacific: Maori Connections to Oceania invites readers to board her waka, an ocean-going canoe, to journey through waves of time and genres in search of "a kind of regional identification" (xxx) that spans much of the Pacific region. Somerville's artful use of painting and poetry, fiction and physical spaces, along with contemporary media and music, all enhanced by her insider perspective of Māori material culture, draw lines of connection on the South Pacific chart from Aotearoa to Samoa, from the Cook Islands to Tahiti, extending all the way to Hawai'i, and then returning to Wellington Harbor in New Zealand. Critical yet imaginative, formalist, and specifically indigenist, the analyses throughout this work are informative, entertaining, and engaging. Somerville begins this journey in search of regional identity by analyzing a painting by Tupaia, a Ra'iatea Islander voyaging with Captain James Cook during his explorations of the Pacific islands in the 1760s. The image depicts an exchange of goods between a Māori man and an officer of Captain Cook's vessel, the Endeavour. The English officer offers a piece of tapa, paper or cloth brought from Tahiti, that Somerville recognizes as a rare and valuable part of Māori material culture. This author uses the painting and tapa to explore strands of connection between the Māori of New Zealand, their "presence and position" (5), and the peoples of the expansive Pacific region. Even though the regional connection of tapa in the Tupaia painting underpins this work, Somerville reinforces the lines of cultural connection with analyses of works by several Māori writers. Throughout her literary choices, Somerville makes regional identity connections with the use of historical, rhetorical, and literary devices employed by Māori writers. She begins with poems by Māori poets Vernice Wineera, Evelyn Patuawa-Nathan, and Robert Sullivan. "All write about and demonstrate journeys in which Māori start at Aotearoa and venture out into the [Pacific] region" (37). After acknowledging other Māori authors in the literary canon, Somerville selects for direct comparison and criticism two works whose authors "turned their attention to the politics of the region" (61): Witi Ihimaera's 1987 novella The Whale Rider and Hinewirangi's 1990 collection of poetry Kanohi ki te Kanohi. These two authors provide waka journeys to Papua New Guinea and

While Ngahuia Te Awekotuku holds a central position in Māori feminist activism, she has also staged a wide range of femininities and sexualities in her fictional oeuvre. Her short story collections Tahuri (1993 [1989]) and Ruahine -Mythic women (2003) in particular offer diverse perspectives on Māori women. Whereas Tahuri focuses on the eponymous lesbian Māori character, Ruahine provides an innovative retelling of mythological Māori women.

2009

Contemporary Māori writer Alice Tawhai has published two collections of short stories, Festival of Miracles (2005) and Luminous (2007). Tawhai’s narratives portray Māori people living an array of diverse lifestyles and her collections include stories about isolation, gangs, substance abuse, identity, education, art and spirituality; her work has been reviewed in literary magazines and online as new fiction that reflected a contemporary society in Aotearoa and these literary reviews imply that Tawhai’s stories are a reflection of Māori people. For Māori readers, Tawhai’s narratives demand a different interpretation of the text, a different way of reading, in order to read these stories of their own merits. To this end, this thesis proposes a practice for reading called ‘Māori literary nationalism’ which is based on a book called, American Indian Literary Nationalism whose proposed literary practice can be suitably adapted for a Maori literary context. One of the most important compon...

Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies, 2022

This is a shared obituary to mark the death of Keri Hulme, written by Drs Susan Najita (University of Michigan) and Bruce Harding (University of Canterbury). Dr Najita focuses on Hulme's literary practice and Harding writes from a more personal perspective about the noted Indigenous New Zealand writer of short fictions, poetry and the bone people.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the 'pioneer days' of European settlement in New Zealand lay in the past. It was 'the period in which settler society in New Zealand consolidate[d] itself economically and culturally' (Stafford and Williams 14). Reminiscences written by 'old pioneers' supplied textual representations of the earlier days of European settlement to an audience, thus participating in forming the collective memory of this project.

Choice Reviews Online, 2013

This landmark publication is the first single-volume, multi-genre anthology of major New Zealand writing, spanning more than 200 years of New Zealand history and incorporating the work of some 200 individual authors. The anthology is structured chronologically and informed by 'neohistoricist' principles: the editors 'believe that literature is seen at its most interesting' when illuminated by 'a sense of historical and cultural context'. 1 To this end, the volume is divided into 11 sections, each of which is prefaced by a brief introductory essay offering salient details about the literary/cultural context informing the period in focus, but each section also includes thematic subheadings grouping particular authors and excerpts together on the basis of shared preoccupations. These allow the reader to trace, for example, the treatment of war, or the environment, or sexualities, across a broad sweep of New Zealand history. Most excerpted material is literary, but travel accounts, essays, public documents and letters are included in the service of the volume's intended status as 'a knife through time' (1). 2 This mixing of genres is particularly evident in the first two sections (focused around the 'contact' era beginning with Cook's landfall in 1769, and the 'colonial' period of the 1820s-1860s), which feature travel accounts, journal entries, letters, and treaty documents alongside poetry and fiction excerpts. The editors include extracts from well-known 'canonical' works (such as F.E. Maning's Old New Zealand (1863)) alongside texts (such as H. Butler Stoney's Taranaki: A Tale of the War 1861) that have until relatively recently suffered from a 'critical eclipse' largely because they preceded the nationalist era of New Zealand writing, during and after which much nineteenth-century New Zealand literature was dismissed on the basis of its putative outmoded adherence to British literary/cultural models (3). The third section of the volume, 'Maoriland', traces the first steps towards this literary nationalism, documenting works (published mainly between 1890 and 1914) in which the indigenous culture of New Zealand, which was subjected to an ethnographic gaze in the earlier colonial phase, became 'absorbed and aestheticised' by writers attempting to 'fashion a writing that was distinctly of this place' (100). Many of the authors in this section (such as