Overview
- One of the first ethnographic explorations of successful Maori resistance efforts
- Provides insight on a spectacular system of ancestor-focused kin groups, through which political alliances are developed through systematic intermarriage
- Traces the development and trajectory of resistance efforts against colonial injustice from its origins to the very recent past
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Table of contents (11 chapters)
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Tūhoe Hapū and the Establishment of the Urewera District Native Reserve
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Kinship and Power in Ruatāhuna and Waikaremoana, 1899–1913
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Conclusion
Reviews
—Tāmati Kruger, Representative in the Tūhoe Te Uru Taumatua, New Zealand
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
The resistance of the Tūhoe Māori of New Zealand to colonisation began more than century before the final return of their sanctuary in the Urewera mountains by the Crown in 2014. In Volume I of A Separate Authority (He Mana Motuhake), Steven Webster provides an ethnohistorical reconstruction of the establishment in New Zealand of a rare case of Maori home-rule over their traditional domain, backed by a special statute and investigated by a Crown commission, the majority of whom were Tūhoe leaders. This relatively benevolent colonial policy enabled the Tūhoe to control the establishment of their vast Native Reserve in a way that entrenched their social organisation, particularly their traditional deployment of kin-based power, while at once manipulating the power of the Crown to their joint advantage from 1894 to 1908. In Volume II, Webster documents how this same form of resistance enabled the Tūhoe to withstand predatory Crown policies between 1908and 1926, thereby retaining remnants of their ancestral sanctuary—which later became the basis upon which they won statutory control of the territory.
In both volumes of A Separate Authority (He Mana Motuhake), Webster takes the stance of an ethnohistorian: he not only examines the various ways control over the Urewera District Native Reserve (UDNR) was negotiated, subverted or betrayed, and renegotiated during this time period, but also focuses on the role of Māori hapū, ancestral descent groups and their leaders, including the political economic influence of extensive marriage alliances between them. The ethnohistorical approach developed here may be useful to other studies of governance, indigenous resistance, and reform, whether in New Zealand or elsewhere.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: A Separate Authority (He Mana Motuhake), Volume I
Book Subtitle: Establishing the Tūhoe Māori Sanctuary in New Zealand, 1894–1915
Authors: Steven Webster
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41042-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-41041-4Published: 08 July 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-41044-5Published: 08 July 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-41042-1Published: 07 July 2020
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XLII, 402
Number of Illustrations: 33 b/w illustrations, 4 illustrations in colour
Topics: Social Anthropology, Ethnography, Historical Sociology, Australasian History, Social Structure, Social Inequality