…is the title of a new book written by an editor of the Harvard Review. According the the New York Times Book Review (I haven’t read the book), it’s about both the author’s experience with modern Maoris and the historical European “discovery” and colonization of New Zealand. Here are a couple pieces from the review:
“Thompson [the author] persists with this meeting-of-alien-peoples theme as the tenuous link between the memoir part of her book, in which she is cast as a kind of explorer charting new cross-cultural territory in her relationship with a Maori (“I was small and blond, he was a 6-foot-2, 200-pound Polynesian. I had a Ph.D., he went to trade school”), and the history part (the European discovery and colonization of New Zealand). The late-20th-century pub incident, for example, segues into accounts of 18th-century encounters between Maoris and explorers like James Cook and Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne. Both of them were ultimately killed by the Polynesians they met; Thompson married hers.”
. . . .
“Although Thompson’s “contact encounter” parallels are strained, her observations about the enduring effects of colonization can be penetrating. She puts her vantage point of insider-outsider (she’s never lived in New Zealand yet has an intimate connection with it) to good effect, tracing the genealogy of racial stereotypes and cutting through some of New Zealand’s most cherished myths about itself. Like the one about how injustices of the past have been addressed, or that, unlike Australia, New Zealand is not racist. “What, after all, does the cluster of social indicators that includes low life expectancy, poor health, high unemployment and low levels of educational attainment suggest, if not poverty?” she asks. “And what is the root cause of Maori poverty, if not colonization?” Thompson now has interests on both sides of the postcolonial divide, feeling the dispossession suffered by her husband’s (hence her children’s) people as well as that perpetrated by her own. (“It was the Dakotas and Pennacooks and Pawtuckets who paid the price of our family’s prosperity.”)”
The full review is available on the New York Times website.