Cultural opportunities
In previous books, historian Dame Anne Salmond has often delved into the clash of beliefs that occurred when Maori and European first came into contact. In this latest work, she moves the issue forward in intriguing fashion by exploring how those conflicting views are starting to overlap in places.
Salmond starts by looking back to the beginning, when Cook landed at Tolaga Bay in 1769, through to the arrival of missionaries in 1814 and the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, and uses fascinating anecdotes to show just how different their belief systems were.
Maori like Te Whakatatare-o- te- rangi, the paramount chief who met Cook at Tolaga Bay, lived in a world of relationships where all things — people or birds, forests or rivers, living or dead — have a common ancestry and are bound together in a complex, ever- changing web, governed by rules of reciprocity needed to preserve a proper balance.
But the British hierarchy, typified by Joseph Banks, gentleman-scientist on the Endeavour, came from a society of individualists. They believed in the power of the scientific approach to examine and classify everything on the planet, identify the underlying rules and so make sense of it all.
Initially, when Maori predominated, their ideas usually held sway. But as the colonists grew in strength they imposed their own perspectives, and for the past 150 years New Zealand has operated largely within a European framework.
However, in the second part of the book, Salmond looks at the growing trend for Maori beliefs to be incorporated into the national way of thinking.
This tendency has always existed, she writes, because “relational ideas and assumptions also exist in the Western tradition, and resonances between justice and tikanga, honour and mana, truth and pono, generosity and manaakitanga ( all relationship concepts) allowed alliances to be forged between Maori and Pakeha, including lawyers, politicians, activists, artists and scholars, in the aftermath of the civil wars in New Zealand, at the turn of the century and in recent times.”
Indeed, as she illustrates, of late that process has accelerated with developments such as non- Maori adopting Maori words and the ideas within them, for instance by thinking of themselves as kaitiaki for taonga such as endangered species or polluted rivers; Maori thinking being drawn on for discussions on sustainable land use and requirements for councils to take into account the relationship of Maori with their traditional spheres of influence.
Perhaps most intriguing of all, the Treaty of Waitangi settlement between the Government and Whanganui, which embraces both world views, recognising the Whanganui River as a legal person with its own rights; and, on the other hand, acknowledging private interests in the water and providing a mechanism for these to be bought and sold.
In her conclusion, she suggests that instead of seeing cultural differences as conflicts we might instead seize on them as opportunities from which new understandings can emerge “and perhaps new ways of living.”