Indigenous Studies

The Original Australians tells the story of Australian Indigenous history and society from its distant beginnings to the present day. From the wisdom and paintings of the Dreamtime to the first contact between Europeans and First Nations Australians, through to the Uluru Statement, it offers an insight into the life and experiences of the world's oldest surviving culture. The resilience and adaptability of Indigenous people over millennia is one of the great human stories of all time.

He Reo Wahine is a bold new introduction to the experience of Maori women in colonial New Zealand through Maori women's own words – the speeches and evidence, letters and testimonies that they left in the archive. This book explores the range and diversity of Maori women's concerns and interests, the many ways in which they engaged with colonial institutions, as well as their understanding and use of the law, legal documents, and the court system. The book both collects those sources – providing readers with substantial excerpts from letters, petitions, submissions and other documents – and interprets them. He Reo Wahine changes that by utilizing the colonial archives to explore the feelings, thoughts and experiences of Maori women – and their relationships to the wider world.

Available through Interlibrary Loan. Skin Deep looks at the preoccupations of European-Australians in their encounters with Aboriginal women and the tropes, types, and perceptions that seeped into everyday settler-colonial thinking. Early erroneous and uninformed accounts of Aboriginal women and culture were repeated throughout various print forms and imagery, both in Australia and in Europe, with names, dates, and locations erased so that individual women came to be anonymized as 'gins' and 'lubras.' The book identifies and traces the various tropes used to typecast Aboriginal women, contributing to their lasting hold on the colonial imagination even after conflicting records emerged. The colonial archive itself, consisting largely of accounts by white men, is critiqued in the book. Construction of Aboriginal women's gender and sexuality was a form of colonial control, and Skin Deep shows how the industrialization of print was critical to this control, emerging as it did alongside colonial expansion. For nearly all settlers, typecasting Aboriginal women through name-calling and repetition of tropes sufficed to evoke an understanding that was surface-based and half-knowing: only skin deep.

Based on in-depth research and interviews with 30 tribal elders, this guidebook to whaikorero--or New Zealand's traditional Maori oratory--is the first introduction to this fundamental art form. Assessing whaikorero's origin, history, structure, language, and style of delivery, this volume features a range of speech samples in Maori with English translations and captures the wisdom and experience of the Maori tribal groups, including Ngai Tuhoe, Ngati Awa, Te Arawa, and Waikato-Maniapoto. Informative and noteworthy, this bilingual examination will interest both modern practitioners of whaikorero and Maori culture aficionados.

One of the first ethnographic studies of Māori urbanization since the 1970s, this book is based on almost two years of fieldwork, living with Māori families, and more than 250 hours of interviews. In contrast with studies that have focused on indigenous elites and official groups and organizations, Being Māori in the City shines a light on the lives of ordinary individuals and families. Using this approach, Natacha Gagné adroitly underlines how indigenous ways of being are maintained and even strengthened through change and openness to the larger society.

Presenting the stories behind several generations of seven Maori-Chinese families whose voices have seldom been heard before, this account casts a fascinating light on the historical and contemporary relations between Maori and Chinese in New Zealand. The two groups first came into contact in the late 19th century and often lived and interacted closely, leading to intermarriage and large families. By the 1930s, proximity and similarities had brought many Maori-Chinese families together, the majority of whom had to deal with cultural differences and discrimination. The growing political confidence of Maori since the 1970s and the more recent tensions around Asian immigration have put pressure on the relationship and the families' dual identities. Today's Maori-Chinese, reaffirming their multiple roots and cultural advantages, are playing increasingly important roles in New Zealand society. This account is oral history at its most compelling--an absorbing read for anyone interested in the complex yet rewarding topic of cultural interactions between indigenous and immigrant groups.

This collection contains more than 2,500 pepeha, or "sayings of the ancestors," that were gathered and compiled from all over New Zealand over a 20-year period. More than just proverbs, pepeha include charms, witticisms, figures of speech, and boasts, and they are featured in the formal speeches heard every day on the marae and in the oral literature handed down from past generations. These expressions provide a rich source of vocabulary, using metaphor and an economy of words to show language that enriches the Maori of today.