"This volume seeks to delineate the history of the production, dissemination, and reception of texts from the earliest pictograms of the mid-4th millennium to recent developments in electronic books."--Page xi.

Maori oral tradition is the rich, poetic record of the past handed down by voice over generations through whakapapa, whakatauki, korero and waiata. In genealogies and sayings, histories, stories and songs, Maori tell of ‘te ao tawhito' or the old world: the gods, the migration of the Polynesian ancestors from Hawaiki and life here in Aotearoa. A voice from the past, today this remarkable record underpins the speeches, songs and prayers performed on marae and the teaching of tribal genealogies and histories. Indeed, the oral tradition underpins Maori culture itself. This book introduces readers to the distinctive oral style and language of the traditional compositions, acknowledges the skills of the composers of old and explores the meaning of their striking imagery and figurative language. And it shows how nga korero tuku iho – the inherited words – can be a deep well of knowledge about the way of life, wisdom and thinking of the Maori ancestors.

The arrival of the Anglican Church with its claims to religious power was soon followed by British imperial claims to temporal power. Political, legal, economic and social institutions were designed to be the bastions of control across the British Empire. However, they were also places of contestation and engagement at a local and national level, and this was true of New Zealand. Māori culture was constantly capable of adaptation in the face of changing contexts. This ground-breaking book explores the emergence of Te Hāhi Mihinare – the Māori Anglican Church. Anglicanism, brought to New Zealand by English missionaries in 1814, was made widely known by Māori evangelists, as iwi adapted the religion to make it their own. The ways in which Mihinare (Māori Anglicans) engaged with the settler Anglican Church in New Zealand and created their own unique Church casts light on the broader question of how Māori interacted with and transformed European culture and institutions. Hirini Kaa vividly describes the quest for a Māori Anglican bishop, the translation into te reo of the prayer book, and the development of a distinctive Māori Anglican ministry for today’s world. Te Hāhi Mihinare uncovers a rich history that enhances our understanding of New Zealand’s past.

During the nineteenth century, Maori women produced letters and memoirs, wrote off to newspapers and commissioners, appeared before commissions of enquiry, gave evidence in court cases, and went to the Native Land Court to assert their rights. 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. Drawing from over 500 texts in both English and te reo Maori written by Maori women themselves, or expressing their words in the first person, He Reo Wahine 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. Eight chapters group texts across key themes: land sales, war, land confiscation and compensation, politics, petitions, legal encounters, religion and other private matters. Beside a large scholarship on New Zealand women's history, the historical literature on Maori women is remarkably thin. This book changes that by utilising the colonial archives to explore the feelings, thoughts and experiences of Maori women – and their relationships to the wider world.

Other Renaissances is a collection of twelve essays discussing renaissances outside the Italian and Italian prompted European Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The collection proposes an approach to reframing the Renaissance in which the European Renaissance becomes an imaginative idea, rather than a particular moment in time

Both colonial and postcolonial historical approaches often sideline New Zealand as a peripheral player. This book redresses the balance, and evaluates its role as an imperial power – as both a powerful imperial envoy and a significant presence in the Pacific region.

Tangata Whenua: An Illustrated History charts the sweep of Māori history from ancient origins through to the twenty-first century. Through narrative and images, it offers a striking overview of the past, grounded in specific localities and histories. The story begins with the migration of ancestral peoples out of South China, some 5,000 years ago. Moving through the Pacific, these early voyagers arrived in Aotearoa early in the second millennium AD, establishing themselves as tangata whenua in the place that would become New Zealand. By the nineteenth century, another wave of settlers brought new technology, ideas and trading opportunities – and a struggle for control of the land. Survival and resilience shape the history as it extends into the twentieth century, through two world wars, the growth of an urban culture, rising protest, and Treaty settlements. Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Māori are drawing on both international connections and their ancestral place in Aotearoa. Fifteen stunning chapters bring together scholarship in history, archaeology, traditional narratives and oral sources. A parallel commentary is offered through more than 500 images, ranging from the elegant shapes of ancient taonga and artefacts to impressions of Māori in the sketchbooks and paintings of early European observers, through the shifting focus of the photographer’s lens to the response of contemporary Māori artists to all that has gone before. The many threads of history are entwined in this compelling narrative of the people and the land, the story of a rich past that illuminates the present and will inform the future.

This book provides a new approach to the historical treatment of indigenous peoples' sovereignty and property rights in Australia and New Zealand. By shifting attention from the original European claims of possession to a comparison of the ways in which British players treated these matters later, Bain Attwood not only reveals some startling similarities between the Australian and New Zealand cases but revises the long-held explanations of the differences. He argues that the treatment of the sovereignty and property rights of First Nations was seldom determined by the workings of moral principle, legal doctrine, political thought or government policy. Instead, it was the highly particular historical circumstances in which the first encounters between natives and Europeans occurred and colonisation began that largely dictated whether treaties of cession were negotiated, just as a bitter political struggle determined the significance of the Treaty of Waitangi and ensured that native title was made in New Zealand.

Twenty-five years ago the Māori Language Act was passed, but research still finds that the Māori language is dying. This collection looks at the state of the language since the Act, how the language is faring in education, media, texts and communities and what the future aspirations for the language are.