This book describes one of the most extraordinary and fascinating stories in NZ history. In the early part of the last century several thousand runaway seamen and escaped convicts settled in Maori communities. Jacky Mamon, John Rutherford, Charlotte Badger and many others - this is their largely untold story. They were regarded as unsavoury renegades by the European settlers, but amongst Maori they were usually welcomed. Many Pakeha Maori took wives and were treated as Maori, others were treated as slaves. Some received the moko, the facial or body tattoo. Others became virtual white chiefs and fought in battle with their adopted tribe. A few even fought against European soldiers, advising their fellow fighters about European infantry and artillery tactics. In this, the first-ever book devoted solely to the Pakeha Maori, Trevor Bentley describes in fascinating detail how the strangers entered Maori communities, adapted to tribal life and played a significant role in the merging of the two cultures.

'This book is about my making sense here, of my becoming and being Pākehā. Every Pākehā becomes a Pākehā in their own way, finding her or his own meaning for that Māori word. This is the story of what it means to me. I have written this book for Pākehā – and other New Zealanders – curious about their sense of identity and about the ambivalences we Pākehā often experience in our relationships with Māori.' A timely and perceptive memoir from award-winning author and academic Alison Jones. As questions of identity come to the fore once more in New Zealand, this frank and humane account of a life spent traversing Pākehā and Māori worlds offers important insights into our shared life on these islands.

An account focusing on the encounters between the Maori and Pakeha—or European settlers—and the process of mutual discovery from 1642 to around 1840, this New Zealand history book argues that both groups inhabited a middle ground in which neither could dictate the political, economic, or cultural rules of engagement. By looking at economic, religious, political, and sexual encounters, it offers a strikingly different picture to traditional accounts of imperial Pakeha power over a static, resistant Maori society. With fresh insights, this book examines why mostly beneficial interactions between these two cultures began to merge and the reasons for their subsequent demise after 1840.

This book traces Māori engagement with handwriting from 1769 to 1826. Through beautifully reproduced written documents, it describes the first encounters Māori had with paper and writing and the first relationships between Māori and Europeans in the earliest school. The earliest Māori–Pākehā engagements were vividly recorded by both Māori and Pākehā in drawings and writing in the early 1800's. These beautiful archival images tell stories about how Māori encountered pen and paper, which gives us a new and exciting perspective on the past. Words Between Us – He Kōrero is a controversial and enlightening book that will stimulate fresh thinking about those first conversations between Māori and Pākehā.

Today's New Zealand is an emerging paradigm for successful cultural relations. Although the nation's Maori (indigenous Polynesian) and Pakeha (colonial European) populations of the 19th century were dramatically different and often at odds, they are today co-contributors to a vibrant society. For more than a century they have been working out the kind of nation that engenders respect and well-being; and their interaction, though often riddled with confrontation, is finally bearing bicultural fruit. By their model, the encounter of diverse cultures does not require the surrender of one to the other; rather, it entails each expanding its own cultural categories in the light of the other. The time is ripe to explore modern New Zealand's cultural dynamics for what we can learn about getting along. The present anthropological work focuses on religion and related symbols, forms of reciprocity, the operation of power and the concept of culture in modern New Zealand society.

The essays in Part One discuss aspects of the legal and historical significance of the gaining of sovereignty over New Zealand by the Crown. The essays in Part Two are studies of Maori reaction to the guarantees given by the Crown to protect their "rangatiratanga" - their tribally based heritage and identity.

Published in 1863, this vivid account documents the traditional Maori way of life that was vanishing due to European influences.

Since Europeans first set foot in New Zealand they have speculated about where the M&āori people came from, how they made their way to New Zealand and how they lived when they arrived here. Theories have abounded: some of them have hardened into accepted truth. The result has been an accumulation of Pakeha myths about M&āori origins. The process of this mythmaking is the subject of Sorrenson's book: 'It is not an attempt to find an original or even a Pacific homeland for the M&āori. I leave that task to the many others who are happily engaged on it.' But as a study of the development of ideas, this book is both fascinating and salutary.