Ngāi Tahu legend Tā Tīpene O'Regan is sitting in the row in front of me as The Piano fills up on Sunday evening for this event celebrating a new edition of archaeologist Atholl Anderson's landmark Ngāi Tahu history, The Welcome of Strangers. It's a chatty full house but one that soon quiets as Anderson and the rest of the panel file onto the stage.
Nominally* in charge of the conversation is Ross Calman (Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāi Tahu), with Ngāi Tahu historians Michael Stevens, Te Maire Tau, and Helen Brown, along with Anderson filling out the panel. I don't know what their succession planning is like but it occurs to me that if some catastrophe had befallen us all that evening, taking out everyone on the stage, that the research, recording and sharing of Ngāi Tahu history would have taken a severe blow, probably for decades. Perhaps they should all travel in different vehicles/planes like the (British) royal family?
Anderson then came to the lectern and gave a kōrero about the history contained in The Welcome of Strangers. Speaking about the original edition of the book, he placed it in the context of other tribal histories, titles like Takitimu or Tuwharetoa, and I was surprised to learn that this kind of writing within Oceania is confined to Māori. This is due to the foundation of Māori society being the hapū (sub-tribe). Due to Aotearoa having a much vaster land area, our arrival being relatively late, and having less population density, Māori didn't develop the system of chieftains common in other Pacific populations. This meant much more whakapapa lines were preserved, as opposed to being reduced to "a few dominant lines". This whakapapa represents a rich resource for historical research.
In terms of Ngāi Tahu, there were specific factors that made the iwi's history unique. Firstly a land area of 140,000 square kilometres, with the coolest climates and more large birds, and a population of less than 5000. There was an economy that focused on 4 main seasonal resources; barracuda (Anderson told us that these could be caught at a rate of 4 fish per minute with a traditional lure), tuna/eels which were taken in bulk from coastal entrances, Tītī/muttonbird from the southern islands, and Tī sugar from South Canterbury Cabbage trees.
Harvesting in bulk meant there were opportunities for an "exchange network" which operated from Rakiura to Kaikōura. Not to mention the pounamu trade which was at "almost factory scale levels of production". This was more of a hunter-gatherer population than you'd find up north, "unusual but successful" but also "vulnerable to external pressures". Ngāi Tahu experience, in some ways, was "at the extremity of Māori experience".
So what does the new edition bring?
Stevens explains that the original 1998 version was very much tied to the 150th anniversary of the Ōtakou purchase and used Anderson's WAI 27 (Waitangi Tribunal claim) research. There has been subsequent research published since then and so the book has been significantly reworked and includes more images, maps, and diagrams. The ability to include so many more resources reflects the iwi's "stronger economic position".
Brown spoke a little on the work involved in the "digital repatriation" of significant documents, of starting out with poor quality photocopies of old documents and going back to find an original so that this edition of the book utilises much better digital versions and twice the number featured in the original edition.
In some instances this involved sourcing documents that had made their way overseas, to the National Library of Australia, for instance. Digital repatriation of this material was at "significant expense". If you're wondering why an iwi should have to pay a foreign institution for their own historical documents you wouldn't be the only one. The new edition also has more biographical information about the people mentioned. Later on when the topic of digital repatriation came up again, Brown felt that, because of the high quality of digital scans now available, perhaps it was time for institutions to keep their digital copies and return the original items back. Certainly in the case of the Ngāi Tahu Archive you can no longer make the case that they don't have the facilities or the expertise to properly care for these documents. I think that's a fair but pointed decolonising challenge to put to institutions.
A foundation text
Tau felt it was important to note that because Anderson's book is so good it offers a lot of freedom to other researchers like himself. There's a tendency for researchers to become hyperfocused on their own particular area, "it's easy to become obsessed with the details of your own village", he says. It's obvious that there's a lot of trust from Ngāi Tahu historians in Anderson's work and the book he's produced despite the fact that Anderson doesn't call himself a historian (later he refers to himself as an "auxiliary historian" in the same way that the Romans had auxiliary, "expendable" forces in the form of Celts or whoever else they had fighting for them) because he's an archaeologist and though to the layman these fields might seem like the same thing, he's clear that they're not.
Tau considers The Welcome of Strangers the "textbook" of Ngāi Tahu history, it's a great read and "it rules". He praises Anderson for addressing difficult issues (no iwi history could be without its thorny issues) saying that "he deals with them well".
Who is a tribal history for?
There was discussion around who the intender readership is for this book and the consensus was that it's about and for Ngāi Tahu but "we're moving units all over the place" and readership does come from "unexpected corners".
Ngāi Tahu has now grown (85,000 people are registered members of the iwi) and as that cohort becomes more dispersed, with some people who might only have one line of ancestry, tribal history can be useful as a way of pulling those people together. Literally giving them a shared history, I suppose.
An accessible read
Calman brought up the fact that the Western approach to writing histories is to focus on the big events and main individuals but tribal histories are much more concerned with whakapapa and wondered if this constituted a more connective way of presenting history - you can engage with the stories of the people involved in a more accessible way (Calman himself has penned a book about his own tūpuna, so it's perhaps unsurprising that he would see whānau connections as a way into history).
Te Maire Tau feels that the book will help stem the tide of enquiries he gets from school teachers interested in local Māori history as he'll be able to refer them to the book. And though it may be intimidation because of its larger size due to all those added illustrations "there's fun in this book - it's a fun book to read".
There was also the expectation that in the same way teachers made their own teaching notes based on the Tangata Ngāi Tahu volumes that they'll likely do the same with this book.
And speaking of Ngāi Tahu publications, an atlas based on their Kā Huru Manu cultural mapping project is on the way!
Later during audience questions a rangatahi asked, "is this a digestible, easily accessible way to understand our people's history?" to which Brown responded that it's pitched at a good level for all readers. Te Maire Tau quipped that it certainly made for better reading than "the Tudor constitution", a topic he was forced to read at that age. Whereas Brown made the excellent observation that "it should be on everyone's bookshelf - it's the history of half the country".
*At various points the panellists would, out of professional curiosity, ask their own questions of Anderson, causing Calman to quip at one point that he was thinking of leaving early and "popping out to the pub". But this was all in good humour and made for a relaxed flow of pātai and answers.
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