1814: Settling the First Settlers – Ka maoritia te Pakeha   14 Jul 2014

1814: Settling the First Settlers – Ka maoritia te Pakeha

The bicentenary of the arrival of Pakeha settlers in New Zealand will be remembered through this year’s commemorative 2014 University of Auckland Winter Lecture Series.

In late December 1814, the first permanent Pakeha settlers arrived in Aotearoa-New Zealand to live at Te Hohi (‘Oihi’) in the northern Bay of Islands, following an invitation from Ruatara of Rangihoua.

“This year’s free lecture series commemorates this important moment of arrival in New Zealand history,” says speaker and organiser Professor Alison Jones from Te Puna Wananga, the University’s School of Maori Education.

“Origin stories about formal Maori - Pakeha relationships typically start with the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, yet decades of Maori - Pakeha relationships before the Treaty were pivotal to that agreement, and to Pakeha settlement.

“Maori and Pakeha leaders were establishing strategic relationships from 1793 and a number of rangatira Maori travelled to Australia in the earliest years of the nineteenth century, both to explore European society and to reinforce political contacts.”

By 1820, in A Grammar and Vocabulary of the Language of New Zealand, the question was asked: “kamaoritia te Pakeha? [ka whakamaoritia te Pakeha?]” [Have the Pakeha become ordinary/one of us?].

The Winter lecture series includes consideration of the Maori invitation and response to Pakeha settlement. It is based on the award-winning He Korero: Words Between Us – First Maori – Pakeha Conversations on Paper (Huia Publishers, Wellington, 2011) jointly written by Alison Jones and fellow lecturer and speaker Professor Kuni Kaa Jenkins.

Following Ruatara’s invitation to Samuel Marsden, the chaplain at Sydney NSW, to send a teacher to New Zealand ‘to teach the children to read and write’, a group of European settlers arrived at Rangihoua in December 1814. They were accompanied by the chiefs Ruatara, Hongi Hika and Korokoro who had sailed with them from Australia.

On 24 December 1814, a significant powhiri involving about 400 people from around the Bay of Islands, took place on the beach beneath the pa at Rangihoua, bringing the new settlers into a relationship with the iwi of the Bay. On 25 December 1814, Marsden’s famous ‘first sermon’ took place on that same beach.

The Church of England of Aotearoa is this year planning commemorations of the sermon and the arrival of Christianity to New Zealand. The Winter lecture series is an opportunity to more broadly recognise the earliest strategic relationships between Maori and Pakeha, to foreground Maori intentions and desires, and to remind us of the historical events of 1814.

It will showcase the work of distinguished researchers from three faculties at the University of Auckland, as well as alumni of the University.

The speakers
Professor Alison Jones is a member of Te Puna Wananga, School of Maori Education at the Faculty of Education, University of Auckland. She was born in Auckland, and gained her PhD from the University of Auckland. Her current research is on the educational relationship between Maori and Pakeha during the period 1793-1826. Her most recent book is the award-winning He Korero: Words Between Us – First Maori –Pakeha Conversations on Paper (Huia Publishers, Wellington, 2011) jointly written with Kuni Jenkins. She is now writing a book with Kuni provisionally entitled Tuai: Maori Witness to the Industrial Revolution which traces the studies of Pakeha society by a young Ngare Raumati man in Australia, New Zealand and England between 1813 and his death in 1826.

Professor Kuni Kaa Jenkins (Ngati Porou) teaches in the School of Education, Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi. She held the prestigious Marsden Fund award for research 2008-2011 in partnership with Professor Alison Jones of the University of Auckland. Kuni was raised outside her iwi in Maori communities of the Hawkes Bay. She was a lecturer in Education at the University of Auckland from 1995-2003. Her interests are especially in the history of education and the schooling of Maori girls. Among her list of publications on Maori education is the award-winning book He Korero: Words Between Us – First Maori–Pakeha Conversations on Paper (Huia Publishers, Wellington, 2011) jointly written with Alison Jones, on which their Winter Lecture Series lecture is based.
Associate Professor Manuka Henare (Te Rarawa, Te Aupouri) is Associate Professor in Maori Business Development in the Department of Management and International Business, at the University of Auckland, and Associate Dean (Maori and Pacific Development). Manuka is also the foundation Director of the Mira Szászy Research Centre for Maori and Pacific Economic Development and leads a number of multidisciplinary research project teams. Manuka is currently a member of the National Strategy for Financial Literacy Advisory Group, government appointee to the Manukau Institute of Technology Council, and the Council of Te Wananga o Aotearoa. He has advised government departments, local authorities and other institutions on bicultural policies and also served on government advisory committees on development assistance, peace and disarmament, archives, history, social policy, environmental risk management and a number of other ministerial appointments.

Distinguished Professor Dame Anne Salmond was born in Wellington and grew up in Gisborne. She was educated at the University of Auckland and the University of Pennsylvania. She is a Distinguished Professor of Maori Studies and Anthropology at the University of Auckland. For many years she worked closely with Eruera Stirling and Amiria Stirling, noted elders of Te Whanau-a-Apanui and Ngati Porou. Their collaboration led to three prize-winning books about Maori life, and a deep and abiding interest in Maori philosophy. Dame Anne has also written a series of books about European voyaging and cross-cultural encounters in the Pacific that have received much international recognition. Dame Anne is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. In 1995 she became a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and in 2004 received the Prime Minister’s Award for literary achievement. In 2008, she was elected as a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and the following year as a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences – the first New Zealander known to have achieved this double distinction. In 2011 Dame Anne received the KEA World Class New Zealander - Science, Technology and Academia Award. She is the 2013 New Zealander of the Year.

Associate Professor Alex Calder is Head of English, Drama and Writing Studies at the University of Auckland. He teaches New Zealand and American literature, literary theory and the Gothic, while his research centres on writings from the cross-cultural frontier and the literature of settlement, particularly from New Zealand and the United States. His most recent book, The Settler’s Plot (2011), is a study of the relationship between literature, place and the history of Pakeha settlement in New Zealand. Other notable publications include several recent essays on the American novelist Herman Melville, a scholarly edition of F. E. Maning’s Old New Zealand and Other Writings, the co-edited collection of essays Voyages and Beaches: Pacific Encounters, 1769–1840, andThe Writing of New Zealand: Inventions and Identities, an influential anthology of New Zealand non-fiction.

Professor Patu Hohepa (Te Mahurehure, Ngapuhi, Te Atiawa) gained his PhD at the University of Indiana in the United States. He is the former Professor of Maori Language at the University of Auckland, and former Maori Language Commissioner. Patu was the first Maori dux of Northland College, and went on to have a distinguished career in Maori and Pacific linguistics. He is also a Ngapuhi orator, genealogist, waiata singer, spokesperson, and writer, and retains an enduring interest in education opportunities for the people of Te Taitokerau (Northland) where he resides.

Professor Andrew Sharp has lived in London since 2006. He is an Emeritus Professor in Politics and International Relations, School of Social Sciences, University of Auckland, and a Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. Educated at the Universities of Canterbury (NZ) and at Cambridge (UK), during an academic career in New Zealand he specialised in teaching political philosophy and the history of western political thought. On his retirement he was awarded an ONZM for services to Political Science. He has published two editions of writings of the English Civil War period (The Political Ideas of the English Civil Warsand The English Levellers), together with a number of studies of political and legal thinking in Britain and in New Zealand. Those on New Zealand include Justice and the Maori, and, edited with Paul McHugh, Histories, Power and Loss, a series of studies in the historiography of Maori-Pakeha relations. Most recently he edited a collection of the writings of Bruce Jesson: To Build a Nation. While at Waikato he is working on a book on the life and opinions of Rev. Samuel Marsden to be called The World, the Flesh and the Devil, due for publication by the Auckland University Press in time for the bicentennial of the establishment of the first mission in New Zealand in 1814.

ENDS

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