You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Elsdon Best was New Zealand's foremost writer on pre-European Maori life. His books are a uniquely valuable record of traditional Maori culture, social customs and beliefs. Without him, we would know little of the customs and traditions of these times. Best published almost a dozen monographs on all aspects of life; this edition brings them all back into print.
First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
In 1895 a meeting took place in the rugged Urewera ranges - Tuhoe country - that would have lasting effects on our views of traditional Maori society. Elsdon Best, a self-taught anthropologist and quartermaster on the road past Lake Waikaremoana, was sought out by a leading Tuhoe chief, Tutakangahau of Maungapohatu. The stories he gave to Best to be recorded for future generations are with us today. Best went on to become a noted Pakeha authority on a people he would style as the last of 'the oldtime Maori'. How much did the old man tell him? Was it freely given? Can Best's writings - so pervasive today in our understanding of Maori culture - be truly relied upon? In his unique examination of this historically significant relationship, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman poses such searching questions, further informing a vital national debate on the shared identity - and destiny - of Maori and Pakeha. 'This is our history at its best.' --Matthew Wright, Sunday Star-Times
Biography of Elsdon Best, known today as New Zealand's first locally born scholar of the Maori and of maori ways. This book describes Best the man - traveller, adventurer, bushman, and devoted ethnologist.
For Europeans during the nineteenth century, the Urewera was a remote wilderness; for those who lived there, it was a sheltering heartland. This history documents the first hundred years of the ‘Rohe Pōtae’ (the ‘encircled lands’ of the Urewera) following European contact. After large areas of land were lost, the Urewera became for a brief period an autonomous district, governed by its own leaders. But in 1921–22, the Urewera District Native Reserve was abolished in law. Its very existence became largely forgotten – except in local memory. Recovering this history from a wealth of contemporary documents, many written by Urewera leaders, Encircled Lands contextualises Tūhoe’s quest for a constitutional agreement that restores their authority in their lands.