Brian J. Murton, University of Hawaii, 267 Panio Street, Honolulu, HI 96821. bmurton@hawaii.edu.

The Textual Displacement of Maori in Early Colonial Northern Aotearoa/New Zealand.

This paper uses the chapters of J. S. Polack’s New Zealand: Being A Narrative Of Travels and Adventures During A Residence In That Country Between The Years 1831 and 1837 (1838) that deal with the area lying between the Hokianga and Kaipara Harbours in northern New Zealand to illustrate how representational practices can help clarify how colonizing power works through the imposition of an appearance of order that seemingly emanates from nature itself, rather from the ordering of appearances in representational practices. Polack’s text ordered and naturalized the landscape, dividing the area into the “primitive” spaces of Maori villages, and empty lands, thus displacing Maori and re-situating them within a new regime of power and knowledge. Colonial rhetoric such as this facilitated the more formal processes usually associated with Maori dispossession of land and resources and they represent the beginning of “governmentality” in New Zealand. In the political present, with Maori land and resource claims being negotiated with the Crown under the Treaty of Waitangi Act, the need is paramount to understand that the writings of travelers, naturalists, merchants, missionaries, and settlers produced and codified knowledge that underwrote and legitimated the deployment of the Crown’s authority over Maori, and which continues to influence policy and practice today.

Keyword: Maori, displacement, New Zealand.