scholarly journals 'Of Red War and Little Else': European Responses to Indigenous Violence in the Tasman World, c.1769-1850s

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Samuel Gordon Gardiner Ritchie

<p>Europeans responded to indigenous internecine violence in a variety of ways in the Tasman world from first contact to the middle of the nineteenth century. Whereas extant historiography has previously addressed European responses to Māori and Aboriginal violence in geographic and temporal isolation, a comparison spanning time and space augments knowledge of these responses. Violence was not the only aspect of indigenous societies Europeans responded to, nor was indigenous violence the only justification for colonisation. However an investigation of the ways in which Europeans represented and responded to indigenous violence enables a better understanding of the processes of the colonisation of the Tasman world.  Indigenous internecine violence included cannibalism, infanticide, inter-gender violence, and inter-tribal warfare. Through a wide variety of European observations of this violence, this thesis identifies an initial conceptualisation of both New Zealand Māori and Aboriginal peoples of Australia as violent, cannibal ‘savages’. This conceptualisation was used to justify both colonisation and the related evangelical and colonial administrative attempts to suppress indigenous violence, as internecine violence was deemed ‘un-civilised’, unchristian, and unacceptable. Europeans attempted to suppress indigenous violence as it was seen both as an impediment to colonisation and, relatedly, as an inhibitor to the ‘redemption’ of indigenous peoples. While indigenous violence was seen as a barrier to colonisation, however, it was also simultaneously used to promote colonisation. Thus the attempted suppression of indigenous violence developed into the European mobilisation and utilisation of intra-Māori and intra-Aboriginal violence in the promotion of colonisation.  The development of European responses to indigenous internecine violence – from conceptualisations, through attempted suppression, to utilisation – is here examined in a Tasman-world context, drawing upon the interactions between these varied responses. In tracing this development within a comparative framework, both indigenous agency and a rejection of the historiographically persistent notions of a homogenous (and harmonious) Aboriginal Australia and a homogenous Māori people during this time period are key threads.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Samuel Gordon Gardiner Ritchie

<p>Europeans responded to indigenous internecine violence in a variety of ways in the Tasman world from first contact to the middle of the nineteenth century. Whereas extant historiography has previously addressed European responses to Māori and Aboriginal violence in geographic and temporal isolation, a comparison spanning time and space augments knowledge of these responses. Violence was not the only aspect of indigenous societies Europeans responded to, nor was indigenous violence the only justification for colonisation. However an investigation of the ways in which Europeans represented and responded to indigenous violence enables a better understanding of the processes of the colonisation of the Tasman world.  Indigenous internecine violence included cannibalism, infanticide, inter-gender violence, and inter-tribal warfare. Through a wide variety of European observations of this violence, this thesis identifies an initial conceptualisation of both New Zealand Māori and Aboriginal peoples of Australia as violent, cannibal ‘savages’. This conceptualisation was used to justify both colonisation and the related evangelical and colonial administrative attempts to suppress indigenous violence, as internecine violence was deemed ‘un-civilised’, unchristian, and unacceptable. Europeans attempted to suppress indigenous violence as it was seen both as an impediment to colonisation and, relatedly, as an inhibitor to the ‘redemption’ of indigenous peoples. While indigenous violence was seen as a barrier to colonisation, however, it was also simultaneously used to promote colonisation. Thus the attempted suppression of indigenous violence developed into the European mobilisation and utilisation of intra-Māori and intra-Aboriginal violence in the promotion of colonisation.  The development of European responses to indigenous internecine violence – from conceptualisations, through attempted suppression, to utilisation – is here examined in a Tasman-world context, drawing upon the interactions between these varied responses. In tracing this development within a comparative framework, both indigenous agency and a rejection of the historiographically persistent notions of a homogenous (and harmonious) Aboriginal Australia and a homogenous Māori people during this time period are key threads.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoë Laidlaw

Rooted in the extraordinary archive of Quaker physician and humanitarian activist, Dr Thomas Hodgkin, this book explores the efforts of the Aborigines' Protection Society to expose Britain's hypocrisy and imperial crimes in the mid-nineteenth century. Hodgkin's correspondents stretched from Liberia to Lesotho, New Zealand to Texas, Jamaica to Ontario, and Bombay to South Australia; they included scientists, philanthropists, missionaries, systematic colonizers, politicians and indigenous peoples themselves. Debating the best way to protect and advance indigenous rights in an era of burgeoning settler colonialism, they looked back to the lessons and limitations of anti-slavery, lamented the imperial government's disavowal of responsibility for settler colonies, and laid out elaborate (and patronizing) plans for indigenous 'civilization'. Protecting the Empire's Humanity reminds us of the complexity, contradictions and capacious nature of British colonialism and metropolitan 'humanitarianism', illuminating the broad canvas of empire through a distinctive set of British and Indigenous campaigners.


Author(s):  
Augie Fleras ◽  
Roger Maaka

Engaging politically with the principles of indigeneity is neither an option nor a cop out. The emergence of Indigenous peoples as prime-time players on the world’s political stage attests to the timeliness and relevance of indigeneity in advancing a new postcolonial contract for living together differently. Insofar as the principles of indigeneity are inextricably linked with challenge, resistance, and transformation, this paper argues that reference to indigeneity as policy(- making) paradigm is both necessary and overdue. To put this argument to the test, the politics of Maori indigeneity in Aotearoa New Zealand are analyzed and assessed in constructing an indigeneity agenda model. The political implications of an indigeneity-policy nexus are then applied to the realities of Canada’s Indigenous/Aboriginal peoples. The paper contends that, just as the Government is committed to a gender based analysis (GBA) for improving policy outcomes along gender lines, so too should the principles of indigeneity (or aboriginality) secure an indigeneity grounded analysis (IGA) framework for minimizing systemic policy bias while maximizing Indigenous peoples inputs. The paper concludes by theorizing those provisional first principles that inform an IGA framework as a policy (-making) lens.


Author(s):  
Shaunnagh Dorsett

This chapter examines legal encounters and legal relations between Indigenous peoples in both Australia and New Zealand and the British Empire. It looks at court decisions as a source of historical material in order to suggest two contact points between jurisdictions through which to think about indigenous laws and settler laws. It focuses on only two instances of contact: the colonial and the present. In many ways this choice reproduces ongoing gaps in tracing and thinking about legal encounters with Aboriginal law in Australia and, to a lesser extent, in New Zealand. Scholarship on legal encounter has tended to be centred on the colonial period to the detriment of the later nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century. The chapter looks at the ways in which colonial and modern law engaged/s with aboriginal law from the perspective of the colonizer, not the colonized.


Author(s):  
Anne Warner La Forest

AbstractThe tale presented in the film The Piano is placed in mid-19th-century New Zealand and has been heralded by critics as a timeless love story, and described as erotic and romantic. A legal historical review of this time period, however, demonstrates that, upon marriage, women had very limited property rights and were entirely dependent upon men, whether their fathers, their husbands, or otherwise. In particular, personal objects such as a piano would become the property of the husband upon marriage. Hence, a married woman's access to the ability to express herself in this manner was not her own. The actions of the characters in this film are consistent with the law applicable to this time period. Ultimately, from this persective, the movie is about the abuses of this kind of culture and its inability to suppress the human spirit—the piano being a symbol of exactly that struggle. This paper compares the “modern” perception of this film to its historical context, with the objective of determining what this says about our present society and culture.


1985 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
E W MacKie

Summary ‘First contact’ artefacts collected from aboriginal peoples by the early European explorers are now valuable in providing the only direct evidence for recent ‘Stone Age’ technologies which no longer exist. During the J770's Dr William Hunter collected many such artefacts for his private museum; most originated in the Pacific and in North America and had been collected by people who sailed with Captain James Cook. Since 1978 it has been possible to re-identify most of this early ethnographical material and to separate itfrom later acquisitions. To emphasise the archaeological relevance of this examples are described here from 18th century hunter-gatherer peoples (the Indians of Tierra delFuego, theNootka of British Columbia and the Eskimos of Alaska) and from stone-using farmers (the Maoris of New Zealand and the islanders of Hawaii). A list of the surviving early collection is given in microfiche.


Author(s):  
Arini Loader

Fittingly published on the eve of Tuia 250, Indigenous Mobilities urges us to think harder and with much more depth about the precise nature of colonial contact with Indigenous peoples and settlement on Indigenous land in the antipodes. Given our geographic proximity, the 200 or so year history of Māori in Australia and our entwined if equally divergent political history, it is surprising that scholarship taking in both the Australian and New Zealand contexts does not appear more frequently. Indeed, it is notable how often Aboriginal Australia is not brought into conversation with New Zealand Māori histories, experiences and aspirations. A welcome addition to scholarship which actively seeks Indigenous–Indigenous connection and recognition of our shared region, Indigenous Mobilities asks what happens when we read Māori and Aboriginal mobility alongside each other. The picture that emerges is a richly hued canvas of lives fully lived and places fully inhabited against a backdrop of colonial oppression.


2010 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 28-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenton Scott Storey

Contemporary British imperial historiography argues that during the late 1850s/early 1860s antagonistic racial discourses became increasingly popular across the British Empire. According to this interpretation, escalating colonial violence and Darwinian racial discourses marginalized the humanitarian tenet that Indigenous peoples could achieve a measure of British civilization. During this same period the British colonies of New Zealand and Vancouver Island featured anxiety related to the threat of indigenous violence. But while New Zealand and Vancouver Island featured remarkable parallels in their colonial development, differing local conditions and relationships to the British metropole contributed to divergent reactions within local press to the threat of indigenous violence. This paper focuses on representative newspapers from New Zealand’s and Vancouver Island’s capital cities. An analysis of Auckland’s Southern Crossand Victoria’s British Colonist provides an opportunity to highlight the effects of colonists’ anxiety, the local resiliency of humanitarian discourses, and the influence metropolitan connections played in the formation of editorial perspectives.


Author(s):  
Bain Attwood

This chapter focuses on historical writing in New Zealand and Australia, which has been transformed since 1945. In the 1950s and 1960s, as the number of academic historians increased exponentially and growing professionalization occurred, a project of constructing a progressive story of masculinist nation-making and nationalism became dominant, while in the 1970s and 1980s, a younger generation of historians—many of them women and first-generation Australians—challenged this triumphant nationalist story of self-realization as they embraced social and cultural history and their emphases on the differences of class, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. There is one area in which historical writing in New Zealand and Australia has undoubtedly been distinctive, at least in terms of its public impact; namely, that concerning the pasts of the indigenous peoples. The chapter then looks at the historiography of aboriginal–settler relations in Australia and New Zealand.


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