Knowledge has become a central problematic in recent work on cross-cultural encounters and the processes of empire building. In an array of contexts—from Spanish America to colonial South Africa, from Ireland to occupied Egypt, the American West to British India—anthropologists and historians have highlighted the ways in which “colonial knowledge” facilitated trade, the extraction of rent and taxes, conversion, and outright conquest. This scholarship has demonstrated how these new forms of understanding produced on imperial frontiers facilitated the actual extension of sovereignty and the consolidation of colonial authority: for Tzvetan Todorov, Bernard Cohn, and Nicholas Dirks alike, colonialism was a “conquest of knowledge.”Footnote ¹ Scholarship on empire building in the Americas has placed special emphasis on the place of literacy in the dynamics of conquest. Walter Mignolo in particular has argued that European understandings of the power of literacy encouraged Spaniards in the New World to discount the value of indigenous graphic systems and disparage Mesoamerican languages as untruthful, unreliable, and products of the Devil. For Mignolo, the dark side of the new knowledge orders born out of the Renaissance was a new interweaving of literacy, knowledge, and colonization in a new cultural order he dubs “coloniality.”Footnote ² In the North American literature, too, literacy has been seen as a crucial element in imperial intrusion and conquest. James Axtell, for example, has argued “The conquest of America was in part a victory of paper and print over memory and voice. The victors wrote their way to the New World and inscribed themselves on its maps.”Footnote ³

These cultural readings of the state processes and forms of intellectual production that underwrote imperial power have not simply connected colonial knowledge with conquest and imperial territorial extension, but they have been particularly concerned with demonstrating the cultural consequences of colonial knowledge. This kind of work has illustrated how the new bodies of demographic, ethnographic, and historical knowledge produced by agents of empire ultimately textualized cultures and subsequently transformed the mentalities and social practices of colonized, indigenous, and enslaved populations, who increasingly understood their own communities through the categories of caste, tribe, religion, and race that were elevated and calcified under colonial rule.Footnote ⁴ Another set of studies, primarily concerned with the role of the colonial periphery in the creation of modern science, has demonstrated the ways in which colonial spaces were never merely locations where scientific raw materials—specimens, observations, data—were gathered, but rather functioned as sites where important new linguistic, scientific, and historical models were formulated and contested.Footnote ⁵ Taken together, these large and diffuse bodies of scholarship have stressed the pivotal role of empire in constituting “modern” forms of knowledge and have also recast our understandings of colonialism itself, re-imagining it as being a “cultural project” as well as a set of unequal economic and political relationships.

This essay works in the wake of this scholarship, but it explores an issue that has not received a great deal of consideration in recent studies of colonial knowledge: the place of paper in the transformations set in train by imperial encroachment and formal colonization. While Harold Innis’ landmark study Empire and Communications (1950) discussed the connections between various media and forms of political and religious organization over the longue durée of human history, his insights have not been developed or tested in recent work on the cultures of modern empires.Footnote ⁶ Recent scholarship on empire has certainly foregrounded the connections between writing or literacy and colonialism, but very little work has addressed the impact of paper on the colonial order of things or the cultural consequences of its particular materiality. The most detailed study of the place of the world of paper in the techniques of colonial rule in British India is Richard Saumarez Smith's Rule by Records (1995). This monograph demonstrated the ways in which the complex system of administrative papers, especially village records and district reports, that the British fashioned in Punjab after that region's annexation in 1849 recast social relations. Smith argues that this bureaucratic system triggered a shift from a flexible tradition of land management that was grounded in an idiom of shareholding to a more rigid system of private property based on patrilineal descent.Footnote ⁷ But for all of Smith's attention to the operation of this administrative machinery, he did not address the material basis of this greatly enlarged bureaucratic regime, overlooking the importance of paper, the very medium that this order was grounded in. The connections between paper and colonialism have been more directly examined in the South Asian context in a provocative short essay by Martin Moir, and its significance is alluded to at several points in C. A. Bayly's Empire and Information. Footnote ⁸ Both of these studies recognized how paper was embedded in the broad shifts from the scribal culture and courtly traditions of the Mughal state to the administrative practices of the East India Company, and these works can be read productively alongside Jonathon Bloom's important work on the impact of paper in the Islamic world.Footnote ⁹ But this focus on the construction of the colonial state's archives offers relatively few insights into the ways in which paper reshaped the everyday practices of colonized peoples, nor does it document the particular impact of paper on South Asia's tribal populations, who were traditionally non-literate and operated within cultural worlds that remained grounded in orality. Ajay Skaria's work on western India has offered some crucial insights into this issue as he has examined the ways in which writing reordered relationships within adivasi (aboriginals; first peoples) communities and highlighted adivasi leaders’ awareness of the strong connections between writing, paper, and colonial power.Footnote ¹⁰ In the Pacific, the focus of this essay, there is significant scholarship on the impact of print technology and the nature of indigenous literacies, but there has been little consideration of the ways in which paper itself was entangled with colonialism and its place in the transformation of indigenous knowledge traditions.Footnote ¹¹

In African scholarship, Sean Hawkins’ detailed assessment of the place of writing in the economic, cultural, and legal transformations enacted in northern Ghana offers a host of insights into the ways in which writing became entangled in both colonial and African practices. But while Hawkins charts the development of this “world on paper,” he prioritizes the impact of literacy and actually offers little discussion of the place of paper itself in these transformations and the monograph's index has no reference to paper.Footnote ¹² Hawkins’ emphasis on the inventive nature of Ghanaian writing traditions has been elaborated by work like Karin Barber's collection Africa's Hidden Histories. That volume highlights the profusion of literary practices that flourished in colonial Africa, documenting the centrality of writing as an instrument of self-fashioning, the enthusiasm for reading as an instrument of self-improvement, and the developing tendency to collect and archive amongst Africans. Like Isabel Hofmeyr's study of the localization of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, Barber's collection portrays a wide cross-section of colonized peoples as innovators who developed new cultural practices, created new genres and traditions of writing, and worked hard to bring into being new literary and cultural spaces where books and print culture occupied a central place.Footnote ¹³ In a similar spirit, Penny Van Toorn has reconstructed some of the creative forms of literacy fashioned by Australian Aboriginal communities who exchanged written British texts as curiosities, wove letters of the alphabet into their graphic tradition, and fashioned distinctive cultures of writing that were markedly different from the prevalent models authorized by missionaries and administrators.Footnote ¹⁴ Brian Frederick Edwards has also documented the efforts of Aboriginal peoples in Canada to harness literacy, books, and libraries introduced by missionaries and colonists to their own cultural priorities and their growing ability to fashion distinctive and increasingly independent literary and library cultures.Footnote ¹⁵

This recent emphasis on the centrality of writing and paper in the life of colonized communities is a crucial starting point for this essay. Here I explore the place of paper and the cultural practices that came to be associated with that medium in southern New Zealand from 1770, when the takata whenua (people of the land) first encountered Europeans, to the close of the nineteenth century when Kai Tahu Whanui, the primary indigenous community in the region, were largely landless and struggling with the consequences of disease, depopulation, and colonial rule. In examining the place of paper and literacy in the transformation of Kai Tahu mentalities, this essay draws on Harold Innis’ deep concern with the material base of knowledge orders: the ways in which the media that knowledge is stored in and transmitted through shapes social patterns, cultural practices, and cosmologies. A focus on the qualities of the material base of knowledge storage and communication is productive because it reconnects mentalities and practices with the distinctive materiality of particular knowledge media, whether we are thinking about stone, the spoken word, or paper. While the existing work on Maori literacy has focused primarily on Christianity and the Native Schools system, here I am particularly concerned with economic questions and the nature of rakatirataka (the culture of chieftainship), foregrounding the relationships between knowledge media, the importance of whakapapa (genealogy) in ordering the Kai Tahu world, and the operation of political power. I argue that from the 1840s, Kai Tahu practices were increasingly embedded in a culture of paper, which included paper itself, the skills of literacy, and the endless circulation of printed texts that was the lifeblood of colonial culture. This centrality of the culture of paper under colonialism encouraged a reorganization of both traditional forms of knowledge transmission and chiefly practice. It is very important to recognize that Kai Tahu encountered paper, literacy, and the printed word simultaneously, unlike some other colonized peoples and unlike Europe itself, where the development of literacy, the adoption of paper, and establishment of printing presses were disaggregated and distinct transitions.Footnote ¹⁶

Debating Maori Knowledge

The nature and status of indigenous knowledge has been the subject of a series of overlapping and long-running debates in New Zealand. While it is possible to suggest that these debates emerged out of the new programs to revitalize Maori language and culture championed in the 1970s, I would suggest that they really began the moment that the indigenous people of New Zealand entered into sustained relationships with Euroamericans. From the moment that members of the Rongowhakata and Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti iwi (tribes) met the officers and crew of James Cook's Endeavour at Turanganui in 1769, knowledge has been in question in New Zealand. In the wake of Cook's arrival, indigenous communities encountered new skills (reading and writing), new ways of presenting knowledge (books and maps), and new institutions through which they could access knowledge (mission stations and schools). These encounters were an important part of the processes that produced a sense of being “Maori.” In pre-contact times, “maori” primarily designated things that were normal or routine, but as contact with Europeans and other newcomers proliferated, the takata whenua increasingly designated themselves as “Maori” (ordinary) people as opposed to the newcomers who were seen as tipua (goblins), pakepakeha (fairyfolk), patupaiarehe (outlandish beings), and Pakeha (strangers). These oppositions were echoed in British imperial thought: just as the opposition between “Maori” and “Pakeha” was consolidated in the language and thought of the Polynesians who had been long settled in New Zealand, British observers made sense of Maori through categories such as “Indian,” “Aboriginal,” and especially “Native.”Footnote ¹⁷ An important part of this production of “Maori” as an indigenous population was the constant evaluation of the nature and sophistication of indigenous knowledge by explorers, missionaries, imperial agents, and colonists, as they variously hoped to benefit from it, reform and elevate it, and, in some notable cases, displace it altogether.

Issues of language and literacy have been key in these contests over knowledge, and historians, educationalists, anthropologists, and Maori Studies scholars have surveyed the extent and nature of Maori literacy and the connections between colonialism and indigenous linguistic and cultural decline.Footnote ¹⁸ There have been two dominant interpretations of the relationship between oral tradition and literacy in the Maori context. The first is a version of “the fatal impact” thesis, which imagined contact with whites as initiating the rapid and almost total destruction of Pacific cultures.Footnote ¹⁹ Within the New Zealand context, this tradition of interpretation identifies literacy as a corrosive force that undermined the vitality of Maori oral tradition, and, as a result, played a central role in the construction of Pakeha (white) hegemony. Some educationalists and historians identify literacy and printing as primarily agents of cultural imperialism, even equating literacy with complete deracination: this rather essentializing line of interpretation suggests that in learning to read and write nineteenth-century Maori effectively lost their own culture and became English.Footnote ²⁰

The second position, which we might term the “cultural continuity” argument, suggests that literacy and Christianity had limited impact on indigenous mentalities and that despite land loss, conversion, urbanization, and colonial education Maori culture exhibits a fundamental cultural continuity with pre-European traditions.Footnote ²¹ This interpretation was developed most fully in D. F. McKenzie's landmark Oral Culture, Literacy & Print in Early New Zealand: The Treaty of Waitangi, which argued that the notion of a “literacy revolution” amongst Maori in the 1830s and 1840s was a product of Evangelical missionaries, who were extreme proponents of a European “literacy myth.” In McKenzie's view, print and Christianity had little effect on Maori and he suggested that Maori retain an emphasis on the primacy of the spoken word, since “the written and printed word is not the mode they [modern Maori] habitually use.”Footnote ²² The limitations of both of these positions have been exposed by recent studies of Maori Christianity and Maori-language newspapers, which have revealed the multiple ways in which Maori individuals and communities wove elements from their old knowledge traditions into new cultures of literacy and print, cultures that generated innovative political and spiritual traditions in the face of British colonial authority.Footnote ²³ Most tellingly, the complexities and richness of Maori literacy and traditions of writing have been hinted at by Brad Haami's short study of the place of writing in the lives of seven individuals spanning four generations of the Maaka family, in forms ranging from pepeha (traditional sayings) to personal dairies to waiata (songs).Footnote ²⁴

In what follows, I stress the fundamentally mixed nature of Kai Tahu knowledge traditions, traditions that can only be partially illuminated by either the “fatal impact” thesis or the “cultural continuity” argument.Footnote ²⁵ These transformations reflected deep-seated changes in the demography and material base of the tribe. The introduction of the potato in the first decade of the nineteenth century encouraged the establishment of new coastal settlements that reshaped the patterns of whanau (family) and hapu (clan) movement and settlement.Footnote ²⁶ These littoral communities grew as Kai Tahu groups engaged with European newcomers, initially sealers in the 1810s and 1820s and subsequently whalers in the 1830s. Shore whaling stations were especially important sites of cross-cultural exchange: they were sites where the takata whenua could sell potatoes, other vegetables, and pigs to Euroamericans and where they could in turn access novel foodstuffs and commodities from the newcomers. Many Kai Tahu men worked on these stations and some also embraced the opportunities that maritime life offered, traveling regularly to the Australian colonies and out into the Pacific world and beyond. Equally importantly, many Kai Tahu women established relationships with whalers, founding the large number of mixed-race families that were a particularly distinctive feature of the southern coast of New Zealand.

In light of these developments, by the middle of the 1830s, Kai Tahu ways of thinking and being in the world were constantly being reshaped through their encounters with new technologies, ideas (especially Christianity), practices, skills (especially literacy), and ways of acting and talking. My particular aim here is to move beyond focusing on representations of the nature of indigenous knowledge and literacy, a strategy that underpinned McKenzie's work, to instead focus on what we might think of as “knowledge practices,” the ways in which indigenous knowledge was actually transmitted, stored, and contested.

Embodied Knowledges and the Kai Tahu World

Prior to contact, Kai Tahu communities stored knowledge in two main ways. The primary one was in the bodies and minds of learned individuals. While knowledge relating to many daily and mundane tasks was widely shared, at least within gender groups, specialized knowledge that had a strong ritual component or that related to the interface with the supernatural and natural worlds was compartmentalized, restricted, and embodied. Knowledge relating to various rituals—from the karaka (welcoming of visitors) to the rites associated with birth, death, or making war—were the domain of select senior people of high rank: women in the case of karaka, men in the case of the rites associated with war. What we might think of as useful knowledge—the information, techniques, and skills related to food gathering, preparation, various crafts, and combat—was also segmented. Many men might be adept at wielding the ko (digging stick), but few men were considered tohuka (ritual experts) in moko (tattooing), carving, or waka (canoe) construction. All knowledge was subject to the laws of tapu (that which is in contact with the supernatural; set apart; sacred) and its antithesis noa. An individual's gender, age, ancestry, rank, and mana (charisma, power) all determined the extent to which they could interact with tapu things and tapu knowledge (or noa knowledge and things, for that matter). Within this social context knowledge was valued, guarded, and even feared: it was transmitted with great care. Sharing knowledge with the wrong person or with the right person at the wrong time could result in misfortune, illness, or death.

Thus, especially valued or dangerous knowledge was invested only in tohuka, experts who were specially trained and who were acknowledged as rare individuals skilled in retaining and transmitting restricted knowledge. In his recent examination of Kai Tahu oral culture, Te Maire Tau has identified the two most important categories of this knowledge as wanaka and purakau. Wanaka signified a wise person or a school of learning, but it also designated the teachings transmitted by a tohuka that deal with supernatural powers or the occult. Purakau referred to a wise man, but also was the name given to mythic narratives of great power relating to ancestral deeds.Footnote ²⁷ These types of narrative, together with knowledge relating to combat, astronomy, the natural world, and makutu (magic, witchcraft), were carefully transmitted at wharekura (schools of learning), where tohuka slowly and carefully shared their knowledge with select pupils, typically young men of high status.Footnote ²⁸ Knowledge transmission in such settings was embodied, depending on the exchange and mingling of the hau (breath, life force).Footnote ²⁹ So these types of highly tapu knowledge were shared under strict controls and these restrictions have encouraged Te Maire Tau to characterize the traditional Kai Tahu knowledge order as a “closed system.”Footnote ³⁰ But as he himself shows, this knowledge order was never entirely closed because folk knowledge—pakiwaitara—was a kind of open access store of understandings and beliefs: these were popular sayings, stories, and scandalous yarns that were widely shared by all in the community, these were stories for amusement, rather than narratives packed with transformative or supernatural power.Footnote ³¹

The second way in which knowledge was traditionally stored was in a range of objects made out of wood, bone, or pounamu (jade). These devices included rakau whakapapa (genealogical rods or staffs), carvings that graced dwelling places and the entrance ways to burial grounds, and a range of worked figures that were used in architectural or personal ornamentation. These objects related to the history of the community (especially key ancestors) or to the connections between atua (supernatural powers, gods) and te ao marama (the world of light; the natural world). Those that pertained to history typically functioned as a kind of prompt; their physical form contained the seed of a narrative, not the narrative itself. Rakau whakapapa, for example, did not actually record the identity of ancestors, but rather their carved notches or knobs were a spur to korero (speech).Footnote ³² They were tangible physical guides around which genealogical information could be recalled, organized, and recited.Footnote ³³ The genealogical knowledge stored in rakau whakapapa was not static or beyond contestation, but rather it provided a narrative that could be inflected in particular ways in specific locations and for specific audiences, as whakapapa was used to establish connections, justify claims to resources and rights, and to establish the mana of the kin group.Footnote ³⁴

There are three important points to make about such objects. First, they were produced by highly skilled individuals who worked materials with special qualities. The outputs of these tohuka—carved wood, worked bone, tattooed skin—were singular and special, imbued with mauri (life spirit, vital quality).Footnote ³⁵ Second, given this framework of production, these objects were relatively uncommon (especially rakau whakapapa) and their construction in durable materials meant that they were not amenable to constant revision: their value was their durability, not plasticity. This meant that they were suited to the communication of knowledge across time. Third, these devices were dependent on embodied knowledge: while a rakau whakapapa might be highly tapu in its own right, it only became a meaningful knowledge medium in the hands of a man who belonged to the precise family that the rakau belonged to. In the hands of an individual who had not learnt the relevant whakapapa, or a man adept at the recitation of whakapapa but with no connection to that specific lineage, the rakau literally contained no knowledge.Footnote ³⁶

In a similar vein, the symbolic language of traditional carving had to be read: as D. R. Simmons has pointed out, the carved works on wharenui (“big houses”: meeting houses) or on smaller objects which represented how the world came to be “were understood and interpreted differently by individuals depending on the knowledge they have.”Footnote ³⁷ In fact, pre-colonial material culture contained many figures and design elements that could be “read” by viewers to produce narratives of various types.Footnote ³⁸ In an important essay, Sarah Gallagher has suggested that pre-colonial traditions of ta moko (tattooing) created a kind of textual culture within the takata whenua before contact with Europeans.Footnote ³⁹Moko designs were a signifying system, with particular elements in moko indicating social rank, particular accomplishments, and genealogical connection.Footnote ⁴⁰ The bands of migrants who settled in Te Waipounamu (New Zealand's South Island) from the fifteenth century CE also developed a notable tradition of pictographic representation that was extensively deployed in caves and on prominent rock faces. These images of birds, dogs, and people as well as more abstract designs were probably important ways of communicating authority: Kai Tahu oral traditions suggest that different colors of pigment were used by successive waves of migrants to assert their rights.Footnote ⁴¹ During the colonial period these pictographs were called whakairo (carvings), but at least one Kai Tahu authority believed that these images were part of a lost writing system and this notion perhaps informs the term “ka tuhituhi o nehera” (the writings of the ancient times) that is frequently applied to these inscriptions on rock.Footnote ⁴² These traditions of representation and interpretation may have meant that the embrace of writing—as a system of representational inscriptions—did not require quite as radical a shift in mentalities as D. F. McKenzie suggested. It is certainly true that alphabetic literacy and the significations embedded in carving, tattooing, and rock art were profoundly different, but it does seem plausible that these pre-existing practices reduced Maori epistemic anxiety about writing and contributed to the alacrity with which Kai Tahu embraced literacy and print culture.

Colonization and the Culture of Paper

The introduction of paper challenged and eventually transformed the very basis of this knowledge system. Paper became a routine part of the Kai Tahu world prior to 1848. Kai Tahu individuals almost certainly encountered paper when they were drawn to the coastal settlements that sprung up around sealing and whaling stations, even if these European communities did not place a high value on literacy themselves.Footnote ⁴³ And those Kai Tahu rakatira (chiefs) who traveled to Port Jackson in Australia on a regular basis were immersed in a colonial society where paper, writing, and printing were bedrocks of commercial, legal, and religious life. During 1834, the rakatira Karetai stayed with the Reverend Samuel Marsden, the former colonial chaplain of New South Wales and chief agent of both the London Missionary Society and Church Missionary Society in the southern Pacific. During a later visit, in 1839–1840, Karetai and another rakatira Te Matenga Taiaroa requested that a missionary be sent to minister to Kai Tahu.Footnote ⁴⁴

With the arrival of the missionary James Watkin in Otago in 1840, texts and paper became increasingly commonplace in Kai Tahu communities. In their meetings with Watkin, his native teachers, and other visiting churchmen, they encountered Bibles, printed portions of scripture, prayer books, newspapers, letters, notebooks, and various types of paper.Footnote ⁴⁵ This flow of paper became a flood once the systematic colonization of Otago began in 1848. Colonists carried newspapers, Bibles, and, in some cases, substantial libraries to the Otago colony: paper suffused their new lives in the colony from the outset. All paper for printing, book production, and personal stationery was imported, primarily from “home” in Britain. Paper mills were established at Mataura and in Dunedin in the mid-1870s, but these produced low-grade paper for packaging and wrapping rather than for printing and personal use.Footnote ⁴⁶ The dependence of both the colonists and Kai Tahu on imported British paper is a potent symbol of the colony's cultural reliance on the imperial center.Footnote ⁴⁷

By the time systematic colonization started, books were highly valued by Kai Tahu and individuals traveled great distances to procure missionary primers and portions of the Scripture.Footnote ⁴⁸ Kai Tahu quickly embraced the possibilities of ready communication over distance that paper offered and once they had become accustomed to using paper they felt shortages keenly, being forced to incise messages into slate or leaves.Footnote ⁴⁹ In this context, literacy was very important. Even though printed artifacts were woven into oral culture—for example, newspapers were read aloud to non-literate community members—some competence in reading and writing was a precondition for full participation in the colonial cultures of paper. Missionaries and native teachers suggested that all members of Kai Tahu should learn to read and write. As we have seen, in the old order of things, the ability to incise skin or carve wood was restricted to a select few: it was only the tohuka who was able to wield the uhi (chisel). In the new order, the ability to inscribe paper was understood as being open to all; unlike the uhi, the pen and pencil were tools that could be used by men, women, and children of all ranks. Kai Tahu writers made use of various types of paper—the loose sheets supplied by missionaries, coarse brown wrapping paper, and, more latterly, the cheap notebooks imported by colonial stationers—to practice their skills, record their thoughts, and communicate their sentiments and desires to kin, friends, missionaries, and government agents. It seems that the cost and quality of the paper was much less important than the ability of this new medium to allow interpersonal communication that bridged considerable distances.

While the depth and quality of Maori literacy remains contested, it is clear that by the 1850s these skills were valued by a broad cross-section of Kai Tahu—men and women, high and low ranking. By around 1850, roughly 50 percent of high-ranking Kai Tahu men were able to sign their names on land deeds.Footnote ⁵⁰ This figure probably underestimates the percentage of the total Kai Tahu population that had some functional reading ability in the vernacular, given that learning to read typically preceded learning to write during the nineteenth century and the particular emphasis that Wesleyan and Anglican missionaries and native teachers placed on the primacy of reading. There is also clear evidence that some chiefs signed these documents with a tohu (a personalized sign or mark: sometimes a simple cross, sometimes a more personalized inscription like Taiaroa's distinctive arrowhead tohu) or with a representation of their moko (facial tattoo), when they were in fact able to sign their own name. The extent of Kai Tahu literacy in English remains unclear. Certainly Wesleyan missionaries focused their efforts on teaching in te reo Maori (Maori language), but we do know that even before large-scale colonization began in 1848 many Kai Tahu could speak some English.Footnote ⁵¹ Given the scope of Kai Tahu's early involvement in sealing, whaling, and long-distance travel in the 1820s and 1830s, it seems likely that Kai Tahu embraced literacy in English more readily and quickly than many North Island communities. This proclivity was probably extended by Kai Tahu's enthusiastic engagement with the colonial market economy in the 1840s and 1850s, and it certainly reflected the willingness of some Europeans, especially the German missionary Johann Wohlers, to encourage Kai Tahu communities to learn English in the belief that a mastery of the language of the colonizers was central to the iwi's economic future.Footnote ⁵²

While documents like land deeds offer a fleeting and shaky snapshot of the extent and meanings of literacy, they remind us that paper was the crucial medium through which members of Kai Tahu Whanui engaged with new forms of economic and political activity. In fact, this kind of engagement pre-dated the formal colonization of the region, since Kai Tahu rakatira were drawn into a pre-colonial land market driven by the logics of imperial extraction—in the form of sealing and especially whaling—and by the speculative ambitions of wealthy colonial entrepreneurs based in New South Wales. In 1832, for example, Te Whakataupuka [“Tobuca”] affixed a copy of his moko to a deed that sold Preservation and Dusky Sounds to Peter Williams, a sealer from New South Wales, for sixty muskets.Footnote ⁵³ What is striking about this contract is that it formalized an earlier oral agreement that was made in 1829: the 1832 deed confirmed the rights that Williams had built up through occupancy and formally revoked any claims that Te Whakataupuka had to the land. The terms of this agreement allowed Te Whakataupuka to cement his paramount position amongst the chiefs of the southern section of the tribe by giving him access to a sizeable cache of firearms, which he deployed in raids to the north against his Ngati Toa enemies and in attacks on whaling stations in Cook Strait and coastal Otago. This agreement with Williams is indicative of the ways in which rakatira like Te Whakataupuka saw Europeans and European ways of being as avenues to enhance their mana, and as central to the future of their communities. It is telling that after Te Whakataupuka's death his nephew Tuhawaiki endorsed Williams’ title, in December 1835.Footnote ⁵⁴

The Paperization of Exchange and Power

After the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, which some southern rakatira signed at Ruapuke and Otakou in June 1840, a new colonial land market took shape, one underpinned by the Crown's assertion of its right of preemption, which was spelt out in article two of both the English and Maori versions of the Treaty. This assertion of the economic paramountcy of the Crown, which was cemented with passage of the Lands Claim Ordinance (1841) that codified this right of preemption into law, was a crucial means through which the reach of the fledgling state was actualized on the ground. Accompanying this preemption were a commitment to investigate land sales that had taken place prior to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi and a prohibition of the further alienation of Maori land through private sale. These investigations reflected concerns that influential humanitarians and key Colonial Office functionaries had raised regarding agreements that some Maori leaders had entered into. But they were also a mechanism that allowed the state to retroactively assert its power as well as potentially maximize the amount of land that it had the ability to assert its rights over in the future.

The investigations of pre-Treaty land sales not only greatly reduced the amounts of land that European purchasers could effectively claim ownership of, but also effectively voided the deeds that eight Kai Tahu chiefs had signed in Port Jackson on 15 February 1840. These agreements had sold the South Island and its adjacent islands (with the exception of Ruapuke) to the prominent lawyer and politician William Charles Wentworth and the Otago-based whaling magnate Johnny Jones.Footnote ⁵⁵ Although these deeds were elaborate documents produced by a powerful lawyer and public figure in the political life of New South Wales before Kai Tahu chiefs had ever seen the Treaty of Waitangi, they were discounted because the Crown asserted that it alone had the power to legally buy native lands and confer title.Footnote ⁵⁶ This suggests that paper contracts were not seen as innately reliable: the reliability of contracts was dependent on the role of the state in mediating and endorsing these agreements. In essence, paper agreements produced by the state had an inherent value that compacts with private entrepreneurs and colonial opportunists were unable to claim.Footnote ⁵⁷

Of course, literacy and the paper were the very basis of the eventual sale of Kai Tahu lands to agents of the New Zealand Company and the Crown from 1844 to 1864. The paperization of economic exchange was the vital legal precondition for the legal alienation of “native land.” Signing deeds of sale had far-reaching consequences. Affixing a signature or tohu to these agreements on paper alienated traditional Kai Tahu lands but at the same time the processes of negotiation created new relationships between Crown agents and Kai Tahu leaders. Writing became a key instrument through which these rakatira could maintain these personal connections and ensure that the Crown fully understood the extent of their traditional authority and the depth of their mana. Through letter writing, the rakatira pushed forward the process of textualizing their status, affiliations, and extent of their authority. In the wake of the signing of Kemp's Deed, which sold vast tracts of Canterbury, Westland, and Otago to the Crown, the coastal Otago chiefs Mamaru, Haereroa, and Korako wrote to Land Commissioner Walter Mantell explaining the precise boundaries of their traditional lands as a way of asserting their rights to a share of the proceeds of the sale.Footnote ⁵⁸ On the very same day, three high-ranking Kai Tahu men from the same region, Horomona, Huruhuru, and Paitu, wrote to Mantell listing traditional divisions of the land and explaining how the money should be parceled up.Footnote ⁵⁹ The volunteering of this kind of detail was greatly valued by Mantell, who was trying to grasp the nuances of traditional rights and strove to precisely map the claims of the southern chiefs. During 1848, Mantell had built up an archive that recorded the names of hapu (clans) on slips of cardboard that were designed to allow him to rearrange them to record interrelationships as he worked through the process of paying for the land.Footnote ⁶⁰ This project of textualizing kin groups and their relationships to the land also produced a series of “Korero Charts” that Mantell drafted in 1851 while he was serving as the commissioner of Crown lands for the Southern District of the Province of New Munster, which mapped the rights of the southern chiefs. The connections between Mantell and these rakatira—which increasingly were maintained through the written word—were a crucial element in the reordering of the socio-economic base of these southern communities, and also helped define the very nature of Kai Tahu itself.Footnote ⁶¹

Thus Kai Tahu leaders quickly saw writing letters and petitions as an important means of shaping the outcomes of these processes. In particular, they used letter writing to try and exercise control over the distribution of money to the chiefs who sold the land. In December 1848, for example, Reihana Moemate wrote to Mantell from Waikouaiti saying that his share of the proceeds of “Kemp's Sale” was £20.Footnote ⁶² The Crown was paying £2000 that was to be divided amongst the chiefs. In a similar vein, Matiaha Tiramorehu wrote from Moeraki, to Mantell: “Friend Mantell, this is my word once more to you. Do not take any notice of Tikao's reasoning that he be responsible for the distribution of the monies to all the chiefs. You must not do this Mantell. My opinion is that it is better that you be the one to distribute the payments to the owners themselves.” Tiramorehu believed that Mantell should exercise total control over the distribution of the cash for the land, to make sure that “the money won't develop wings.”Footnote ⁶³ What is particularly striking about these letters is the ways in which Kai Tahu writers used paper and literacy to reaffirm their personal connections with the agents of the Crown, to overcome the physical distance that separated them from men like Mantell, and to personalize power and authority in keeping with pre-colonial political tradition that saw political power as being individualized and invested in certain individuals. While using the skills of literacy and the medium of paper allowed Kai Tahu leaders to nurture their connections to powerful agents of the state, this project struggled against the logic of mature colonial authority. Whereas the fledgling colonial state sought out connections with chiefs to facilitate the negotiation of land deals, the significance of these types of connections was reduced as state structures became more elaborate and state power increasingly operated through bureaucratic routines. The nature of this shift was not immediately obvious to Maori leaders, but the privileging of institutions over individuals and processes over relationships tempered the ability of Kai Tahu rakatira to press their claims on the state. This was made clear in the 1860s when Walter Mantell, who had become the key contact for Kai Tahu leaders and a sympathetic advocate, found that even as “native minister” he lacked the power to move the machinery of the state to address Kai Tahu grievances in a meaningful way.Footnote ⁶⁴

Disembodying Transmission: Notebooks and Newspapers

Before offering a discussion of the ways in which paper and literacy structured Kai Tahu political struggles in the second half of the nineteenth century, it is important to note that this paper world also was entangled with a range of new practices and habits beyond the land market and Kai Tahu's struggles with the state. Many of these left only the faintest archival traces or were never captured by state-sponsored processes of archivization. There was a long tradition of Kai Tahu consumption of the skills, material culture, and routine cultural practices associated with paper, but these are very difficult to recover. In particular, we know that Kai Tahu individuals and families read a large number of texts that upheld ideal models of social comportment and exhorted them to reorder their lives. These representations were carried into Kai Tahu communities via printed portions of the Bible, both Maori and English language newspapers, schoolbooks, novels, and a whole range of printed texts and artifacts. The ways in which Kai Tahu read these texts, discussed them, and interpreted them often remains unclear, but these routine ways of operating were not passive; through consumption, Kai Tahu individuals and communities were constantly engaged in making and remaking culture.Footnote ⁶⁵

This cultural work was energetic, improvised, and productive even though many of the texts Kai Tahu engaged with had been produced to serve the ends of a dominant economic and social order that sought to reform “native culture.” We get glimpses into the processes through which Kai Tahu cosmologies were reordered in the writings of Matiaha Tiramorehu and Wi Pokuku, and the letters and petitions produced by both high-ranking leaders and humble Kai Tahu folks document many of the basic political, economic, and educational aspirations of the community.Footnote ⁶⁶ But the vast majority of the day-to-day Kai Tahu engagement with the new commodities, ideas and ideologies, practices and prescriptions of the colonial order remains obscure. This is in part a consequence of the nature of reading as a practice: it does not routinely generate written records. Moreover, much of the mundane writing of Kai Tahu individuals escaped formal archivization in state institutions and local repositories, for a range of reasons. But documents long held in family collections reveal the growing importance of writing in the Kai Tahu world by 1900. The diary kept by Annie Maaka between 1899 and 1920, for example, records the daily routines of a Kai Tahu family, the continued importance of traditional economic practices such as te hopu titi (mutton-birding), and the abiding investment of Kai Tahu individuals and families in their tribe's political struggles, and hints at the ways in which writing had become an important tool for working out ideas and identities.Footnote ⁶⁷ These family collections remind us that by 1900 some Kai Tahu individuals and families were keeping informal archives of their own, stores of knowledge that would record genealogical connections, document the experience of successive generations, and transmit information relating to important cultural practices and resources.

Two significant innovations related to the paper world were especially important in the transformation of Kai Tahu mentalities and cultural practices from the 1850s. The first of these was the emergence of whakapapa (genealogy) books. It seems that from the 1860s, but especially between the 1880s and 1900, some key Kai Tahu individuals and families began to use their literacy and the new media of paper to record their whakapapa in written form. This innovation suggests that paper had become understood as a medium that was useful for recording traditional knowledge, a quality of considerable importance given that the effects of disease and intermarriage with colonists had begun to seriously attenuate traditional lines of knowledge transmission. Typically these whakapapa were recorded in notebooks of varying descriptions or in the front of family Bibles. These whakapapa books exhibit several striking features, especially if we consider them in relation to the rakau whakapapa rods or staffs. First, these whakapapa books record the ancestors in detail, spelling names out, where as we have seen the rakau were a more elliptical device, functioning as a kind of prompt.Footnote ⁶⁸ Second, and following from this, the qualified improvisation that was a key element of the oral recitation of whakapapa was lost in the whakapapa notebook, where each generation was carefully detailed (though this could be recaptured or recreated when notebooks were the basis for oral recitations). Third, where rakau whakapapa referred to one central lineage, the Kai Tahu whakapapa books of the late nineteenth century recorded a range of lineages from a variety of sources and relating to different hapu. In some cases, these notebooks also contained whakapapa that connected to ancestral Kai Tahu. These were provided by visiting North Island Maori who were familiar with the sequencing of these genealogies, which were distant in time and place from the Kai Tahu world in the late nineteenth century. Reading these texts one has a sense of an opening up of genealogical knowledge, the emergence of a new era where knowledge was shared, circulated, and contested much more freely.Footnote ⁶⁹ Fourth, even as this shift diversified and amplified whakapapa, it marked a simultaneous codification of genealogical knowledge. While whakapapa books do exhibit some flexibility—they were often added to and annotated, and absorbed new information from other (frequently written) sources—in time they also increasingly acquired an authority that could stand in the place of older forms of embodied knowledge and oral transmission. Within a social context that was being reshaped by Kai Tahu women marrying colonists and their mixed-race descendants, growing numbers of Kai Tahu settling in towns and cities, declining use of te reo Maori, and improving literacy rates, whakapapa books came to be seen as the authoritative source of genealogical knowledge.Footnote ⁷⁰ Fifth, whakapapa books transformed the accessibility of genealogical knowledge. No longer was such knowledge to be carefully shared by a tohuka in a wanaka or in some other ritual setting where hau was exchanged; rather these notebooks allowed this knowledge to be disembodied and consumed in a range of social contexts and physical locations quite distant and dislocated from those learned individuals who still retained genealogical narratives.

Thus whakapapa books were mobile, changing hands within families and being read by many people, including colonial ethnographers and collectors. This suggests that the ritual injunctions that had controlled such knowledge were significantly weakened and, in some contexts, completely set aside.Footnote ⁷¹ In the case of whakapapa, paper as a medium allowed the dissemination of knowledge across space and, in so doing, made knowledge more diffuse. This diffusion simultaneously diluted the old cultural injunctions that controlled the transmission of embodied oral knowledge while also ensuring that elements of that old knowledge would survive the demographic and cultural displacements of colonialism, albeit often in attenuated forms. The history of these documents suggests that Kai Tahu traditional knowledge did not completely die when it encountered colonialism as Te Maire Tau has argued, but rather that significant elements of the knowledge order persisted, even as they were substantially reordered and reconfigured by new skills and new media.Footnote ⁷²

The other significant innovation was Kai Tahu's enthusiastic engagement with the Maori-language newspapers that flourished between 1845 and the 1930s. Some of these were produced by the state, others were published by religious leaders (often with a strong Maori involvement), while still others were published by a range of Maori individuals and communities of very different political and religious persuasions.Footnote ⁷³ All of these newspapers were published in the North Island, but a wide variety circulated in the South Island as well through agents and through personal subscriptions.Footnote ⁷⁴ Even a partial list of Kai Tahu subscribers is revealing: it is clear, for example, that in the mid-1870s leading chiefs and new parliamentarians, tohuka, and bastions of the native churches alike were regular readers.Footnote ⁷⁵ The material that Kai Tahu readers encountered in these newspapers not only explained (and debated) government policy, but also discussed religion, offered advice on economic matters and household management, and conveyed a wide range of information about the world and its peoples.Footnote ⁷⁶ The cultural shifts associated with the rise of literacy and of a world of paper were clearly conveyed in the material that Kai Tahu writers contributed to these Maori newspapers. Individuals wrote in to explain new commercial and agricultural ventures, contest whakapapa and associated resource rights, disseminate accounts of meetings to both Kai Tahu and a wider Maori audience, and organize the iwi's campaign to have heard its claims against the Crown violations of the Treaty of Waitangi and various deeds of purchase.Footnote ⁷⁷ These practices also allowed Kai Tahu to be actively involved in an emergent Maori political sphere largely independent of the colonial state, which produced new ideologies (especially “Kotahitanga”—oneness, or togetherness) that wove iwi together. Newspapers were a medium that allowed the iwi to be knitted together in new ways and to create forms of connection with North Island Maori communities. At the same time, engagement with this print culture connected southern Kai Tahu to broader shifts in Maori aspirations and cultural practices and allowed them to affirm their own indigenous status as Maori, which was very important given the iwi's high rates of intermarriage.Footnote ⁷⁸

This immersion in the world of print was of great political as well as cultural significance given the absolute centrality of newspapers to colonial politics. In 1849, the tohuka-turned-Christian Matiaha Tiramorehu wrote a lengthy letter to Governor George Grey to complain about government land purchases in the north of South island and the failure of the colonial state to recognize Kai Tahu's claim to traditional lands at Kaiapoi and Kaikoura.Footnote ⁷⁹ Tiramorehu did not simply send this letter to the governor, however; instead he posted a copy to the New Zealand Spectator and Cook Strait's Guardian, a leading colonial newspaper published in Wellington, demonstrating his understanding of the power of the printed word within colonial politics.Footnote ⁸⁰

Paper and the Culture of Colonial Politics

Tiramorehu's letter makes it clear that by 1850 the battles of southern chiefs and families to reclaim resources and make political gains were being waged in a cultural world framed by paper and literacy. Kai Tahu leaders used both the written and printed word to forward their political aspirations and to record their frustration and growing anger at the Crown's reluctance to meet its promises of adequate reserves, schools, and hospitals. In 1857, for example, several Kai Tahu leaders wrote letters pressing their concerns on Walter Mantell, who had returned to London. In that same year Tiramorehu himself drafted a petition to the Queen on behalf of the Kai Tahu chiefs, which stressed their loyalty while underscoring Kai Tahu's hope that their community would enjoy full equality with Pakeha before the law.Footnote ⁸¹ A constant stream of letters and petitions flowed from Kai Tahu pens. In 1866, a letter from Hori Kerei Taiaroa, which explained Kai Tahu anger at the loss of the Princes Street reserve in the city of Dunedin, triggered the establishment of a judicial commission that reviewed the history of that reserve and, after a torturous legal process, ultimately resulted in the payment of £10,000 to Kai Tahu in compensation and back rents.Footnote ⁸² Writing also allowed leaders to convey to the government the consensus produced out of the traditional mechanisms of hui (meetings) and korero (talk). After gathering at Kaiapoi in March 1874, for example, Matiaha Tiramorehu and 391 others sent a petition to Parliament that drew attention to the Crown's failure to deliver on the promises that Kai Tahu understood to have been made during negotiations around land sales. The petition also argued that Kemp's sale was tainted by his threat to give sale money to Kai Tahu's rivals, Ngati Toa, and that Kemp had intimidated Kai Tahu leaders with the threat that, if they did not consent to the terms of sale, “soldiers will be sent to take your land for the Europeans.”Footnote ⁸³ Drafting petitions and letters had become a crucial political practice: whereas the power and status of chiefs of the 1810s rested on their ability to wage war and assert their mana through oratory, for Kai Tahu leaders under colonialism, literacy and a clear understanding of the political process were key accomplishments of leadership.

From 1867 onward, Kai Tahu voices were also raised in the colonial Parliament as well; in that year not only were Maori men fully enfranchised, but four seats in Parliament were set aside for Maori electors. The work of Kai Tahu parliamentarians such as H. K. Taiaroa and Tame Parata made it clear that Kai Tahu were unwilling to acquiesce quietly to colonial domination, but at the same time were committed to using colonial institutions and cultural practices to pursue their aspirations. Taiaroa fought tirelessly in Parliament and pursued a range of issues, including a catalogue of concerns about the nature of the original land sales of the 1840s and 1850s, the Crown's failure to deliver various provisions that Kai Tahu understood to have been part of these sales, and more immediate matters of Crown policy or bureaucratic operation that impinged upon Kai Tahu interests. He petitioned the Native Affairs Committee in 1882, for example, asking them to add eight acres to the Crown grant of land made to him at the Otago Heads, which had been omitted by bureaucratic oversight.Footnote ⁸⁴ In that same year Taiaroa drafted another petition naming eight islets, sandbars, and reefs in Otago Harbour that he claimed for Kai Tahu, arguing that they were not included in Kemp's deed of sale. The official notes drafted in response to this petition reveal uncertainty about Taiaroa's claim: “In no case do they [these locations] bear these names upon the survey map. No evidence has been adduced to show whether or not they are Crown lands. If they belong to the Natives the proper course to pursue is for the claimant to make an application to the Native Land Court to ascertain the title.”Footnote ⁸⁵ This exchange tested the limitations of the Crown's knowledge of its domains and serves as a potent reminder that Kai Tahu traditions of naming and claiming did not depend on the practices of map-making, inscription, and formal archivization that underwrote state-sponsored geographic knowledge.

The campaigns of Kai Tahu parliamentarians like Parata and Taiaroa punctured some of the walls that separated Kai Tahu from the colonists who had settled on their ancestral lands. In the first two decades of colonization, many newly arrived Europeans suggested that Kai Tahu were a tiny population of no political consequence that could be discounted in the colonial scheme of things: they were marginal, a problem for the governor to deal with, and a population to be “uplifted” by missionaries and humanitarians. But after the passage of the Maori Representation Act there was a marked shift in the dynamics of cross-cultural communication and in the colonial political terrain. The letters and speeches of Taiaroa and Parata were routinely and widely reported in Otago newspapers and the colonists were increasingly aware of both the Kai Tahu political grievances and their cultural presence.Footnote ⁸⁶ Although these claims stimulated some anxiety, they were also seen as markers of the relative sophistication of Kai Tahu, embodying that tribe's commitment to constitutional politics. Their willingness to engage peacefully with settler politicians was seen to mark southern Maori communities off from their North Island counterparts who had raised arms and rejected both the Queen's and Parliament's authority.

Paper and the Politics of the Colonized

These new ways of communicating also transformed the internal political dynamics of Kai Tahu communities. In the pre-contact world, the mana of chiefs was derived from both their genealogy and their ability to act in a chiefly manner, especially in accumulating resources and making war, and in the arts of whaikorero (oratory). As we have seen, the traditional Kai Tahu knowledge order marked off special forms of knowledge and concentrated it in the minds and bodies of a few: in a cultural world defined by wood, bone, stone, and oratory, great authority lay with tohuka and rakatira. Engagement with Euroamericans transformed the contexts within which these values operated: the political and economic horizons of the Kai Tahu world were forced open. There were new opportunities for trade and travel, there were new plants, animals, and commodities to buy and sell, and new ideas and experiences to evaluate and process. Between the first decade of the nineteenth century and the 1840s, two generations of Kai Tahu chiefs attempted to exploit these possibilities, exhibiting considerable entrepreneurial spirit as they strove to enhance the wealth and status of their own whanau and hapu while also working to shore up Kai Tahu whanui's takiwa (domain of authority) against the raids of their Ngati Toa rivals from the north.

The sale of massive tracts of traditional land to the state in the 1840s—which, as we have seen, Kai Tahu leaders swiftly contested the terms and implications of—worked to consolidate the authority of a new generation of chiefs, men like Matiaha Tiramorehu and H. K. Taiaroa. These were not only men of high ranking and considerable mana, but they were also literate, Christian, and adept at navigating the practices and structures of the colonial world. H. K. Taiaroa, in particular, saw his position as a cross-cultural political broker as an opportunity, and attempted to achieve a centralization of power that was rare in Kai Tahu history. Before his death in February 1862, H. K. Taiaroa's father, Te Matenga Taiaroa, dictated a testament “To all my tribe, to my hapu, and to my son,” which argued that Kai Tahu Whanui had to fight to ensure that the state kept its promises made in earlier transactions, while simultaneously acknowledging the Queen's sovereignty.Footnote ⁸⁷ That this was a recorded testament, that Te Matenga's words were inscribed on paper, itself indicated the changes that cross-cultural contact had initiated. The old chief, born in the late 1790s before the advent of sustained contact with sealers, no longer relied simply on the Polynesian conventions where a chief's dying words (ohaki in Maori) were seen as powerful injunctions that should not under any circumstances be broken—he preferred instead the new authority attached to the power of the written word.Footnote ⁸⁸

By 1871, H. K. Taiaroa not only enjoyed the authority that came with being a member of Parliament, but also sought a new position of paramountcy in Kai Tahu's internal politics. He claimed authority to function as the tribe's primary representative in making its claims, and also requested control of money that tribe members had accumulated to fund its struggle. In June 1875, he convened a meeting at Otakou marae (meeting place, ritual center) at which assembled Kai Tahu elders were presented with a “Covenant” that proposed new parameters for Kai Tahu political life. This text, which explicitly drew upon biblical precedent to invest it with authority, gave sole charge of the campaign to contest earlier land sales to H. K. Taiaroa. It also allowed him to appoint lawyers and gave him discretion over the expenditure of the fighting fund. Sixty-one senior figures, including Tame Parata Haereroa, Horomona Patu, Teone Topi Patuki, Korako Karetai, and Timoti Karetai signed the covenant. In subsequent years, Taiaroa would claim that his power emanated from a binding agreement with “the whole of the Ngai Tahu,” even though few leaders from the northern part of the tribe signed the Otakou covenant.Footnote ⁸⁹

H. K. Taiaroa's desire chafed against the political logic of the colonial order. It is certainly true that in the 1840s and 1850s the colonial state tended to personalize power in its dealings with Maori, and particularly attempted to deal with chiefs, but by the 1870s state authority was increasingly embedded in institutions and settler democracy also dispersed power. Authority in the colonial world lay in many offices and institutions, a distribution of power that was seen to underwrite the democratic order by checking tyranny and encouraging liberty. The colonial political sphere was constituted by both talk—on the hustings, in voluntary associations and institutional committees, in public meetings and local government, on marae, and in Parliament—and the constant movement of the printed word. Print disseminated the program of the government through the printing of parliamentary debates, the publication of official reports, and newspaper coverage of politics in both Maori and English. But it also provided a crucial mechanism through which both central and local political agendas could be contested and challenged. So, despite print's inherent tendency to open up sites of cultural contestation and disperse power across space, H. K. Taiaroa was quite successful in harnessing it to cement his own authority within the tribe and his position as a key intermediary between southern Maori and the state. For him, this new medium became an avenue through which traditional priorities of chieftainship, especially the pursuit of mana and the securing of his community's economic base, could be pursued. He was both a political innovator and a man immersed in the demands of a tradition, a leader who struggled against colonialism's inherent inequalities even as he increasingly embodied the contradictions of the colonial order. Ultimately, his political campaign was dependent on his ability to navigate the paper culture of the colonial state. He spoke and wrote many words, and the flow of letters and petitions from his desk bore few fruit in the short term, but in the longer term his political activity fashioned an archive that recorded Ngai Tahu's grievances and their struggles, a paper trail that was a vital precondition for the final resolution of the tribe's claims in the late 1990s.