At his keynote address to the Pacific History Association in 2016, David Hanlon called on historians of Oceania to transcend their core concerns for more than a generation: contact, cross-cultural encounter, and colonisation. Whereas academic history once side-lined Islanders in pursuit of Western explorers, traders, and sailors, Hanlon argued, Oceania now appears ready to be “lost” again, this time to “Pacific worlds” scholarship that absorbs Islanders and their cultures into European or American historiographies in pursuit of the global, or the transnational. In response, he proposed, Pacific historians must offer a fully realized counterpoint, one rooted in indigenously focused and conceptualized histories and centred in “imagination, discursive flourish, and Deep Time”.
As one of New Zealand's most visible and accomplished public anthropologists, historians, and environmentalists, Dame Anne Salmond is uniquely positioned to model the sort of scholarship Hanlon had in mind. Ambitious and highly readable, Tears of Rangi is an extensive study of New Zealand's human and environmental pasts and presents, centred around what Salmond calls “experiments across worlds”. The book integrates much of her earlier work, from anthropological studies of Maori ritual to more recent ethnographic histories of Pacific colonisation. What is new here is Salmond's embrace of anthropology's ontological turn, which helps her elevate more familiar models of cross-cultural encounter like Richard White's middle ground. Salmond now asks readers to think of New Zealand's colonisation, not only in terms of processes of mutual invention within contact zones but of distinct “onto-logics” that stem from differing—though not always incommensurable—objective realities.
In part one of the book, this approach enables Salmond to recast the period between James Cook's first New Zealand voyage and the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi as a kind of intellectual history, one produced through the encounter of distinctive Maori and Pakeha philosophies of being. On the one hand, we see Ruatara or Hongi Hika as men whose creative engagement with European life and society enabled their vigorous experimentation with, and contestation of, Western concepts of reality and forms of order. On the other hand, we encounter missionaries like Thomas Kendall, whose acts of friendship and alliance bound him so profoundly into Maori relational networks that his status as pākehā was thrown into question—at a historical moment when such identities were not yet “hermetically sealed”. Each form of experimentation helped to set the stage for the more aggressive colonisation efforts that followed.
Amid this narrative, Salmond's engaging, character-driven storytelling frequently detours into expositions of Maori and European thought. She addresses the relationships that bind Maori to one another and nature, as well as the critical tenets of Maori reality like hau (winds, breath, or vital force), mana (ancestral efficacy), and whakapapa (genealogy). Some of these ideas seem to shape the text itself. The notion that space-time is a vortex, for instance, permitting human beings direct linkages with their ancestors across time, is reflected in Salmond's frequent interjection of the contemporary into the historical and the text's sometimes autobiographical nature. But the book is just as concerned with the Biblically-rooted hierarchies that governed settler relationships, and the Cartesian impulse to examine, analyse, classify, and record, ordering and gridding everything from the landscape and sea to the neatly arranged desks of a primary school classroom.
When the book's first part culminates in an extended treatment of the Treaty of Waitangi and its Maori translation, Te Tiriti, the stakes of these philosophical collisions are fully revealed. As settler populations grew and Maori land was alienated with increasing frequency, Pakeha felt less pressure to accommodate Maori practices they found objectionable. At the same time, stadial theories of humanity's development from savagery to civilization increasingly came to dominate British thinking. These theories were embedded in the treaty's English text, which cedes sovereignty over New Zealand to Queen Victoria. But critical concepts—like sovereignty itself—did not appear in the Maori translation, which merely cemented an aristocratic alliance between Maori hereditary leaders and the Crown, a finding affirmed by the Te Paparahi o Te Raki Tribunal in 2011. The English treaty's later hegemony, therefore, stems in large part from a broader process whereby settler “common sense” itself became hegemonic, producing what Salmond calls an “ontological impasse” that now “lies at the heart of the New Zealand state”.
Part two of the book is structured more thematically, drawing the text's earlier disputes over the nature of being and meaning of life through individual chapters on rivers, land, sea, and people. Here Salmond begins to verge into meditations on public policy. The Whanganui River's legal recognition as a living being in 2014 frames the section's first chapter, and the author's interest in the “ontological creativity” of Maori activists who rely on both ancestral cosmologies and modernist framings of things like property rights to advocate for community interests. At the same time, Salmond argues, that activism is not always reducible to ethnic collisions, and both Maori and modernist thinking have now been substantially transformed. Here perhaps the book's motivating idea, that Maori and Pakeha relations are best understood as the encounter of different objective realities begins to break down a bit. Do generations of Maori engagement with modernity or the pains of colonisation itself ever bridge these multiple realities? Can they form a new one? Or is there something about Maori or Pakeha ways of knowing that always remains impermeable? Or perhaps the complexity of New Zealand's ongoing disputes over ontology or forms of order simply reflects the evolving and complex nature of the nation's social and environmental relationships.
Tears of Rangi is the masterful work of a senior scholar at the peak of her powers, and a highly readable book suitable for Pacific and indigenous studies scholars, historians of empire, and popular readers. Salmond's work reflects the vibrancy and promise of Pacific histories centred in indigenous communities and ways of knowing, and deserves a wide readership.
