A taonga in the telling

July 26, 2008
Geoff Collett talks to the husband and wife partnership behind the prize-winning history of top of the south Maori. -------------------- It has been 20 years of researching, accumulating, hunting and writing, taking them around the country, across the world and deep into long-forgotten archives and hidden family records. They have gathered an enormous store of fact and data, anecdote and memory - far more than they could ever hope to properly make sense of - and still it keeps coming.
But Hilary Mitchell can still sum up the essence of this voyage of exploration into the history of Maori in the top of the south - Te Tau Ihu - in three pithy sentences. "There were a lot of Maori people here. They were good people, by and large. And they got done."
It's not as glib as it might sound, because even now, Mitchell observes, there are still those who maintain that Maori never much featured in the Nelson-Marlborough region before Europeans came along. And there are still those, she believes, who think that Maori make up the stories of their past.
Such myths, she hopes, will get a long-overdue burial through the vast project she and husband John embarked on back in the 1980s, which has so far seen the production of two large and handsome volumes, and which realised a particularly notable achievement this week when the Mitchells won a prestigious literary award for their work - a Montana book award, for the country's best history book published in the past year.
If there were any who doubted the Mitchells' endeavours, the prize surely dispelled scepticism. It is a welcome honour, of course - "It would be silly to say we're not pleased and proud, " John Mitchell says - but greater satisfaction has come from the appreciation, if understated, of the descendants of those the project is all about.
The Wakatu Incorporation co- published the book with Huia Publishers, underwriting the production costs to allow it to be produced to high quality. The book is, ultimately, the stories of the original Maori landowners whose reclaimed legacy Wakatu today represents.
Clearly, the incorporation is satisfied with its investment, as John Mitchell observes: "They wouldn't have done twice what they did if it had been a flop."
But more significantly, there are other tribal groups in the top of the south not affiliated to Wakatu - the Kurahaupo tribes, conquered during the invasion of iwi from Taranaki and Tainui in the early 19th century - who may have harboured suspicion about how their stories would be told. Instead, "they have said, 'You did a good job' . . . I regard that as probably a more important tribute than from my own, " John Mitchell says.
The books are surely the couple's most significant contribution to Nelson, although they have both played reasonably prominent roles in other aspects of community life: Hilary in public office (Nelson City Council, the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology), John as an active participant in Maori affairs locally, principally at an iwi level.
While they have shouldered the vast burden of seeing the Te Tau Ihu O Te Waka history project to fruition, it has, inevitably, been a project that has drawn in many others, ranging from the likes of artist Brian Flintoff, who freely provided illustrations, to numerous archivists and curators who have helped uncover forgotten treasures. They have delved as near to home as the local Anglican church archives and families who opened precious whakapapa books to them, and as far as Oxford University, where a long-lost and priceless book of original sketches of various 19th century Maori identities from the region was rediscovered.
There were frustrations and serendipity, and they continue to happen across long-lost or forgotten resources, often in unlikely places. Mostly, it is now destined for the Wakatu Incorporation's archives and one day should be properly organised, to provide a starting point for historians of the future.
The Mitchells hope that their research may inspire others to follow. They suggest teaching material could be developed for schools and research competitions devised for students.
The morning after the award ceremony, John Mitchell was careful to pay tribute to the various kaumatua who around 1987 set him and Hilary on to their challenge of documenting the story of Maori in the region before and during the European settlement. He noted the poignancy that only one of the 40 or 50 in the original group of elders was still alive.
But the responsibility the Mitchells felt of honouring the memory of the dead goes far beyond that, back into the heart of the 19th century when one of the bleak realities of European- Maori interaction played out: simply, the extinction of many family lines as - for reasons the Mitchells can only speculate about - Maori fertility rates withered. Bringing their stories back to light became part of the mission.
Throughout, it has remained a story- telling exercise, but one backed up by diligent research. They were careful not to treat the project as a polemic, nor to champion grievances. The books' origins may have been in a desire to start documenting material for Waitangi Tribunal claims, but the Mitchells determined early that their role was not to seek to right wrongs or to gild any lilies. The stories, they quickly found, spoke for themselves.
Volume one, sub-titled Te Tangata me Te Whenua, The People and the Land, quickly begat volume two, Te Ara Hou, The New Society, which won the Montana prize this week.
A mild departure from the popular chronological format of local histories, it delved into the social implications for top of the south Maori of European settlement and colonisation. Inevitably, large parts of the stories revolve around the injustices visited on Maori that continue to give rise to disadvantage and grievance 160 years on - principally the poverty and hardship arising from the loss of traditional lands and food-gathering areas. But there is much, too, that entirely unravels the "savage" stereotypes which have lingered down the ages.
The Mitchells recite a sample list of such discoveries: the eagerness with which entire Maori communities seized on Christianity (often more piously and devotedly than any of the white settlers). The speed with which Maori acquired literacy. Their enthusiasm for the commercial opportunities presented by the arrival of the increasing stream of settlers. Their canny approach to deal-making and their willingness to use the European courts to pursue remedy if they felt ripped off. Their ready adoption of new technology (such as the English sea- going vessels, which enterprising Maori seized on to launch into coastal shipping).
Some of the most powerful stories, though, are of the simple interactions between Maori and European: tales of common human decency and respect, of friendships and family ties, and an utter normalcy of interaction.
While the infamous Wairau "affray" of 1843 - the clash between settlers and Maori that led to the slaughter of 22 of the former - was a seminal event around which changes in attitudes and relationships revolved, the much larger backdrop was the steady deprivation of land and the increasing numbers of Europeans. Maori of Te Tau Ihu may not have had to directly contend with war or the organised oppression seen elsewhere - Maori Party leader Tariana Turia's "holocaust" of Taranaki, for example - but the indirect consequences were ultimately the same, the Mitchells conclude.
As for whether living with the beast for 20-plus years and penning more than 1000 pages has satisfied their own hunger for the subject, well, suffice to say that work is well-advanced on volume three, although it is not likely to feature in either best-seller or prize- winner lists. It is more a "telephone book" approach, John says - extensive lists of names and records uncovered over the years, intended as a resource for others seeking to unravel whakapapa, family trees and general genealogy.
Volume four has moved beyond a glint in the eye - they would like to develop the biographies of several- dozens of the leading Maori who feature briefly in the first two volumes, "because they had much wider lives than just appearing, say, in one incident in Motueka on a particular day in 1853".
And John enthuses over the possibilities for volume five: perhaps a coffee-table format, which compares modern day photographs of the region's landscapes with the versions documented by artists who travelled with the European explorers. For now, though, that remains at the glint stage. Nelson Mail