Tom Brooking
Knowledge Is a Blessing on Your Mind: Selected Writings, 1980–2020 by Anne Salmond (Auckland University Press, 2023), 608pp, $65
Anyone who has read or taught New Zealand history, particularly on the evolving complex relationship between Māori and Pākehā, will be delighted that Auckland University Press has published an overview of Salmond’s writing across forty years made up of seventeen essays of very different length and content. Salmond remains one of New Zealand’s top scholars in studying this important part of our shared history because of her deep knowledge of te reo Māori and long interaction with leading Māori scholars, particularly Eruera and Amiria Stirling from Te Whanau-ā, whom she first met as a young woman when growing up in the Gisborne area. The couple ended up carrying out many interviews with Salmond, who was studying anthropology at the University of Auckland. She gained valuable insights into Māori culture from these fine teachers who assisted greatly in the preparation of Salmond’s first book, Hui: A study of Maori ceremonial gatherings, published in 1975. Salmond also learnt much from the Māori language educator Merimeri Penfold during her years as a graduate student. This regular contact with Māoritanga was reinforced when she became a tutor and lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, where she joined many other leading scholars in the field, including Hugh Kāwharu, Bruce Biggs, Roger Green and Patu Hohepa.
It is Salmond’s interest in anthropology that marks her work off as something distinct from that of more mainline historians, especially because of anthropology’s emphasis upon the ‘ontology’ or close examination of the activities and rhythms of everyday life, and the need to carry out copious field research to establish the complex cultural differences that emerge when Indigenous cultures encounter very different colonising cultures. To amplify this point, this new book contains an impressive variety of illustrated content, including maps and photographs—both in black and white and colour—along with paintings and other artworks, contemporary and historical. These images enhance the text in diverse and meaningful ways. The almost 10-page Māori glossary is indispensable.
The first of the essays is her personal report on her career, based on conversations conducted by her former students Cris Shore and Susanna Trnka in 2012. It provides a very useful overview of her development as a writer, especially for those who are less familiar with her output. During the 47-page interview, which is interspersed with numerous photographs that reveal much about her close relationships with many leading scholars of interactions between Māori and Pākehā, Salmond explains the importance of her growing up in Gisborne and also the importance of her close links to her grandfather, the very Celtic James McDonald, an early director of the Dominion Museum with a strong interest in ethnology.
McDonald was a pioneering documentary photographer of Māori life. He also made many of the first films about Māori ‘tikanga’, dating from before World War I into the 1930s. Several of them involved the leading Māori scholars of the time: Sir Āpirana Ngata and Te Rangi Hiroa (Peter Buck). By the early twentieth century, Māori and Pākehā were settled in the Gisborne region in similar concentrations, but despite interdependence in farming, Salmond argues, they did not get on especially well and had little regular contact. As a teenager in the early 1960s Anne won an American Field Service scholarship, and she found in the United States that she was expected to speak regularly to Rotary and other American community groups about New Zealand and Māori culture. This experience persuaded her that she needed to expand her Indigenous knowledge more fully on her return.
She outlines her engagement with the anthropology department and her teachers in Auckland, as well as the solid grounding in Māori tikanga, especially on marae, given to her by the Stirlings. These visits emphasised how every iwi (and often hapu) was different and followed distinctive protocol. Sometimes the differences were quite startling to an uninitiated Pākehā. Above all, Salmond realised early on that most Indigenous peoples did not separate the human and natural worlds, unlike the majority of European colonists who brought Christianity and the philosophical beliefs of the so-called ‘Enlightenment’ movement, separating Man and Nature. Māori insisted on the contrary on a holistic unity and that every single part of the environment, even rocks, forests, trees and special places such as battlefields, had a life force, or ‘mauri’, of their own. She also appreciated that Māori place names contained all sorts of useful information about sites that were erased or obscured by the British and European names that the colonists applied to the land.
Salmond went on to develop her skills as a linguist, working with scholars such as Bruce Biggs, initially on little-studied languages spoken in the Solomon Islands. This proved crucial to her work with the Māori world. The rest of the first essay reveals much about the many ground-breaking conferences, both international and local, that Salmond attended, as well as her growing commitment to environmentalism. On balance, she concludes that she has learnt much more from Māori life than the other way round.
The second essay adds more about Eruera Stirling’s great influence on her thinking and understanding. In dramatic contrast, the third essay, written in 1983 and titled ‘Institutional Racism at the University of Auckland’, reminds the reader of the extraordinary arrogance and notions of cultural superiority held by many Pākehā scholars before the Māori cultural resurgence of the 1980s. This arrogance is also recalled in Salmond’s calm and reasoned response—titled ‘Antipodean Crab Antics’, first published in the New Zealand Journal of History in 1994—to the criticisms of the Eurocentric historian Peter Munz in particular of her first two books on both Amiria and Eruera Stirling (Amiria: The life of a Maori woman, in 1976 and Eruera: Teachings of a Maori elder, in 1980); as well as to various criticisms of Hui: A study of Maori ceremonial gatherings, and her account of clashes between two very different cultures Two Worlds: First meetings between Maori and Europeans (1991). Looking back at this controversy, the hostility is hard to comprehend for those of us who first began teaching courses on Māori and Pākehā interaction in part because these books were so helpful, illuminating and well informed. That such dubious nineteenth-century notions on the superiority of ‘open’ as opposed to so-called ‘closed’ societies, and the even more biased notion of the superiority of ‘civilised’ peoples over ‘savages’, once proliferated, now appear quaint and blinkered and part of a vanished era.
Essay four, describing ‘Māori Epistemologies’ (first published in 1985), is one of the most important and helpful sections in the book because it explains so clearly key differences in Māori understanding of the world, including Mātauranga, or ‘Reliable knowledge’; Wānanga, or ways in which men and women brought life to the universe; and Kōrero, or ‘discourse’, usually presented in terms of the beliefs and practices of iwi authorities, which vary from marae to marae. In sum, the essay demonstrates the way in which the meeting of Māori and European thought produced a clash of ‘two worlds’ of quite distinctive misunderstandings.
Essay five, which is titled ‘Theoretical Landscapes: On Cross Cultural Conceptions of Knowledge’, elaborates on just how considerable many of these misunderstandings are, especially as so much of Western thinking is based on a comparatively narrow range of philosophical assumptions, which are linked to mainstream science and the history of the European ‘Enlightenment’. Salmond also points out that much of the debate about these differences is metaphorical, as the word ‘enlightenment’ shows. According to Salmond, once the centrality of metaphor is acknowledged, understanding between two very different ways of thinking about the world becomes easier.
Essay six, ‘Pathways in Te Ao Māori’, is developed around the blockbuster touring exhibition ‘Te Māori’ (1984). This much-celebrated show revealed the range and the expertise of Māori artists, especially carvers and weavers, to the rest of the world, and in particular to cultural gatekeepers in the United States, when it was shown in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Within this sixth essay, Salmond also discusses other discoveries of ancient Māori art, once held in Wellington’s Dominion Museum and later located in the Otago Museum, that link back to Captain Cook’s voyages of the 1770s. Her essay then celebrates the close association between iwi and the land they lived on and relates the legend of Tāne, God of the forest, who brought life out of ‘Te Po’, the Nothingness. This creation story tells how the universe was changed as light flooded into the world. Tāne also slept with the first woman, Hineahuone, and so humanity began as ‘tāngata whenua’ (‘people of the land’). Descent lines emerged; some prospered, and others failed if their mana declined or if there were losses in mana, warfare or suffering from magical interference. The new human order was not exactly hierarchical but rather responsive, as teina, or junior lines, could rise above tuākana, or senior lines, if individuals increased their mana through success in war, oratory, or feasting. Whakapapa had to be zealously guarded to maintain the advantage of higher rank at birth.
Captain Cook and the scientists who visited with him, including the botanist Joseph Banks, were surprised at the differences between iwi according to the environs in which they lived. Some seemed relatively prosperous, especially if they possessed large collections of pounamu ornaments, while others appeared ‘miserable and impoverished’ in comparison. Misunderstandings between two such different peoples were inevitable, especially when it came to British understanding of Māori tikanga—from the meaning of haka to what British practices seemed acceptable to Māori. Little wonder then that cultural misunderstandings underlay many of the conflicts that broke out on Cook’s voyages.
Salmond changes focus in essay number eight, entitled ‘Māori and Modernity: Ruatara’s Dying’ (1999), by focusing on the impact of new diseases on formerly geographically isolated Indigenous people. Ruatara, a highly ranked rangatira of Ngā Puhi and nephew of the warrior Hongi Hika, was an early convert to Christianity and a supporter of Samuel Marsden, Thomas Kendall and the Church Missionary Society in the Bay of Islands. Ruatara left New Zealand in 1805 as a young crew member on the whaling ship Argo. He spent most of the next four years serving on various whaling ships. Some ships’ masters treated him well, while others defrauded and abandoned him. He suffered starvation and beatings. In 1809, after a visit to England, the Reverend Samuel Marsden was returning to Australia by the Ann, a convict vessel, when he discovered Ruatara on board. The rangatira was ill and neglected, vomiting blood because of the severity of his previous shipmates’ beatings. Marsden ensured that Ruatara was cared for, and when the ship reached Port Jackson, he took the still-ailing young man in. Essentially, Samuel Marsden nursed Ruatara back to health. Marsden then taught Ruatara about cultivating cereals at his Parramatta farm, which inspired Ruatara to plan wheat production back home in Rangihoua. After further misadventures at the hands of unscrupulous whalers, Ruatara finally returned to Rangihoua in 1811, where he helped Marsden establish the CMS settlement and continued to work with wheat-growing experiments. Ruatara eventually convinced his fellow chiefs of the value of wheat growing and also offered protection to Marsden and the other missionaries. However, in 1815, Ruatara again fell seriously ill.
Ruatara complained that he could not breathe, and Salmond’s article covers the importance of the Māori notion of ‘hau’, or the breath of life. The missionaries wanted to save Ruatara’s soul so he could go to heaven, but local Māori rather feared the influence of the European ‘gods’. As Ruatara lay dying, missionaries and hapu squabbled over him, but after his death, his Ngā Puhi kin quickly spirited his body away to tribal lands. The missionaries believed in the ‘great chain of being’ and that God had ordered humans, as in the Bible, to go forth and multiply before replenishing the earth and having dominion over the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air and every living thing that ‘moveth upon the earth’. Unlike te ao Māori, they did not acknowledge that a unifying life force ran through all things, including rocks and trees. The missionaries believed that everything was divided in a binary way. In early modern science, with its possessive individualism and European imperial practice, ‘everything was split into isolatable, controllable, calculable parts’, according to Salmond.
Salmond concludes the sad tale of Ruatara by suggesting that anthropology from on high—using one form of knowledge to study all others—is ‘hau whitia’ or out of kilter. It seems more ‘reciprocal exchange’ is required if we are ‘to exchange your wisdom for mine’.
Essay nine, ‘The Trial of the Cannibal Dog, or, Why Did Captain Cook Die?’, relates to her excellent book of the same name. This essay helps explain why Cook’s behaviour worsened as he became involved in learning more about both Tahiti and Hawai’i. Salmond’s account remains the best available on why Cook seemed to lose his rational judgement and his ability to act as ‘an exemplar of enlightened reason’ on his first and second voyages in 1769 and 1770–71.
Essay ten, ‘Their Body is Different, Our Body is Different’ (2004), reveals much more about the influence of high-born priest Tupaia from Raiatea in the Society Islands on Cook’s voyaging, as well as providing translations of various Polynesian peoples and places encountered on Cook’s first voyage. Salmond did more research about Tahiti and the Society Islands following writing ‘The Trial of the Cannibal Dog’ in the Marlborough Sounds and brings in some of this material here. She ends this essay by suggesting that: ‘It seems better history, and better anthropology, to try to do justice to the complex, many-sided dynamics of these engagements’ between Europeans and Polynesians.
Essay eleven, ‘McDonald Among the Māori’ (1990), reports further on Salmond’s investigation of her grandfather’s films of Māori rituals and the impact of showing those films to latter-day Māori audiences that included Merimeri Penfold and carver Cliff Whiting. Anne’s daughter Amiria then took up research on her great-great-grandfather, and on the exchange of ancestral treasures between Scotland and New Zealand and their display in New Zealand and Scottish museums. Amiria’s doctoral research eventually ended up being published as a book by Cambridge University Press. A Marsden-funded group helped Anne assemble much more information on cross-cultural collaborations, and further investigation into James McDonald’s film-making revealed that he worked closely with the historian James Cowan and the ethnographer Johannes Andersen. Later, McDonald also worked with both Āpirana Ngata and Te Rangi Hiroa to help ensure the survival of a distinctive Māori culture.
Salmond ends her book with several short essays on other aspects of her mahi. Essay twelve, for example, describes her work with various artists. This is an absorbing essay that includes contemporary artists such as Lisa Reihana and Fiona Pardington. Essay thirteen, entitled ‘Of Women’, discusses her growing interest in women’s history, gender relations and the problems of misogyny and male violence towards women. Essay fifteen is about her deepening engagement with environmental questions, including supporting the Government legally recognising the Whanganui River as a human being. Essay sixteen, ‘Entangled Worlds’, on the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt and his rather land-based view of the Pacific region, notes that this landlocked perspective was shared initially by Cook and other explorers, along with older medieval views on control and hierarchy like the ‘Great Chain of Being’ that dismissed Indigenous philosophies. Essay seventeen, ‘What is Anthropology’, a rethink of anthropological methodology, concludes with a quote from Merimeri Penfold: ‘when different groups of people come together, it is always possible to exchange perspectives with each other’.
The most important of these final essays, though, is Essay fourteen, first published in 2010, which offers informative coverage of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. This should be read by everyone interested in current debates because, like the entire book, it is deeply researched and comprehensive. Above all, it makes the central point that the key version of the Treaty is the version written in te reo. It was this version that Governor Hobson used to persuade some of the rangatira who attended the Waitangi meetings to sign the Treaty. It guaranteed Māori sovereignty and provided a fair degree of self-government. But Governor Hobson never used it again, substituting the much more ambiguous English version in the rest of his discussions and negotiations.
For any reader unfamiliar with Salmond’s work, this book provides a useful springboard for learning more about the key dynamics of New Zealand history. The book encapsulates her life’s work in an engaging and stimulating manner. For the interested reader who wants to learn more, the book is supplemented by an extensive index, bibliography and endnotes. It is a most timely production given the recent introduction of the new histories curriculum in schools and the current conversations related to Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
Like everything written by this exceptional scholar, Knowledge is a Blessing is rigorously researched, based deep in her knowledge of Māori whakapapa, custom, language and kaupapa; it is intellectually challenging and a delight to read. It is highly recommended, especially for university students, regular (and perhaps irregular) readers of New Zealand history, and anyone interested in race relations in colonies founded after 1700. The publisher, Sam Elworthy, and Auckland University Press should also be congratulated for producing such an important and handsome-looking book at a fair price.
TOM BROOKING is an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Otago. His books include Richard Seddon: King of God’s Own, published by Penguin Books in 2014.
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