David Eggleton
Books of Mana: 180 Māori-authored books of significance edited by Jacinta Ruru, Angela Wanhalla and Jeanette Wikaira (Otago University Press, 2025), 225pp, $65
In their co-authored chapter, ‘The written word can change the course of history’, in Books of Mana: 180 Māori-authored books of significance, Jacinta Ruru, Angela Wanhalla and Jeanette Wikaira outline how, in 1948, a Māori community centre was established at Freeman’s Bay in a former army building opposite Victoria Park. Opened by Prime Minister Peter Fraser, it was the only specifically Māori community centre in the entire Auckland district, although there were dozens of other community centres across the city. The centre was popular and served as an urban marae. Amongst the amenities originally proposed for it, there was to be: ‘a library concentrating mainly on Māori literature … In time this could become of importance … to all New Zealand as a centre of a distinctively New Zealand literature.’ The authors point out that it is not known, or officially acknowledged, despite these declared intentions, whether the library was ever created. The community centre closed in 1970 and the site is now an apartment block, but that aspirational library symbolises their hopes for this book, albeit at a different time in the nation’s history.
The best libraries are living things, in a constant state of evolution as guardians of cultural and historical memory. A library evokes literature as an emblem of both cultural continuity and cultural efflorescence. The scope of a good library allows for the expression of complex identities: of nuance, contemplation and questioning. Libraries are organic and papery; implicitly we reject or are wary of books read via a digital device, not so much because of the dumbing down of our attention spans, though there is that, but because of the lingering sense of ideological manipulation by whatever digital platform we are using.
For these editors, the ideal Māori library stresses reading and knowledge-gathering as an iwi or communal activity taken from books by Māori writers (sometimes in collaboration with non-Māori), but beyond that as accessible to all. It emphasises a Māori way of understanding that, while grounded in customary whakapapa, acknowledges secular and liberal elements and individual agency. Partly, too, making a Māori library is about the revival and resuscitation of landmark literature, of important out-of-print books, not so much rescued from obscurity as waiting to be found. The editors tell us that their catalogue of titles and capsule summaries is intended as a selective survey: ‘there are hundreds of other significant books by Māori authors’. But if not offering a comprehensive inventory, Books of Mana does point us to exemplary guidebooks, key wellsprings of inspiration, books that excel in their fields.
The concept of a curated list of Māori-authored non-fiction books that have been published since the early nineteenth century began at a hui held at Waipapa Marae at the University of Auckland in 2017, and the scheme was launched in 2018 with a project called Te Takarangi (named after a distinctive spiral form in carving), unveiling a hexagonal stand or kiosk to reveal the first books chosen for the reading list. The intention with the display, too, was to emphasise how physical books might be understood as taonga tuku iho: cherished talismans handed down through generations. As we are told here, nineteenth-century Māori had high rates of literacy in their own language, and using the Latin or Roman alphabet they took up writing with alacrity, creating tribal manuscripts, whakapapa books, political articles in Māori-language newspapers, and becoming prolific writers of letters and other personal documents.
Books of Mana is much more than a glorified bibliography. Supported by different commentaries in its various chapters, it is the deliberate construction of a counter-canon of Māori-centric books as the literature of Aotearoa. The argument made is that while we live in a bicultural nation, only a few Māori authors—Ihimaera, Grace, Hulme, Tuwhare, Duff—have been elevated into canonical status. We need to understand choices around representation within a canon as a method of forgetting or ignoring or erasing other texts that don’t serve the canon’s purposes. Yet while this book is a catalogue that revels in its specifically Māori perspective, it aims to be a rebalancing rather than an attempt to idolise or folklorise Māori writing. The focus is on peer-reviewed or consistently critiqued non-fiction texts, considered in terms of tikanga Māori (Māori customary practices) and wānanga (discussions) of mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge). The books here often have been chosen because they deftly address historically suppressed narratives—or biased commentaries around racism, injustice and sociopolitical discriminations that continue to percolate through today’s media.
Books of Mana asserts through its choices that canons are the product of agendas, and that for the literature of New Zealand this has encompassed in the past: ‘the colonial view that Indigenous cultures are non-literate, as well as a colonial presumption to know everything about Indigenous people. A narrow range of Māori representations can lead people to think that real Māori people look or act or feel in a narrow range of ways.’ At an early stage of Te Takarangi, the editors produced an ‘anti-racist’ list of ten books designed to combat ignorance or amnesia about New Zealand as a colonial imperialist project, and they are included here as part of the book’s kaupapa of literary activism.
The list includes Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s polemical Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples, published by Otago University Press in 1999; Ranginui Walker’s Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: Struggle without end, published by Penguin Books in 1990; and Aroha Harris’s Hīkoi: Forty years of Māori protest, published by Huia Publishers in 2004. These books are concerned with re-storying history, affirming that there is no people without a history, and that in the end all history stories are similar, since they only summarise a series of struggles between the oppressed and the oppressor. The Bible, for example, was used as an instrument of erasure as much as enlightenment, so that in terms of mātauranga Māori, spiritual knowledge considered tapu, and handed down orally, was erased and replaced by the moralising paperwork of Pākehā bureaucrats, intent on simplifying the complexities of mana whenua and tangata whenua.
Books of Mana contains around 20 essays exploring the different ways Māori have historically responded to the advent of books in Aotearoa, rejecting reductive notions and insisting on a multiplicity of experiences, especially noticeable, here, in terms of mana wāhine. As is explained, the seeming silence or absence of Māori wāhine from the public record in earlier times was not because they were silent, but because they were marginalised from it or not included at all. Angela Wanhalla tells us that researching a 2017 book she co-wrote with Lachy Paterson, He Reo Wāhine: Māori women’s voices from the nineteenth century, revealed that the archives are full of the voices of Māori women in the form of letters, memoirs, petitions and legal documents. She goes on to discuss how ‘life writing’ has offered an important counter to the absence of women’s voices and experiences in mainstream histories, citing an autobiographical trilogy by Mihipeka Edwards as amongst the most significant of these, with its ‘searing and honest account of racism’.
Jacinta Beckwith, in a chapter titled ‘Ko te kupu te ihi, te wehi, te wanawana: Libraries, archives and mātauranga Māori’, reminds us that formerly histories were written almost entirely by Pākehā ‘who rewrote and reconstructed traditional stories and sometimes in ways that ignored Māori realities and failed to acknowledge Māori contribution or authority’. The Te Takarangi project helps to remedy this and points towards the ultimate goal ‘of every tribe having access to the authentic accounts of their own traditions as recorded by their own writers’.
Wayne Ngata, a descendant of Sir Apirana Ngata, writes about Ngā Mōteatea, the anthology of songs and chants compiled by his ancestor, and in particular the memorised oriori or lullabies. When Apirana describes collecting them from kaumātua, by listening to them being sung, Wayne cautions, ‘the more you write things down, the more your capacity to maintain an oral tradition disappears’. But Poia Rewi by contrast states that his book Whaikōrero: The world of Māori oratory ‘came from realising all my pakeke elders were dying. I started interviewing people just to capture their knowledge before they passed on.’
Jeanette Wikaira in her essay ‘Books are taonga’ tells us that in the early period of Māori interaction with Pākehā Māori rangatira sketched their moko on paper, utilising them as legal signatures: ‘Rangatira who signed Te Tiriti o Waitangi did so using symbols. Such marks were regarded as tohu—signs—not only as physical markings on paper but also visionary signs of the future.’ She goes on to argue that those books affirmed as taonga have a similar function today: ‘The book becomes a vessel that embodies the mana of the author, the presence of others and the mana within.’
What the Te Takarangi or Books of Mana project is asserting then is ‘story sovereignty’ by way of bringing Māori scholarship ‘to the widest possible audience’. Just as the declaration of Matariki Day made Aotearoa New Zealand the first country in the world to celebrate Indigenous knowledge with a public holiday, so we don’t need to go overseas to ‘reflect our identity’ because ‘we have identity and culture right here, we’ve always had it and now we are starting to reflect it’. This flax-roots canon formation is important, because if we are serious about decolonisation, ‘it matters what the powerful people at the centre of decision-making in Parliament—and in classrooms and in everyday homes—ßare reading’.
The book’s appendix contains the complete Te Takarangi list, so far, of 180 books, along with a timeline that extends from 1815 to 2022, with amongst the most recently added titles being Rachel Buchanan’s Te Motunui Epa, published by Bridget Williams Books in 2022. Te Motunui Epa is a chronicle of how five interconnected tōtara panels or whakairo, carved by Te Ātiawa, Buchanan’s iwi, around the beginning of the nineteenth century and smuggled out of the country became a test case globally around changes in international law to protect and repatriate stolen cultural treasures.
DAVID EGGLETON is a writer, reviewer and poet living in Ōtepoti Dunedin. His books include Lifting the Island: Poems published in 2025 by Red Hen Press (USA).
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