“… the relative poverty in which many Canterbury Kāi Tahu were then living was directly attributable to their loss of land in the nineteenth century.”

In 1952, the historian and friend of Kāi Tahu Harry Evison (1924–2014) completed his Master’s thesis, ‘A history of the Canterbury Maoris (Ngaitahu) with special reference to the land question’. He concluded that the relative poverty in which many Canterbury Kāi Tahu were then living was directly attributable to their loss of land in the nineteenth century. His argument reflected the intergenerational, lived experience of Kāi Tahu communities but was dismissed in the academic circles of the 1950s where the inherently racist Pitt-Rivers theory of ‘culture clash’ prevailed – according to this theory the negative impact of the colonial encounter on Māori was attributed to ‘psychological collapse’ rather than the economic hardship enforced by the loss of land and resources.

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I have a complicated love/hate relationship with Max Hailstone’s ‘Treaty Posters’. I was a student of Max’s very shortly after he completed this suite of screenprints in 1990 for the 150th anniversary of the signing of te Tiriti o Waitangi. I remember seeing the prints lurking around the design studios but also knew that our art history lecturer Jonathan Mane-Wheoki (Ngāpuhi ki Hokianga, Te Aupouri, Ngāti Kuri) had stepped in at the last minute and organised a tapu-lifting ceremony at the Ilam School of Fine Arts to alleviate some of the controversy around the project.

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