September 06, 2012
Maori captivity captures copyright prize
A proposed book on Maori in captivity has won an Auckland historian an award aimed at helping writers to realise non-fiction projects.
The $35,000 Copyright Licensing New Zealand Writers’ Award will allow Hazel Petrie to research and write Into the Darkness, which she says will break entirely new ground on how Maori war captives were treated and how Maori slavery is perceived today.
Dr Petrie says the idea came out of her earlier book about Maori tribal businesses in early colonial New Zealand, Chiefs of Industry.
“The people who tended to become successful independent entrepreneurs were often released captives so it crossed my mind then to start thinking about why that was and I assumed it was because they had no mana to preserve, or very little. I then started to try and look for literature on that subject and there basically wasn’t any,” she says.
Dr Petrie says much of what is known of Maori captivity comes from the musket wars, but she wants to find out how the practice was seen before that upheaval.
The other 2013 CLNZ award went to David Veart, the author of a social history of food, First Catch Your Weka, who plans to write Hello Boys and Girls: A New Zealand toy story.