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More than half a century of writing on relations between Maori and Pakeha have been brought together in a book launched in Auckland last night.
Ko te Whenua te Utu/Land is the Price by Auckland University Emeritus Professor Keith Sorrenson covers the land purchases and the King Movement of the nineteenth century, twentieth-century politics, and the new arrangements that are emerging through the Waitangi Tribunal process.
Professor Sorrenson, who has whakapapa from his mother to Pukenga, Wairaka and Toroa of Mataatua, says when he first started studying New Zealand history, there were some big myths to slay.
"It was assumed that Maori, having been defeated in the wars, simply gave up hope and were sitting there gradually dying off and I very quickly discovered when I started to research that period that wasn’t the case at all."
"Their population was declining but they certainly hadn’t given up the ghost, That was really the point of the first essay that I published in 1956," he says.
Professor Sorrenson says as long as large numbers of Maori are down the bottom of the socio-economic ladder there will continue to be conflict.
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