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Exchanges between Maori and European that shaped New Zealand's past and future is a theme for this year's Royal Society of New Zealand Rutherford Lectures.
They will to be delivered by academic and enviromentalist Dame Anne Salmond, who says she is fascinated by ‘long-run human history’ and how the trajectories of people and their philosophical frameworks intersect.
Her first lecture, The Sea, in Tauranga on October 28 will look at Maori relations with the ocean, contrasting the moment in 2012 when Te Whanau a Apanui went out to confront the Petrobras’ oil drilling ship Orient Explorer with the episode almost 250 years earlier when canoes headed out from Cape Runaway to confront Captain Cook’s Endeavour.
She says such contests pit Maori conceptions of the ocean against European ideas about sovereignty, freedom of the sea and economic zones.
Other lectures in Christchurch, Wellington and Whanganui will look at the the first European settlement in the Bay of Islands 200 years ago and what that meant for concepts about land, what the encounter between Hongi Hika and King George IV in London says about rangatiratanga and sovereignty, the importance of Maori women to the sufferage movement, and what needs to be done to improve both the environment and New Zealand's regional economies.
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