December 21, 2016
Innovation fostered in treaty fellowships
Victoria University of Wellington has given Treaty of Waitangi Research Fellowships to three of its scholars who are finding innovative ways to the look at the foundational importance of Maori culture to New Zealand.
Law lecturer Carwyn Jones will look at the way Maori constitutional principles can be gleaned from traditional sources rather than documents, statutes and court reports.
He has already done considerable study identifying legal reasoning and process in the korero purukau or stories of his own Ngati Kahungunu iwi.
Dr Jones says waiata, whakairo, and karakia can also reveal patterns of authority and decision-making.
Nikki Hessell, a senior lecturer in the School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies, will look at a series of articles in the Maori language newspaper Te Toa Takitini in 1926 about Maori land claims and law reform, where journalist Reweti Tuhorouta Kohere used British poetry quotations to reinforce his points.
The research is part of a larger book project in which Dr Hessell is studying use of British poetry for indigenous diplomacy in Africa and the United States.
The third fellowship will help art history lecturer Simon Perris bring the work of classicist and scholar of Maori oral literature Agathe Thornton to a new audience.
Dr Perris says Thornton, who died in 2006 aged 96, was one of Aotearoa’s unsung cultural heroines whose work should inspire non-Maori to take Maori language, myth and literature seriously.
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