Writing Back from the Academy: Uncovering the Unnamed Targets of Makereti's Revisionist Anthropology

Abstract

The second Māori student to enrol at the University of Oxford, Makereti studied anthropology in the intellectual epicentre of the British Empire from 1927 to 1930, participating in transnational academic networks by writing about her own people. Her work was published posthumously as The Old-Time Maori, now acclaimed as an unprecedented work of Māori auto-ethnography. Exploring a forgotten seam of revisionist anthropology, this article argues that reappraisals of Makereti have failed to capture the magnitude of her project of Indigenous resistance writing. Through close reading of Makereti's personal papers and published work, this article uncovers the targeted revisionism of Makereti's scholarship—in particular identifying the unnamed targets of her critique—and how she used the epistemic tools of imperial and salvage anthropology to challenge colonial discourses about Māori. Makereti's engagement with Oxford illuminates Indigenous adaptation of a discipline and institutions often portrayed as sites of incorrigibly imperialist ideology.

“No people ever had a better ambassador and interpreter than the Maori had in her.”¹ According to T. K. Penniman, then secretary of the Board of Anthropological Studies at the University of Oxford, Makereti (1872–1930) was the superlative intermediary between Pākehā (New Zealanders of European descent) and Māori (Indigenous people of Aotearoa/New Zealand). And yet she far exceeded the role of interpreter. Born Margaret Pattison Thom to a high-status Māori mother and a Pākehā father, Makereti was the second Māori student to study at Oxford, registering for the Diploma in Anthropology in 1927.² The final product of Makereti's degree was her posthumously published dissertation, The Old-Time Maori (1938). Before moving from the colorful pools and geysers of New Zealand's “Thermal Wonderland” to Oxfordshire in 1912, Makereti had been a famous tour guide and international celebrity. A fascinating individual, with numerous aliases and modes of representing Māori,³ Makereti's life and scholarly pursuits intersected with anthropology, Oxford, and the British Empire in underappreciated ways.

Makereti has been the subject of historiographical reappraisal and biographical treatment, recognizing her life and research as “explicitly concerned with Maori self-representation.”⁴ The Old-Time Maori is now regarded as an unprecedented work of Māori scholarship.⁵ Today, she is feted as part of the globally mobile intellectual set that contributed to the “Māori renaissance” of the 1920s and 1930s.⁶ However laudatory, these accounts do not capture the magnitude of her project of resistance writing. Makereti is remembered as “a collector of Maori tradition which she wanted to record so that it would never be forgotten.”⁷ But her project became more ambitious than mere preservation. The more she read about her people, written by outsiders, the more determined she became to reclaim Māori culture and history. The extent, intent, and novelty of her revisionist scholarship remains underanalyzed.

The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to highlight Makereti's unique status as an Indigenous woman critiquing her contemporaries from the vantage of an elite colonial institution; and second, using hitherto underexplored archival materials to identify precisely whom Makereti was targeting in her work. Contextualizing Makereti's work within the nascent discipline of anthropology and tradition of salvage anthropology which emerged in New Zealand from the late nineteenth century, this article sets Makereti's representation of Māori against the background of her tribe, Te Arawa, and the apparently assimilationist politics of the Young Māori Party, early twentieth-century advocates for Māori welfare. It does so by tracing Makereti's origin story, the local and global intellectual contexts framing her ambitions, and her journey from small-town New Zealand to Oxford. Finally, as distinct from other scholarship, this article unpicks the revisionism within The Old-Time Maori: identifying Makereti's targeted rebuttals of scholarly representations of Māori by triangulating this text against her draft manuscripts, unpublished research notes, and the primary texts to which she was responding. In part, this study is a response to Stefan Collini's demand for “lateral” intellectual history. Beyond a myopic “discipline-history” that “bores a ‘vertical’ hole in the past,” an intellectual history attempts “to excavate a ‘lateral’ site, to explore the presuppositions, ramifications, and resonances of ideas, which may often involve pursuing them into neighbouring fields.”⁸ Following the exemplary work of Freddy Foks, the present article attempts “to reconstruct this more richly contextual account of anthropology's history” by looking “beyond anthropologists’ published ethnographies and dig[ging] into their archives.”⁹ It seeks to do so with the help of postcolonial theory and without Eurocentrism.

A compelling case study of early twentieth-century Indigenous scholarship, Makereti's story has long flown under the radar of both “discipline history” and “intellectual history.” Her name does not feature in the indexes of most histories of anthropology, even the ones explicitly about women in Oxford.¹⁰ This omission is typical of intellectual history, notorious for its non-global subject matter.¹¹ Despite its broad thematic terrain, intellectual history has been critiqued for arbitrarily halting “roughly in the middle of the nineteenth century.”¹² Further, global intellectual history is criticized for having “long marginalized gender.”¹³ As properly understood, the field is neither Eurocentric, nor exclusively male, nor limited to the “original” intellects preceding the mid-nineteenth century.¹⁴ Nor is it limited to charting the life spans of European political concepts or ideologies, or their disciples. Global intellectual history ought to be intersectional, globally oriented, interdisciplinary, and methodologically expansive. And indeed the field has received major stimuli from the history of political thought, literary theory, and ideas about territoriality and space.¹⁵ Global intellectual history is also being expanded in exciting directions through black, Indigenous, and queer feminist intellectual traditions.¹⁶ Following Sanjay Subrahmanyam's “insistence that global intellectual history is not simply the study of dissemination from the West to the rest,” and thus that we look “beyond the usual suspects,” this article expands the realm of global intellectual history by taking seriously the scholarship of an early wahine Māori (Māori woman) scholar.¹⁷

Echoing Elleke Boehmer's proleptic analysis of anticolonial texts through the prism of postcolonial theory, this article treats Makereti's work as a prototypical assertion of Indigenous identity, history, and epistemic authority.¹⁸ Drawing on analyses of auto-ethnography, postcolonial concepts of resistance literature (“writing back”), “dual cleaving,” and contemporary scholarship on decolonizing methodology, this article reveals how Makereti was developing a voice for Māori from the vantage point of 1920s Oxford: defending Māori history and culture against and from within the allied schools of imperial and salvage anthropology. Revealing the divergent language, tone, and ideas Makereti used in her published and unpublished writing, this research explores a forgotten seam of revisionist anthropology, drafted at the epicentre of British imperial anthropology, the University of Oxford. In complex ways, Makereti's engagement with Oxford helps us to see Indigenous adaptation of and interaction with a discipline and institutions often portrayed as sites of incorrigibly imperialist ideology.

Resistance literature

Since the late 1980s, postcolonial theory has highlighted how literature works with “resistant, ‘real-world’ effects” in colonial and neocolonial situations.¹⁹ Writing is taken seriously both as a form of activism and as a locus of counterhegemonic struggle. Barbara Harlow's keystone text Resistance Literature argues that literature creates an important “arena of struggle” for peoples battling colonialism.²⁰ Operating in parallel with the liberation struggle, this arena is “especially crucial in combating forms of cultural hegemony.” Because this tradition believed that empire “could be ‘written back to’,” postcolonial writers and academics were viewed as potential allies in resistance movements.²¹ Makereti's revisionist anthropology was not a “derivative discourse,” parasitic on European “modular” forms, but an exercise of agency, intertextuality, and writing back.²² Examining Makereti's writing back as a deliberate strategy of subversion, rather than an accidental by-product of academic writing, the following analysis adopts the historically grounded concepts of resistance literature and dual cleaving, rather than post-structuralist hybridity or mimicry.²³

Postcolonial theory was influenced by Edward Said's emphasis on the “gravity of history” and his recognition of culture as an “instrument of power.”²⁴ While cultural hegemony operated through exclusion and othering, postcolonial theorists perceived that this hegemony could also be contested through culture. Essentially, resistance literature is a tradition of “politically determined writing … grounded in the struggle to restore people to history or to justice.”²⁵ This is the core of writing back, which maps onto Boehmer's concept of anticolonial dual cleaving. Clearly, resistance literature need not be unequivocally anticolonial. Like other forms of subversive collaboration, its success often depends on compliance with colonial conventions. Thus writing back also consists of going with the grain, insofar as desirable, but then twisting that grain a little. This is precisely how Makereti's resistance writing operated: a pragmatic, paradoxical foxtrot of complicity and resistance, with the female/Indigenous scholar gradually assuming the male/orientalist lead. Through institutional and disciplinary affiliation, she grounded her work in sites, methods, and concepts of intellectual authority. But she also introduced striations, in the form of factual corrections. Dual cleaving is exemplified in Makereti's compliance with certain academic conventions, alongside the flouting of others—for example, her auto-ethnographic content and impassioned language. Makereti's academic writing, in publication and in draft, helped to forge an arena of struggle for Māori in battling colonialism and cultural hegemony. Exploring the counterhegemonic power of revisionist scholarship, the following analysis reveals how Makereti became increasingly grounded in the struggle to restore her people to history and justice.

According to chronological convention, the “postcolonial” was primarily a postindependence phenomenon.²⁶ But what does this mean for a settler colony that became a dominion in 1907 and has never decolonized?²⁷ In the settler societies of Makereti's era, the “postcolonial” did not yet exist. This article defines postcoloniality as the condition in which colonized peoples sought to assume their place “as historical agents in an increasingly globalized world.” Postcolonial literature therefore includes writing which “subversively scrutinizes the colonial relationship” or resists colonialist discourses.²⁸ Thus, defined ideationally rather than chronologically, Makereti's revisionist writing was quintessentially postcolonial.

Her story: cultural tourism and international celebrity

It is not feasible to examine here all the spaces in which Makereti engaged with British colonialism, commencing with her childhood, mounting celebrity, and subversive collaboration within Māori tourism.²⁹ Before tracing her path to Oxford, however, it is imperative to situate both Makereti in her own genealogy and the imperial science of anthropology and the Pākehā-dominated field of salvage anthropology. Within these fields, amongst others, academic interactions were “impeded as well as facilitated by empire.”³⁰

Makereti was born in 1872, the year of the official cessation of Māori armed resistance to British rule in New Zealand.³¹ Her mother was of chiefly lineage, descending from Ngāti Wahiao and Tūhourangi, two hapū (subtribes) within the tribal federation of Te Arawa. Her father was an English soldier.³² As the firstborn of an ariki (superior chief) genealogical line, Makereti was raised in a Māori-speaking world for the first nine years of her life.³³ Her elders taught her the genealogy, history, and customs that informed her later scholarship.³⁴ Aged ten, Makereti switched to a Western education.³⁵ Her dual heritage, fluent English, renowned beauty, and charisma led to a successful career as a tour guide around the hot springs of Whakarewarewa, a Māori village within the North Island town of Rotorua.³⁶ From 1893 to 1911, Makereti introduced tourists to the geological and built features of her village, telling stories and discussing Māori customs. Known as “Guide Maggie” or Maggie Papakura, she played a prominent role in Te Arawa's flourishing tourist industry.³⁷

Carefully cultivating her iconic persona, Makereti commissioned photographic portraits associating her with Whakarewarewa village, gave interviews, and wrote for newspapers.³⁸ Through mass reproduction of her image, Makereti became a synecdoche for Whakarewarewa: a Māoriland metonym.³⁹ One of her many obituaries recalled, “Her name was known the world over wherever Rotorua was mentioned.”⁴⁰ She also became something of an international impresario, organizing a cultural concert group of Tūhourangi to tour the United States (1906), Australia (1908, 1910), and England (1910–11). Her fame was intentionally curated, but targeted at the representation and survival of Te Arawa, rather than at self-aggrandizement.⁴¹ She used her public profile to promote Māori interests, supporting the political campaigns of Apirana Ngata and the Young Māori Party, which aimed to improve Māori living standards by promoting adaptation to the Pākehā-dominated world, while strengthening elements of traditional Māori culture.⁴²

Makereti's celebrity arose within the “Thermal Wonderland” of Rotorua, a collaboration between Te Arawa and the government that epitomized a strained period of cultural conflict. Across the world, colonialist “constructions of the other as in need of civilization were used to justify the dispossession of natives.”⁴³ Pākehā alienation of Māori lands and sovereignty was therefore “tightly bound to the racialisation and reduction of Indigenous identities,” a cultural colonization in which Pākehā attempted to appropriate and mythologize Māori culture.⁴⁴ From the late nineteenth century, this cultural colonization was achieved through countless forms of print media, including salvage anthropology, and tourist attractions.⁴⁵ Founded in 1882, and run by the Department of Tourist and Health Resorts, Rotorua was promoted as the cultural capital of a mythicized “Maoriland.”⁴⁶

This joint venture with the government was natural, as most Te Arawa fought on the side of the British during the New Zealand Wars of the 1860s, an alliance that led to their perception as the “Crown's Māori.”⁴⁷ Makereti herself made several statements in this pro-colonial vein.⁴⁸ However, this collaboration was also the result of straitened circumstances within Māori communities. Given the loss of land and an increasingly monetized economy, many Tūhourangi and Ngāti Wahiao turned to tourism.⁴⁹ State partnership proved, as ever, a double-edged sword. By the 1880s, tourism had made Tūhourangi the wealthiest subtribe in New Zealand. Threatening this prosperity, however, the government attempted to assume control of the tourism industry through increasing land acquisition. In the late 1880s, as Makereti lamented, the government confiscated Te Arawa land, provided “paltry” compensation, and broke promises that Te Arawa would retain “the right to guide” in the region.⁵⁰ By 1900, the government owned most of the geothermal features around Whakarewarewa.⁵¹ Te Arawa were thus reduced from entrepreneurs controlling local tourist attractions to living curios, “little more than objects of curiosity for visiting tourists.”⁵²

Despite such concerted efforts towards cultural colonization, Māori exercised considerable agency over their representation through the tourism sector. As the Young Māori Party recognized, Te Arawa arts and crafts were fundamental to the tourism industry. Regardless of whether Māori artistic genres were commercialized or adjusted to European tastes, this industry provided an opportunity to revitalize Māori culture.⁵³ Makereti was equally alive to the potential for cultural conservation within tourism. Given her bicultural heritage and education, she was well placed to play a leading role in Whakarewarewa tourism. She was the perfect “go-between,” able to command the respect of Māori and Pākehā.⁵⁴ Makereti worked closely with Thomas Edward Donne, the tourist department's superintendent and an amateur ethnographer with “definite views about how Māori should be portrayed.”⁵⁵ Although Makereti skillfully disseminated romantic images of Māori, she was not Donne's puppet. Instead, Makereti appropriated tourist practices to serve Māori interests. Makereti's guiding performances reflected her appreciation of the power of tourism as a forum for intercultural dialogue and the assertion of Māori control over their culture within the constraints of colonial governance.⁵⁶ As explored below, Makereti later appropriated anthropological discourses while studying at Oxford to assert Māori intellectual and cultural sovereignty: to reclaim and retell Māori history.

Before considering Makereti's postcolonial scholarship, it is worth discussing its popular, non-academic precursor. In 1905, near the apex of her guiding career, Makereti published a Guide to the Hot Lakes District.⁵⁷ It was a commercial success.⁵⁸ While essentially a prospectus for the region and an account of popular Māori legends, there are traces of auto-ethnography in this publication. Makereti occasionally described aspects of Indigenous lives—such as funeral rites, diet, and tribal groupings—and offered a gentle corrective to what tourists might expect of “the natives,” emphasizing their temperance and characteristic love of children.⁵⁹ In an interview in 1906, Makereti expressed her desire “to write something worthwhile,” to write more comprehensively about Māori culture and traditions. Referring to her recent “book about the thermal district of [her] native land,” she now wanted “to go deeper into literature.”⁶⁰ Because she specifically wanted to have this work published in England, she said that she would take the project there herself. Ultimately, the field of anthropology offered Makereti the best opportunity to write something politically meaningful, and to start forming a more ardent voice for Māori. While the legends recounted in her Guide were apparently those “of the kind tourists asked to hear,”⁶¹ and her public statements were often staunchly pro-empire,⁶² Makereti's later writing did not simply deliver what those interested in Māori wished (or felt entitled) to know. Instead, she wrote back, not always against the grain, but correcting errors where she perceived them.

Makereti's background in tourism has been held to exemplify subversive collaboration.⁶³ Through the tourism industry, Whakarewarewa Māori colluded in their own caricature and romanticization, commercializing and thus preserving traditional Māori culture. Drawing on techniques from postcolonial theory and literature, the next sections explore how Makereti's academic writing maps onto this practice of subversive collaboration, or “dual cleaving”: a “double bind” within postcolonial literature that characterized the search of colonized peoples for agency.⁶⁴ This process encompasses both “cleaving from,” in the sense of “moving away from colonial definitions, transgressing the boundaries of colonialist discourse,” and “cleaving to: borrowing, taking over, or appropriating the ideological, linguistic, and textual forms of the colonial power.”⁶⁵ At Oxford, Makereti wrote back against misrepresentations of her people, defending and legitimizing Māori history, culture, and traditions against and from within the discipline of salvage anthropology. Antoinette Burton's critical ethnographies of “native” metropolitan society also help to contextualize Makereti's complex positioning vis-à-vis the colonial state. Akin to the colonial travelers discussed by Burton, Makereti was simultaneously embodying some of the empire's policies and objectives, as well as criticizing its politics and scholarship.⁶⁶ Like her involvement in tourism, Makereti's written resistance was a partial collaboration with Pākehā constructs.

Her context: salvage anthropology

The late nineteenth-century tradition of salvage anthropology—the “drive to collect and re-invent Maori tradition”—was spurred by the belief that Māori were dying out.⁶⁷ This tradition was embedded in Victorian racial theory and ideology, in which the evolutionary ladder symbolized “the differential advance of peoples.” Western man was believed to have ascended through certain metamorphoses, the phenotypes of which survived in less-developed societies. Known as social Darwinism, this theory was essentially a racist Darwinism based on the corruption of Darwinian evolutionary theory and “fatal-impact” ideology.⁶⁸ Its pseudoscientific racial hierarchy poised Māori above many other Indigenous peoples, but below Europeans.⁶⁹

Informed by Darwinian natural selection, fatal-impact theory was crucial to the development of salvage anthropology. This theory claimed that the Indigenous peoples of new worlds would inevitably be supplanted by Europeans upon contact, as the latter were believed to be physically and culturally superior to other races.⁷⁰ Captured by the trope of the “dying savage,” the corollary of European contact seemed to be “the ruination of Pacific races.”⁷¹ Salvage anthropology in New Zealand was therefore part of a global context of cross-cultural representation by colonial settlers: the ideological notion of the doomed, ephemeral nature of “primitive” societies.⁷²

Despite the misdiagnoses of fatal-impact theory, the Māori population was indeed being ravaged by the co-morbidities of disease and anticolonial wars.⁷³ From the mid-nineteenth century, and intensifying from the 1880s, Pākehā therefore hurried to record the lore and custom of the “dying Māori” before they disappeared.⁷⁴ Immensely popular, this tradition generated a “ceaseless flow” of texts on the “fossilised arts, concepts, and customs” of Māori.⁷⁵ Elsdon Best, widely regarded as the father of Māori ethnography,⁷⁶ declared, “The Maori himself will never record such data, will never preserve his own traditions; it remains for us to do it.”⁷⁷ This assertion encapsulates the underlying “white-savior” impetus of salvage anthropology. Justifying the importance of anthropology as “miscegenation” increased, Best predicted that “the pure-blooded race” would pass away, and “we shall know the Maori only according to what we now put on record concerning him.”⁷⁸ Clearly, this conviction denies agency to Māori, either to write their own culture, or to adapt to new circumstances without changing into an unrecognizable race. Along with other ethnographers, Donne recognized the utility of comparative anthropology for the British Empire, as this “close scientific study” would improve control and governance of “native races.”⁷⁹ Salvage anthropology was, in part, an exercise in intellectual and cultural hegemony.⁸⁰

One of the core ideological components of salvage anthropology was the notion of Māori Aryanism. In 1885, Edward Tregear published The Aryan Maori, hypothesizing that Europeans and Māori shared an Aryan origin.⁸¹ Stephenson Percy Smith later inferred that Māori were part of the Caucasian family.⁸² These ideas had traction well into the twentieth century, because the Aryan Māori was a useful tool of assimilation.⁸³ By reinventing Māori as “darker Europeans,”⁸⁴ colonizers whitened Indigenous peoples into “suitable co-ancestors” deemed “suitable for a new Better British nation.”⁸⁵ For Pākehā, the Aryan Māori theory portrayed the settler colony as racially homogeneous, and thus “legitimated European colonialism in New Zealand as family re-union.”⁸⁶ Consequently, although Tregear's methods and thesis were criticized, Māori were widely believed to be a “branch of the Caucasian race.”⁸⁷

Two main cohorts of Pākehā studied Māori culture: first, the amateur ethnologists who founded the Polynesian Society in 1892; and second, the emergent generation of “New Zealand-born but overseas-trained anthropologists,” who attained prominence from the 1920s, such as H. D. Skinner, Felix Keesing, and Raymond Firth.⁸⁸ However, the scientific duty of salvage anthropology was not limited to Pākehā. It was a burden also shouldered by Māori elites. Most notably, the Young Māori Party anthropologists—Ngata, Te Rangihiroa (Peter Buck), and Maui Pomare—used the Aryan Māori theory to augment Māori status in the Pākehā mind.⁸⁹ Te Rangihiroa evocatively described Polynesians as “Vikings of the Sunrise” in one of his most popular books.⁹⁰ They deployed the idioms of fatal impact and the dying Māori to spur cultural regeneration.⁹¹ Many Māori leaders saw anthropology as “offering emancipatory insights” in their anticolonial struggles and as a valuable tool for political activism in the realm of native policy.⁹² They were not alone in this. Mark Matera has shown how African and Caribbean students formed an insurgent critique of colonial policy in their homelands and on behalf of colonized people and people of color from within anthropology. Their “ground-breaking scholarship” criticized leading authorities “on political and intellectual grounds.”⁹³ Jomo Kenyatta, the first leader of independent Kenya, and an anthropologist trained at the London School of Economics under Bronisław Malinowski, was a prominent example of the ways in which anthropological knowledge could be deployed by subaltern figures.⁹⁴ As Burton has shown, it was not uncommon for elite men and women from colonized populations to migrate to study, train, and live in England.⁹⁵ This diasporic movement in the colonial metropolis makes Makereti both more familiar in intellectual-historical terms and all the more striking, given her point of origin. She was both part of a community and, in a sense, peerless.

Anthropology has often been viewed as “a site of colonial and racial domination,” rather than a vehicle of counterhegemonic resistance for Indigenous peoples.⁹⁶ However, colonial knowledge was “profoundly hybridized” and “dependent on indigenous expertise.”⁹⁷ We can extend Matera's conclusion beyond Britain's “tropical empire,” for the production of knowledge on imperial subjects “was never a one-way street, even if it was not characterized by highly equal relations of power.”⁹⁸ The work of Indigenous anthropologists was a form of “gazing and talking back as researchers, students, and lay critics of academic presentations and published scholarship.”⁹⁹ Moreover, in New Zealand, the intergenerational tension within Pākehā salvage anthropology opened a space in which Māori intellectuals could maneuver, using anthropology in novel ways. Māori voices circulated widely within transnational anthropological networks. By the late nineteenth century, Māori were significant actors in this field.¹⁰⁰ Accordingly, we ought to approach anthropology as “an important site for the recovery of some Indigenous voices.”¹⁰¹ Indeed, this burgeoning subdiscipline was the intellectual context in which Makereti realized her aspirations “to write something worthwhile” about her people.¹⁰² This value threshold was not about commercial success, instead resembling Kenyatta's attitude towards social anthropology. After years of advocacy for his people, the Kikuyu, Kenyatta “hoped at last to have found a medium in which to make his people worthy of British attention, whose grievances warranted British redress.”¹⁰³ Makereti, too, was attracted to the cross-cultural, intra-imperial communicative potential of anthropology.

Her journey: from Rotorua to Oxford

Makereti finally found her preferred environment for this project through anthropological studies at Oxford. The segue was initially romantic, rather than academic. During the 1911 concert tour to England, Makereti renewed her acquaintance with Richard Staples-Browne, an Oxfordshire landowner whom she had guided around Rotorua in 1902.¹⁰⁴ Having accepted his proposal of marriage, she moved to England in 1912 and became chatelaine of Oddington Grange, Oxfordshire.¹⁰⁵ Determined to retire from the public eye after the financial difficulties and conflict that followed her recent tour,¹⁰⁶ it would be fifteen years before she matriculated as a student. Nevertheless, Makereti was involved with the anthropological community well before her formal enrolment in the university. Makereti's first recorded interaction with the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford's hub of anthropology and ethnography, was in November 1921. This was the first of many donations to the museum's collection. On 9 March 1922, Makereti was elected an associate member of the Oxford University Anthropological Society (OUAS). On 27 January 1927, Makereti registered as a student for the Diploma in Anthropology.¹⁰⁷ Amongst those encouraging her enrolment were Henry Balfour, then curator of the museum, and Robert Ranulph Marett, university reader in anthropology.¹⁰⁸ Both became Makereti's academic supervisors.¹⁰⁹

Beyond being only the second Māori to matriculate at Oxford,¹¹⁰ Makereti was also a rarity in being a woman. Between 1900 and 1945, few women studied at British universities.¹¹¹ Although women could become full members of Oxford from 1920, they remained unable to join university colleges.¹¹² Still, ahead of its counterparts in Cambridge and London, Oxford was unique in training a contingent of female anthropologists in the early twentieth century. Like the other “hidden heroines” in Frances Larson's group biography of British anthropologists, it was through the encouragement of male dons that Makereti came to formal study.¹¹³ Unlike those women, Makereti was not seeking “escape” or “freedoms” through the fieldwork required of the discipline. She did not want, “more than anything, to travel far away”; she had already done so. It was not in fieldwork that Makereti “endured isolation and physical hardship in cultures very different from [her] own,” but in the academic environment itself.¹¹⁴ Uniquely positioned, she did not conform to the new norm of the “scholar–fieldworker.”¹¹⁵ This was a core difference between Makereti and her rare female peers and precursors. In both New Zealand and Oxford, Makereti contradicts the Pākehā assumption that Māori women were not admitted to the whare wānanga (places of higher learning) because that knowledge was gendered as “men's knowledge.”¹¹⁶

Before enrolling, Makereti delivered several public lectures on Māori legends, customs, and traditions, including addresses to the Women's Institute, the 1924 British Empire Exhibition, and BBC Radio.¹¹⁷ She delivered a significant lecture before the OUAS at the Pitt Rivers Museum on 8 March 1928.¹¹⁸ For a meeting that usually attracted a modest audience of around twenty members, there were 142 guests in attendance, eager to hear Makereti speak on “The Māori as He Was.”¹¹⁹ She also furnished part of her Oxford home as the “New Zealand room.” Adorned with weaving, carvings, and other Māori artifacts, Makereti held salons here, where “budding anthropologists, colonial students, and intrigued travellers” congregated every Thursday.¹²⁰ Clearly, Makereti was becoming part of the “empire of scholars”: an extensive network of academics and ideas, especially active from the 1910s, which intersected with other transnational intellectual networks to shape academic practice and knowledge.¹²¹

Described as “the anthropological center in Britain most self-conscious about its concern with ‘the translation of cultures’,”¹²² Oxford was “the heart of the heart of the Victorian empire.”¹²³ It expanded its fields of study to answer the needs of colonial administrators, with the twentieth-century development of the social sciences being “deeply influenced by Empire.” Anthropology was the discipline most intimately associated with imperialism, and during the 1930s secured a place in the “science of colonial administration.”¹²⁴ At Oxford, anthropology was closely tied to the bequest of General Augustus Pitt-Rivers, who donated his collection of comparative technology to Oxford on condition that it would be housed in its own building, with someone appointed to teach the subject.¹²⁵ Accordingly, Edward Burnett Tylor was appointed keeper of the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1883, and reader in anthropology in 1884. Marett succeeded Tylor as reader in 1910 and cofounded the OUAS, whose meetings were “often concerned with the contribution of anthropology to colonial administration.”¹²⁶ Although much has been made of Oxford's intellectual “stagnation, if not decline, in anthropology” during the interwar years,¹²⁷ the diploma offered a hospitable environment for women students, enabling them to pursue their professional aspirations.¹²⁸

Early curatorial practice in the museum was animated by the belief that artifacts provided scientific evidence for “the workings of the human mind.”¹²⁹ The museum thus displayed artifacts typologically, according to an evolutionary framework that juxtaposed the technologies and corresponding ideas of “primitive” peoples with those of “advanced” societies.¹³⁰ This progressivist framework has been widely rejected, leading to curatorial changes within the museum. Indeed, anticolonial critiques have spread to encompass all museums, which have increasingly come to be viewed as inherently imperialist institutions. Anthropology and ethnography have similarly grappled with issues of appropriation, decolonization, and representation, often being equated with colonial ideology.¹³¹

However, museums are not merely “instruments of colonial power,” but sites with long histories of “indigenous adaptation and exchange.”¹³² James Clifford's conceptualization of museums as “contact zones” provides helpful nuance. These contact zones are asymmetrical, albeit productive, spaces in which “peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations.”¹³³ Perceiving museums as sites of mutual influence allows historians to see a “paradoxical [Indigenous] resistance to and collaboration with” the colonial project, as Māori engaged with European heritage institutions and used them for their own ends.¹³⁴ The engagement of colonized peoples with metropole museums is much older, and more significant, than orthodox critiques allow.¹³⁵ In fact, leading figures in the museum and the university encouraged Makereti's study and lecturing. Through interactions with both institutions, Makereti carved out a creative space for knowledge sharing between Māori and Pākehā. As discussed below, she deliberately drew upon these affiliations to legitimize her anthropological writing. This institutional affiliation was essential, given the elite anthropological tradition she was both joining and critiquing from within.

Having explored Makereti's familial and intellectual roots, the following analysis focuses on her published anthropological work. We turn now to analyse her anticolonial project of writing back, one which cleaved to, as well as from, British colonial constructs, concepts, and theories—but this time, of the academy rather than the tourism industry.

Her work: The Old-Time Maori

Through the tradition of resistance writing, this section analyzes Makereti's book The Old-Time Maori, as an early experiment in auto-ethnography and writing back against and from within salvage anthropology. It charts the unusually collaborative character of this text, along with other novelties of this early “insider” anthropology. Filling a gap in the historical treatment of Makereti, this analysis also undertakes something of a forensic historiography by tracking the precise thematic and authorial targets of her criticism. These are explored below through select ethnographic themes. This analysis complicates orthodox understandings of Makereti's relationships with Pākehā scholars. Her professional collaboration with Donne,¹³⁶ for example, did not reflect unanimity regarding the proper representation of Māori. Makereti was not uncritical of Donne's work; she was merely careful in her framing, and never explicitly named him in her academic corrections.¹³⁷

Unlike her Pākehā contemporaries, Makereti's participation in salvage anthropology was not limited to the project of fossilizing a dying culture. Reacting against ethnographic texts about Māori, Makereti felt duty-bound to write back against these colonial appropriations of her people. She wrote in the hope that the younger generations of Te Arawa would “learn how fine a heritage they have, and try to keep what is best in it.”¹³⁸ To achieve this, Makereti needed to borrow from texts, taxonomies, and entire disciplines, which were aligned with the project of colonialism. The Old-Time Maori thus shows Makereti deftly cleaving to the methods of anthropology to correct colonialist discourses about Māori.¹³⁹ Oxford's empire of scholars assisted her in this project. In draft acknowledgments for this text, Makereti thanked Balfour and Marett for encouraging her to read “what has been written about her people,” and inducing her “to write a true account.”¹⁴⁰ As her Oxford mentors helped her dive “deeper into literature,”¹⁴¹ Makereti formed a clearer idea of what she needed to write. It was not enough to record traditional Māori customs; she needed to correct fundamental misrepresentations of her people. Albeit constrained by the disciplinary requirements of the Oxford degree and by Western academic norms and expectations, it has been suggested that her evolving voice spoke more to her people than to the academy.¹⁴² Nevertheless, she wrote back to early Pākehā observers of Māori. Using her literacy in the imperial science of anthropology for counterhegemonic ends, Makereti foreshadowed “traditions of both anti-colonialism and a longer-lasting decolonization effort.”¹⁴³ Her scholarship illustrates how, at the metropole, the oppositional energy needed to counter orientalist ideas was often supplied by colonized expatriate intellectuals: those who, as Said observed, used “the very weapons of scholarship and criticism once reserved exclusively for the European, now adapted either for insurgency or revisionism.”¹⁴⁴

In 1926, Makereti returned home to discuss her intended research project with Te Arawa and obtain her elders’ endorsement.¹⁴⁵ This consultation with her community continued through correspondence once Makereti had returned to Oxford.¹⁴⁶ On this trip, she also became a life member of the Polynesian Society and attempted, unsuccessfully, to meet one of her idols: Elsdon Best, then ethnologist at the Dominion Museum, Wellington.¹⁴⁷ On 5 July 1926, she wrote to Best, “This is the third time I've come to see you. You are obviously busy. Farewell father, the work I'm doing will be of great importance for the Maori people.”¹⁴⁸ The Pākehā paterfamilias of salvage anthropology, Best was both revered and corrected in Makereti's later writing, although publicly criticized with much less confidence than by Pākehā scholars.¹⁴⁹

Around this time, Makereti started reordering “a life-time's accumulation of notes” to produce what she planned as “a series of books on every feature of the life of the Maori as he was.” In 1928, Makereti was advised to present part of this research for the Bachelor of Science in Anthropology.¹⁵⁰ Although rheumatism hampered her mobility and study, she worked feverishly to complete this thesis on early Māori life. She was assisted throughout by Penniman, a former Rhodes scholar who became a close friend, scribe, and, ultimately, the protector of her legacy.¹⁵¹ Their sustained collaboration was remarkable: for two years, Penniman visited Makereti's home three or four times a week, discussing her thesis while taking notes, and then returning home to type them up. Makereti then rewrote the manuscript multiple times, “until she was satisfied that the chapter was a true presentation of the facts and of the spirit.”¹⁵² Although in some ways similar to Tikao Talks, a collaborative work of salvage anthropology in which Herries Beattie recorded conversations with kaumātua (elder) Teone Taare Tikao, Makereti and Penniman's collaboration differed in crucial aspects.¹⁵³ As distinct from Beattie's authorial control and his salvage mission to secure “the vast store of Maori knowledge” within Tikao's memory,¹⁵⁴ Makereti directed her textual project; she maintained authority throughout.

Due to present her thesis for examination on 7 May 1930, Makereti died of a heart attack on 16 April 1930.¹⁵⁵ Given her constant rewriting, with drafts shuttling back and forth between Penniman and herself, the thesis remained unfinished at the time of her sudden death. However, through Penniman's efforts, the final manuscript was published as The Old-Time Maori in 1938 by Victor Gollancz. Having sent the manuscript to New Zealand, Penniman only published upon receiving corrections from Te Arawa Council, including input from Makereti's immediate family.¹⁵⁶ Throughout the publication process, he showed complete fidelity to Makereti's instructions and thus to those of her tribe. For example, he deleted certain karakia (prayers, chants) upon Te Arawa's request, and insisted that the typesetters only italicize Māori words where Makereti had indicated this was appropriate.¹⁵⁷ The text even ends abruptly, mid-sentence, just as Makereti had last handed the manuscript to Penniman.¹⁵⁸ Ngahuia Te Awekotuku speculates that Penniman may have deliberately opted for this “sudden cutting-off point to accentuate our great loss,”¹⁵⁹ but it seems more likely that he wished to honor Makereti's text as it was: unadulterated by words not her own. Despite Penniman's editing, there remain typographical errors, significant repetition, and incomplete footnotes, which cumulatively give the sense of a draft, truly a work in progress. This, of course, is precisely what it was.

The Old-Time Maori is essentially Makereti's autobiography, as well as a biography of the “old people” by whom she was raised and to whom the book is dedicated.¹⁶⁰ Narrating the story of the village in which she was born, the text discusses genealogy, marriage, rituals, food cultivation, and warfare. The text opens conventionally, with “a description of tribal and family organisation.”¹⁶¹ However, it diverges from the disciplinary norm in that, pursuant to mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge), this is expressed first through Makereti's own genealogy, demonstrating her descent from four chiefly lines.¹⁶² Her writing thus fits into a research method that emerged much later in the twentieth century: auto-ethnography. Amongst other foci, auto-ethnography uses the researcher's personal experience and relationships to analyze cultural phenomena, “balances intellectual and methodological rigor” with emotion and innovation, and “strives for social justice.”¹⁶³ Writing as both “native informant” and ethnographer, Makereti occupied a new position in the tension between the amateur and academic Pākehā strands of salvage anthropology. This intergenerational friction created a space which Makereti could leverage. Her formal scholarship at Oxford distinguished her from Smith and Best, augmenting her authority as insider anthropologist with the institutional credibility of a trained academic.

Unique in its collaborative formation, The Old-Time Maori is also notable for this insider perspective. Makereti's lectures, like her book, were invaluable for showing “Maori life as it appears to a Maori, rather than to an outsider.”¹⁶⁴ One of the related benefits of Makereti's anthropology-from-within is that it does not contain the Eurocentric cultural assumptions and outsider critiques that characterized most salvage anthropology.¹⁶⁵ Insider anthropology, however, was not immune from self-critique. Māori anthropologists occasionally denounced aspects of traditional Māori culture. Te Rangihiroa and Ngata lauded their indigeneity as the superlative basis for writing anthropology, which informed the political reforms they hoped to achieve. However, they could be vigorously deferential to European science and culture.¹⁶⁶ Proud inheritors of bicultural traditions, and having acquired—through their elite Western education—“some facility in looking through pakeha spectacles at racial problems,” both scholar–politicians believed themselves best placed to study Māori people, represent them to Pākehā, and direct the administration of “the native races.”¹⁶⁷ Marked by cultural colonization, Māori anthropologists vacillated between optimism and pessimism about the future of the Māori race and the role of Pākehā “civilization” in its demise or renaissance. Makereti similarly saw herself as blessed with this bifocal vision, and “felt like a direct connecting link between the Pakehas of Eng[land] & the Maoris of N.Z.”¹⁶⁸ Like Te Rangihiroa and Ngata, Makereti was an “aristocrat of knowledge,” deeply attracted to prestige. For each of them, “The inescapable lure of hierarchy, in racial and status terms, helped define their careers and shape their anthropological preoccupations.”¹⁶⁹ A determined conduit of intercultural knowledge, Makereti wielded anthropology for her own revisionist agenda. As we shall see, her writing similarly reveals a complex, twinned indictment of and gratitude for European civilization.

Makereti's account of traditional Māori life was also valuable for its respectful engagement with its source community—Te Arawa. As distinct from her Pākehā contemporaries, Makereti was selective in the material collected for publication, feeling “no compulsion to make all of Te Arawa culture available to western anthropology.”¹⁷⁰ This is shown through her insistence on the sanctity of karakia. Makereti deleted certain karakia from her thesis, and resolved that other, publishable karakia must not be translated, lest their meanings be distorted.¹⁷¹ She wrote that it “would be sacrilege” to translate “these sacred karakia” because nobody “alive to-day could give [their] real meaning.”¹⁷² Translation would risk disseminating a corrupt version of Māori knowledge, which might foment further misunderstanding of Māori culture. This position stands in stark contrast with Best, who reproduced karakia without qualms, describing them as formulae “which may be as puerile as [a] childish jingle.”¹⁷³

Her targets: naming the unnamed

The outcome of these novelties was a work of auto-ethnographic scholarship that dared to correct the established body of knowledge about Māori.¹⁷⁴ Through engagement with existing scholarship, The Old-Time Maori was intended to disprove the “false assertions” and “nonsense” of Pākehā writers about Māori.¹⁷⁵ However, for various reasons, Makereti was reserved in her public revisionism, preferring not to name the scholars whose work she was refuting. Thus, although The Old-Time Maori was advancing debates with salvage anthropologists, the scarcity of express references to other publications made Makereti's position within these debates harder to see. This lack of referencing is partly due to the inchoate nature of her thesis and to Penniman's editorial discretion. Although many sources are clear from her research notes, Penniman opted not to insert references into the manuscript. The paucity of citation is also perhaps attributable to a desire to consolidate her own voice by allying herself with leading scholars, rather than alienating herself from the academic pantheon. Best, for example, was both lionized and chastised in Makereti's writing. This reticence might account for the lack of precise, text-specific analysis of Makereti's revisionist anthropology. Even the scholars most alive to Makereti's revisionist project neglect to identify to whom or what Makereti was responding.¹⁷⁶ No historian has identified the scholars or representations Makereti was writing back against, or why. As distinct from existing scholarship on Makereti, the remainder of this article traces the core anthropological misconceptions to which Makereti responds, matching them to specific authors. Grouped here by theme, but dispersed throughout the various chapters of the text, Makereti's most significant corrections focused on Pākehā myths and misrepresentations of polygamy, familial love, sexual morality, treatment of the sick, and the profligate “starving Māori.”

Rationalizing polygamy

In the chapters on marriage and children, Makereti bridled at insinuations that rangatira (chiefs) lustily accumulated wives for the sake of status. She wrote that monogamy was “the general rule” in Māori society, and that polygyny was practiced “only among tangata tino rangatira, men of very high rank.”¹⁷⁷ Makereti clarified that high-born chiefs were innately important: “it was his own mana [status; prestige] that made him important in the eyes of the people,” regardless of “the number of wives he had.” She reiterated that the only reason a chief would take multiple wives was to ensure that his kawai (line of descent) would continue, “not, as is often stated, to show his importance and status.” These dynastic concerns were not limited to male chiefs. For the same reason, wives who lost their children would ask their husbands to take another wife.¹⁷⁸

This is a correction of several writers, including Donne, who alleged that Māori chiefs practiced polygamy because they “could afford the luxury of plurality of wives,” and because husbands ceased sexual association with their wives from conception until childbirth.¹⁷⁹ Similarly, Best stated that chiefs often took multiple wives “in a spirit of self-aggrandisement, to increase their own fame and importance” and to guarantee “extra helpers in the labour of procuring food supplies.”¹⁸⁰ Whereas Pākehā observers viewed these traditions as purely economic or lustful, in a subtle causal inversion Makereti explained the real reason for polygyny: it was not a question of insatiability, self-importance, or affording a harem, but of a chief's “great dread of his line of descent dying out.”¹⁸¹ One role of the highest chiefs was to serve as “living monuments” to tribal history, by keeping their lineage alive. Makereti showed, from the subject position of Māori, that polygyny was rationalized through the desire for tribal regeneration. Touching on another personally aggravating element of Pākehā writing about Māori, Makereti connected this marital practice to the deep love of Māori for their children.

Familial love

Countering Pākehā assertions that Māori families displayed an abnormal lack of affection,¹⁸² Makereti wrote at length about the power of love in family life and in Māori society. She wrote that having children was “one of the most important things in the married life of the Maori,” and repeatedly underscored the “very great love” Māori had for their children: “a great unselfish love,” unsurpassed by any other race.¹⁸³ She added that an individual must “thoroughly” realize that “a Maori was surrounded with love from his infancy,” and understand all other Māori customs, “before he can … write about the Maori. Otherwise his criticisms lack understanding.”¹⁸⁴ Her emphasis on aroha tamariki (love of children) corrected Best's denial that the nuclear or intimate family existed as a significant social unit in Māori society, which “lacked family life as we know it.”¹⁸⁵ Makereti's assertions of deep parental love aligned with Firth's rebuttal of Best in Primitive Economics, a text she is likely to have read, given that one of her supervisors published a glowing review in the Economic Journal.¹⁸⁶ Corralling an impressive array of corroborating evidence and exposing the illogic and inconsistencies within Best's own work, Firth refuted Best's inaccurate representation of Māori family life. If Makereti read Firth, however, she does not cite him as supporting her own phenomenological account of familial love. As with her observations in the 1905 guidebook, Makereti evidently saw her personal experience and intimate knowledge of her community as sufficient retort to an outsider's misperception.

Sexual morality

In an account inflected with Christian morality and a firmly hierarchical view of class and caste, Makereti stressed that Māori were not lustful, raised their children with responsible attitudes towards sex, and had never engaged in prostitution.¹⁸⁷ Responding to Donne, as well as earlier observers such as Captain Cook, Makereti noted that despite the prurient assumptions of Pākehā writers, the old-time Māori had strong traditions of sexual morality. To the extent that these traditions were no longer practiced, this was because they had been corrupted by the interaction of “lower-born Maori” with Pākehā.

Makereti vehemently denied that Māori engaged in prostitution, repeating that the “Maori woman was very modest,” contrary to the accounts of “some ‘pokokohua pakeha’ [ill-informed foreigners].”¹⁸⁸ Without naming the offending scholars, she wrote, “I feel sure, knowing my people as I do, that … our Maori women would not sell themselves.”¹⁸⁹ Conceding that Pākehā might have offered gifts to mark marriages in the “far back days of the early visits of the pakeha,” Makereti argued that this did “not mean … he was buying the girl.” Regrettably, early Pākehā writers “spoke of things that they did not understand.” Ignorant of Māori language and marriage customs, they “judged the Maori according to European customs.”¹⁹⁰ Rebutting Donne's tales of organized prostitution and hundreds of Māori girls cavorting with foreign sailors in “maritime picnics,”¹⁹¹ where women were traded for “a few nails or an axe,” Makereti asserted that the Māori deemed such couples to be husband and wife.¹⁹² There is evidence that in the Bay of Islands, such relationships were viewed as temporary marriages.¹⁹³ Although prostitution was not a traditional part of Māori society, it did occur for a variety of reasons in the context of the Musket Wars and early European contact. Makereti's assertions that Māori women would never have sold themselves might be true. However, it might also be true that prisoners of war or slaves were sold in order to secure ammunition, weaponry, and valuable trading relationships.¹⁹⁴

Makereti conceded that prostitution “may occur to-day under the deteriorating influence of western civilization,” but denied that this occurred in traditional Māori society.¹⁹⁵ She asserted that Europeans had no monopoly over morality, which was not racially determined but instead stratified by class.¹⁹⁶ While “the lower type of Maori” might have been responsible for myths of prostitution and loose morals, Makereti believed that chiefs or the highborn would never succumb to such baseness. Moreover, while these “lower” levels of Māori “may have consorted with sailors of a like nature as certain English women with foreign seamen in this country,” she emphasized that “[o]ne does not form an opinion of the womanhood of England from the conduct of these unfortunates.”¹⁹⁷ Thus, she argued, it was wrong to infer universal wantonness from the actions of lower-class outliers who had, moreover, been degraded by external influences.

Treatment of the sick

On matters of health and the “survival of the fittest,” Makereti lamented that “[m]uch has been written about the callous and indifferent way in which the Māori treated their children when ill. This is a libel.”¹⁹⁸ Although no references are given for these calumnies, Makereti is here blatantly referring to Best. Her almost verbatim quotation is telling. In The Maori, Best introduced his readers to “some of the unpleasing characteristics of the Maori people,” whose “treatment of the sick bears often the aspect of callous indifference to the suffering of the patient.”¹⁹⁹ Alongside accounts of the “deplorable” lack of care and attention to the sick, Best also insinuated that children were often killed with kindness “of a negative nature.”²⁰⁰ He attributed this “lack of human sympathy” to superstition and “the peculiar prejudices of these natives,” which led them to “remove a sick person from his dwellingplace and to convey him to a rude, temporary hut at the out skirts of the hamlet.”²⁰¹ He saw these practices as vestigial “ideas from an ancient period of savagery when sick or decrepit persons were simply viewed as encumbrances.”²⁰²

First, Makereti responded, “The writer forgets that the Maori of pre-pakeha days was free from illness as a rule.”²⁰³ Highlighting the major epidemiological impact of contact with Europeans, she noted that “Captain Cook's arrival initiated a series of epidemics that swept over the land, with each new vessel bringing diseases which killed thousands.” Moreover, once the Pākehā had “laid the Maori low” with various illnesses, “it was natural that the Maori should go to the Tohunga [priest, healer] to find comfort and relief for his child.” The recognized experts in matters of health, tohunga were better placed to deal with “these strange diseases” than ordinary individuals. Contrary to erroneous ethnographic accounts, this was not child neglect, but akin to a Pākehā parent taking a child to a doctor. Thus Makereti normalized Māori treatment of illness through tohunga. Similar to the reality in England, where—even with ample medical professionals—it was “not always possible to cope with these diseases which were altogether new to the Maori,” Makereti wrote that, although patients sometimes died, they were “never treated with neglect. The European must not judge the Maori to be callous because he does not understand his methods of treating illness.” Rejecting European allegations of Māori “indifference” to the ill or dying, Makereti intended to write more on this subject, but this section of the thesis was not completed before her own death.²⁰⁴ In this defense of Māori responses to unfamiliar pathogens, Makereti contextualized their experiences both prior to and following contact with Pākehā.

The myth of the “starving Māori”

Oriented around food and the “nonsense … written about the starving Maori,” Chapter 4 contains the most sustained corrective agenda throughout The Old-Time Maori.²⁰⁵ By examining the social customs around hākari (feasts) and traditional agricultural practice, Makereti writes back against Pākehā anthropologists’ misconceptions of Māori indolence, profligacy, and low productivity. These leitmotifs of salvage anthropology are clearly illustrated in the works of Best and Donne. After recounting Māori diligence in the laborious tasks of collecting and preserving food supplies, Best negated this by asserting that they were “most improvident” in their tendency “to waste their substance in giving great feasts.” He described hākari as “the result of an ostentatious desire to excel the efforts of some other clan or tribe,” a game of one-upmanship in which “enormous quantities of food were consumed” and irresponsible quantities of gifts were squandered.²⁰⁶ Donne provided similar sketches of Māori profligacy around feasts, particularly those held for tangi (funeral rites). After declaring that Māori have massive appetites, Donne noted that when an individual's “capacity to consume food” is scaled up to 1,500 guests, “one realizes the expense to the hosts of a first-class tangi.”²⁰⁷ He also claimed that, during tangi for revered chiefs, the hosts’ “generosity overstepped discretion, and some of the tribes found themselves impoverished and even hungry” afterwards.²⁰⁸ To Makereti, these were red flags of provocation.

Countering these half-truths, Makereti used anecdotal evidence and childhood recollections to show how the provisioning of such ceremonies was shared amongst many people.²⁰⁹ Thus she illustrated that hosts “were not impoverished by the people who came to the ceremony just for the sake of what they could get to eat, as many ignorant writers have stated.”²¹⁰ To prove Māori agricultural prowess, Makereti also described the technical construction of pātaka (storehouses) and hāngī (ground ovens), extensive agricultural cultivations, fishing and hunting practices, and the communal organization of labor “to show that the Maori always had plenty of food, and that he need never wait for a hui (gathering) to have a square meal.” Casting doubt on the value of Western civilization—in particular, European ways of producing and distributing food—she added that there were never “poor or hungry Maori” before Pākehā arrived, when “Maori left their kainga [villages] to work for Europeans and a necessity for money arose and disorganized their former wonderful method of living.”²¹¹ Here, Makereti is also writing back against early voyagers, such as Captain Cook and John Nicholas, who had described Māori cultivations as “scarce,” “casual,” “disadvantageous,” unfathomably separated from their villages, and “great proof of the insecurity in which these people live.”²¹² In response, Makereti explained the Māori system of rotation between villages and agricultural areas, listing numerous cultivation sites “to show that other writers have not known or failed to note the extensive plantations of the Maori,” and have consequently “failed to give a just account of their economic organization.”²¹³ For this information on agricultural practices, she drew upon the oral testimony of Māori claimants in the 1887 Native Land Court hearing at Taupō regarding the Tūhourangi claim.²¹⁴ This was an extremely early use of Native Land Court evidence to enhance anthropological knowledge of Māori, prefiguring the overlap of law and history in today's Waitangi Tribunal proceedings.²¹⁵ Similar to Te Rangihiroa's defense of the scientific principles of “old Maori pre-European cultivation,”²¹⁶ this strand of Makereti's scholarship presages Bruce Pascoe's revisionist history of Indigenous peoples in Australia. Pascoe corrects colonial accounts by adducing evidence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ sophisticated, precolonial systems of agriculture, engineering and construction.²¹⁷

To illustrate “how very seriously [Māori] took agriculture,” Makereti referred to artifacts exhibited in Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum.²¹⁸ Makereti frequently referred to both institutions in her writing, specifically recalling, for example, a lecture of Balfour's, along with her own “lecture at Oxford.”²¹⁹ These careful institutional affiliations grounded and legitimized her insider anthropology through her membership of the anthropological intelligentsia.²²⁰ Lacking the political and academic authority of Te Rangihiroa and Ngata, Makereti attained a greater platform by writing as an Oxford student than she would otherwise have enjoyed. Similar to Te Rangihiroa's deliberate affiliation with the Bishop Museum, Yale University, and leading Anglo-American anthropologists,²²¹ Makereti nurtured an academic network in Oxford, deploying these institutional affiliations to ground her scholarship in respectability. Makereti did not need Oxford to write the history of her people. It proved, however, extremely useful. Providing both academic direction and institutional legitimacy, the Department of Social Anthropology facilitated Makereti's revisionist project. This “academic entrepreneurialism”²²² exemplifies dual cleaving: deliberate borrowing from forms of colonial power to challenge colonial discourses.²²³ These textual references to institutional authority helped to ground her rebuttal of the myth of the starving, self-impoverishing Māori. These strategies align with the expanding body of work on the ways in which social sciences were undermining the imperial project in this era.²²⁴ Rife with “profound contradictions and ambiguities,” the production of anthropological knowledge has long been recognized as a double-edged sword.²²⁵ As Helen Tilley has written, for non-Western scholars, “producing ethnographic studies became a means to seize control of political terrain, both for personal aims and for purposes of collective representation.” Expanding the geographic reach of Tilley's thesis, Makereti “demonstrates that processes of knowledge production subversive of the status quo could emanate directly from epicenters of colonial power in Britain” and its settler colonial dominions. One distinctive feature of Makereti's case study is her gender, as “most of the examples [in other studies] are of men.”²²⁶

Her critics: reception of The Old-Time Maori

Over time, assessments of The Old-Time Maori have altered according to perceptions of the once-orthodox disciplinary gap between “native informant” and “anthropological agent.”²²⁷ Gender and racial elements were clearly operative in the immediate reception of Makereti's work. While there were positive reviews,²²⁸ some male Pākehā reviewers criticized the text for the reliability of its information, and its insider perspective. The Australian anthropologist Ralph Piddington wrote a scathing one-paragraph review in 1940, complaining about “Makereti's lack of any conception about what it is important to record about a primitive people” and “the personal character of her approach.” The result was, he alleged, “an incoherent and highly idealized picture of Maori life.”²²⁹ There is something to this critique of hyper-idealization of traditional Māori society, as Makereti seemed to participate in Māori Aryanism. Similar to Te Arawa scholar Te Rangikaheke's deliberate “whitening” of Māori tradition through contributing to the texts of Sir George Grey, a colonial governor and later premier of New Zealand, Makereti repackaged Māori custom and ways of life into forms she considered more palatable to Pākehā audiences.²³⁰ As Clifford has observed, “Western Orientalist experts” do not wield a monopoly over cultural essentialism and stereotypes: these are epistemic tools.²³¹ Like the Young Māori Party anthropologists, Makereti sought to use the Aryan Māori narrative “as a point of leverage, renewing the value of Māori for Pākehā.”²³² Through her contributions to anthropology in the most elite university of the British Empire, Makereti was simultaneously trying to whiten the “Old-Time Maori” and to present her people as they really were. This was a skilful form of writing back, in that it endorsed the optimal stereotype of Māori: a pragmatic move, given that the elimination of stereotypes was then unrealistic.²³³

However, the chief objection to her scholarship was that it did not qualify as scholarship: it was, by its nature, incorrigibly amateur and substandard. This critique played out pursuant to the exclusionary native-informant/scientist binary exemplified in Bronisław Malinowski's 1922 classic Argonauts of the Western Pacific.²³⁴ In defining the only ethnographic sources of “unquestionable scientific value,” Malinowski drew a distinction between the “brute material of [native] information” and “the final authoritative [European] presentation of the results” of ethnographic research.²³⁵ “Unfortunately,” he wrote, “the native can neither get outside his tribal atmospheres and see it objectively, nor if he could, would he have intellectual and linguistic means sufficient to express it.”²³⁶ As illustrated above, Pākehā salvage anthropologists echoed this understanding of Indigenous incapacity for self-observation and analysis.²³⁷ Conventionally, ethnographic studies were marked by “a delicate balance of subjectivity and objectivity,” in which “[t]he subjectivity of the author is separated from the objective referent of the text.”²³⁸ This “valorization of outsiderness” and “the presumption of cultural boundary crossing, of anthropology as a practice of studying others,” imposed a formidable hurdle.²³⁹ These disciplinary methods theoretically restricted Indigenous peoples from studying their own cultures, operating “to authorize and reinforce dichotomies that separate native subjects from anthropological agents.”²⁴⁰ And yet, as we have seen, the literature consistently shows Indigenous intellectuals and intellectuals of color writing “from within and against” colonial disciplines.²⁴¹

As distinct from Pākehā observers, Makereti did not need to—in Malinowski's words—“get … the hang of tribal life.” She did not need to conjure up “ethnographer's magic” to understand “native mentality or behaviour,”²⁴² as it was the mentality and lifeways of her own people to which she was devoted. She achieved what Malinowski urged upon ethnographers: a twinned study of “the intimate aspect” as well as “the legal frame” of native communities, tracing the emotional warp and weft of the Indigenous social fabric.²⁴³ As explored above, Makereti carefully studied the intimate relationships between family and tribal members, as well as their bases in Māori custom. However, her positionality proved disconcerting to certain non-Indigenous academics. As an early Indigenous anthropologist, Makereti bridged the disciplinary gap between native subject/informant and “anthropological agent.” Thus she was not understood as a scholar capable of analyzing the material objectively.²⁴⁴ This negative reception possibly hinged, also, on Makereti's coming to scholarship as a mature woman student, a response experienced by other “hidden heroines” of British anthropology in this period.²⁴⁵ Her age did not, however, impair her male peers’ or mentors’ perceptions of her expertise, ability, or status. To the contrary, Penniman held his friend in remarkably high regard, describing Makereti as “the chieftainess,” one of “the tangata whenua, the lords of the land.”²⁴⁶

Academic moods have changed. The binary of scientific European/ascientific Native has proven methodologically untenable and ethically unpalatable. Throughout the twentieth century, anthropology became increasingly self-conscious and self-critical. Its “disciplinary politics” changed apace with decolonization movements.²⁴⁷ This accounts for the reassessment of The Old-Time Maori as an unprecedented work of Māori scholarship. On its reprinting by the New Women's Press in 1986, Te Awekotuku's Introduction lauded it as “the first comprehensive, ethnographic account by a Maori scholar,” which remains “an original contribution to Maori scholarship and to the wider ethnographic record.”²⁴⁸ Echoing this acclaim, the Royal Society of New Zealand notes that the “most striking quality” of this “unique” text is its foundation in “traditionally acquired knowledge and first-hand experience.”²⁴⁹

It is significant that the intellectuals and publications that began to take her work seriously were spurred by second-wave feminism. Founded in 1982, New Women's Press was part of a small but tenacious group of independent feminist publishing houses and collectives—including Spiral and Broadsheet—that promoted writing by, for, and about women, including Māori women, and made it widely accessible.²⁵⁰

Although the self-reflexivity of Makereti's scholarship was before her time, her work has been recognized as a reliable source of anthropological data on traditional Māori society. The Oxford connection may have been beneficial in this regard. In 1942, the Pitt Rivers Museum displayed a photographic exhibition of The Maori of New Zealand. The catalogue lists Makereti's text alongside Best, Firth, and Augustus Hamilton as leading authorities on Māori “social, religious, and economic organization.”²⁵¹ That same year, Beatrice Blackwood, Penniman's closest colleague at the museum, published an article citing The Old-Time Maori by “Makereti, a Maori writing about her own people.”²⁵² Following these Oxford-based endorsements of her work, numerous publications cited The Old-Time Maori as authoritative.²⁵³ Makereti's resistance writing was more effective because of this cleavage both to and from colonial science. It became successful, recognized by anthropologists at Oxford and further afield, because she was partly collaborating in hegemonic systems and sites of knowledge production.

Makereti had a firm faith in the professional science of anthropology. She was not writing back against the discipline or overturning its conventions, but deploying that discipline as an epistemic weapon, believing she could wield its discursive practices to correct unscientific theses and misapprehensions of the Māori mind-set. Makereti attempted to “reflect the depth of her Maori values and worldview, while at the same time accommodating the rigorous demands of Western academic discipline.”²⁵⁴ For this reason, her book has been recognized both as precursor to the modern Kaupapa Māori research paradigm—which centers Māori beliefs, values, and worldviews—and to the related movement to decolonize methodology.²⁵⁵ It is also heralded as a seminal work of auto-ethnography.²⁵⁶ Despite these accolades, none of the new appreciations of Makereti's work identify precisely whom Makereti was targeting. The full extent of her revisionist project has thus remained opaque. The unique contribution of this article has been to make such identifications clear.

Conclusion

Amplifying Makereti's own voice and scholarship, this article has examined her attempts to “decolonize” European knowledge of Māori within Oxford. A deliberate anachronism, this verb is intended to highlight the early ways in which Makereti coopted Pākehā disciplines to sustain and protect Māori knowledge.²⁵⁷ And yet Makereti's work fits uneasily within Linda Tuhiwai Smith's canonical text Decolonizing Methodologies, which problematizes European ways of knowing and representing the past because colonialism has meant “the imposition of Western authority over all aspects of Indigenous knowledge, languages and cultures.”²⁵⁸ We have seen how Makereti carefully positioned Māori in a racial hierarchy, endorsed assimilation, and coopted the epistemic technologies of the British Empire. Makereti's scholarship generates crucial questions about Māori uses of Pākehā institutions and cultural discourses. In preserving Māori knowledge through European frameworks, is this ongoing cultural colonization or rather the dynamic cooption of Pākehā knowledge systems? Pākehā systems of knowledge did not uniformly efface or supplant mātauranga Māori. Instead, Makereti exemplifies how Māori sustained, protected, and selectively disseminated their traditional knowledge, sometimes by working within the most august institutions of the British Empire, and by using the very tools intended to appropriate and fossilize their allegedly moribund culture. Like the Young Māori Party anthropologists, Makereti's writing attempted to make Pākehā and Māori mutually comprehensible.²⁵⁹ Along with other colonized peoples, Māori adapted scientific methods to record and revitalize their own traditions and customs. The internalization of colonial ideologies was a double-edged sword. While evidently capable of weakening and “disciplining Indigenous identities,” this adaptation of external ideologies could also be a self-critical, creative site of re-forming Indigenous identity.²⁶⁰

Throughout her extensive body of writing, Makereti's project resembles Smith's more recent work in the sense that both Māori scholars are “‘researching back’, in the same tradition of ‘writing back’ … that characterizes much of the post-colonial or anti-colonial literature.”²⁶¹ However, Makereti was practicing textual resistance long before the tradition had been identified. Attempting to rebalance the asymmetry of cross-cultural knowledge and power implicit in anthropology, Makereti carved out space for Indigenous scholarship by describing Māori as the people best qualified to write Māori history and anthropology. Like her Young Māori Party contemporaries, she asserted that, while inter-cultural understanding was possible, alterity was undeniable and needed mediation. This mediation was the proper role of Māori. In the allied aims of claiming legitimacy for Indigenous scholarship, undoing imperial domination, and restoring Māori to justice through self-representation and revisionism, Makereti was a decolonizing (or postcolonial) writer. Although proleptic, the description is apt.

In a considerable development from the anodyne, pro-colonial tone of her 1905 guidebook, The Old-Time Maori reveals Makereti's subversion of the imperial science of anthropology to revise pervasive myths about Māori. Defending her people against scholarly misrepresentations, she produced an auto-ethnographic work of resistance literature that relied upon salvage anthropology in order to challenge its precepts. Through the oratory of her elders, her reading of salvage anthropology, and her Oxford education, Makereti had been acquiring knowledge about her people, as both subject and object. In different ways at different points of her life, she shared that knowledge with Pākehā: as tour guide, impresario, and performer, and as lecturer, writer, and scholar. Ultimately, The Old-Time Maori could have been written anywhere. Makereti did not head to Oxford to learn about Māori. Nor did she need to be in Oxford to write an account of her people. Oxford was merely one stage—the final one—in a life devoted to “preserving and keeping vigorous all that was best in the old Maori life.”²⁶² Crucially, however, it provided the institutional frameworks and legitimacy for Indigenous resistance writing in the early twentieth century. What she gained from Oxford was a disciplinary framework, institutional affiliations, and academic mentorship. Her supervisors provided bibliographic direction, steering Makereti towards certain Pākehā-authored texts on Māori that spurred her to correct their errors: to tell the true story of traditional Māori life.²⁶³ This education and community amplified her knowledge of outsider perceptions and representations of Māori, impelling her to write much more than a memento mori of Indigenous culture.