December 13, 2019
Bluff window on world for Kai Tahu
An historian working on a history of one of Aotearoa’s oldest centres of continuous contact between Māori and European says the research is done but the writing’s the hard part.
Michael Stevens has received the Judith Binney Fellowship to allow him to complete his book A World History of Bluff.
He says the fellowship buys him time to complete it outside his mahi as an independent contract historian.
He says his Bluff hometown is a Kāi Tahu village, with 44 percent of the population Māori compared with 11 percent across Southland.
At the same time it is a commercial port, with ships coming and going from all over the world.
"The project’s really looking at this resilient stable Māori community on the one hand and then this very forward, global node on the other hand and how these things have interacted, bumped up against one another, bled into each other over the past 200 years. We are trying to grapple with the nature of being Māori in that part of the New Zealand archipelago," Dr Stevens says.
He will start writing once the mutton bird season is over.
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