March 02, 2021
Kaa in with a prayer for book prize
The author of one of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards’ finalists says it challenges the assumptions many people have about Māori churches.
Hirini Kaa says the Te Hāhi Mihinare: The Māori Anglican Church was a labour of love, drawing on stories he heard from his father, the late Canon Hone Kaa, and his tūpuna who did so much mahi in the hāhi.
He says it’s a complicated story, with both good and bad choices involved.
Rather than being a vehicle for colonisation, the church has been a space for Māori resistance.
“It’s been a place where we have found a safe space where we could talk amongst ourselves as Māori, amongst our iwi, formulate our thoughts, express them in various ways as creative and there was a strong political outcome from that all through our history, the past two centuries,” Dr Kaa says
In recent years social movements like the anti-apartheid movement and Takaparawhau-Bastion Point were strongly supported by Mihinare as what they should do as Christians and Māori.
Te Hāhi Mihinare is competing for the non-fiction prize with Vincent O’Sullivan’s biography of the late artist Ralph Hotere, Alison Jones’ This Pākehā Life and Madison Hammill’s essay collection Specimen.
Winners will be announced at the Auckland Writers Festival on May 12.
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