Culture and Identity in New Zealand quotes
Edited by David Novitz and Bill Wilmott
“New Zealanders did not learn their own history in schools, leaving them ‘without a personal history’, without indigenous roots in New Zealand.”
“Pakeha culture in New Zealand has been characterised by an ongoing struggle between the indigenous and the imported.”
“culture is not simply art, music and literature; it is the total collection of behaviour patterns, values and beliefs that characterise a particular group of people.”
“Maori identity was intimately associated with place, and therefore the land.”
There is “a sense of dependence on Europe and United States in their great reliance on metropolitan culture.”
“New Zealand can either succumb to increasing economic and cultural dependence and the consequent internal conflict brought about by the greedy scramble for diminishing ‘lollies’, or it can begin to develop a sense of autonomous identity that unites our people in opposing internal exploitation of the disadvantaged and external exploitation by the mighty.”
“The key to New Zealand identity is thus land...today it centers on the struggle for the return of that land.”
“A basic component of Maori identity is the concept of Maoritanga.”
“gods, ancestors and living people are linked through genealogical descent.”
“Church dogma undermined Maori society by attacking important cultural symbols.”
“Competition for land and its resources transformed the relationships of economic cooperation between Maori and Pakeha into opposition.”
“Maori and Pakeha became ethnic, social and cultural categories in a binary opposition of dynamic tension...an important historical component in the contemporary definition of Maori identity.”
“Maori land constitutes the main basis of the cultural identity of the Maori people.”
“White settlers invaded the land, missionaries invaded the Maori mind.”
“The attack on the Maori language struck at the very core of Maori culture and identity...denying their humanity.”
“For the Maori, the loss of land, loss of language and erosion of culture are socially incapacitating.”
“the Pakeha is clearly the dominant group in New Zealand an controls all the power and symbols of success.”
“pressing for transformation of the monocultural institutions of Pakeha society to make provision for biculturalism.”
The ancestors “were seen as having a part in the creation of the present.”
“We are products of our unique history as a Pacific nation torn between the imperatives of our geographical situation, the culture of the indigenous people of these islands and the political, economic, and cultural connections we have to Britain, and more recently the United States.”
“Our literary tradition is full of lonely individuals realising their destinies in a hostile physical environment.”
“Literature is an institution within a society, and as such it both reflects and projects an image of that society’s cultural identity.”
“They have re-examined the past, defined the present, and imagined the future in dealing with themes of cultural identity.”
“Maori writers in English have arisen to challenge the literary dominance of the Pakeha male.”
“dreams of a non-acquisitive, bicultural New Zealand, built on Maori aroha rather than Pakeha hubris, keep emerging”
“Hulme’s The Bone People ends with the recovery of the Mauri, the spirit of the land, which had been lost by the Maori in their internecine combat and ignored and desecrated by the Pakeha, and with the hope of ‘blending reality with dreams, melding Maori and Pakeha, weaving strange and hurtful pasts into strangely bright futures’.”
“The outpost of a sick and self-destructive Western culture, an ex-punitian society that has desecrated the islands...has almost destroyed an indigenous Maori culture, and has swallowed a false dream of affluence; but also a society that, if it can learn from its past errors, might have the potentiality to become something new, beyond its European origins.”
“For Maori artists, the affirmation of cultural roots has also been of vital importance...Keri Hulme discovered her Maori ancestors.”
