Steven Webster Author

The resistance of the Tūhoe Māori of New Zealand to colonisation began more than century before the final return of their sanctuary in the Urewera mountains by the Crown in 2014. In Volume I of A Separate Authority (He Mana Motuhake), Steven Webster provides an ethnohistorical reconstruction of the establishment in New Zealand of a rare case of Maori home-rule over their traditional domain, backed by a special statute and investigated by a Crown commission, the majority of whom were Tūhoe leaders. This relatively benevolent colonial policy enabled the Tūhoe to control the establishment of their vast Native Reserve in a way that entrenched their social organisation, particularly their  traditional deployment of kin-based power, while at once manipulating the power of the Crown to their joint advantage from 1894 to 1908.  In Volume II, Webster documents how this same form of resistance enabled the Tūhoe to withstand predatory Crown policies between 1908 and 1926, thereby retaining remnants of their ancestral sanctuary—which later became the basis upon which they won statutory control of the territory.

In both volumes of A Separate Authority (He Mana  Motuhake), Webster takes the stance of an ethnohistorian: he not only examines the various ways control over the Urewera District Native Reserve (UDNR) was negotiated, subverted or betrayed, and renegotiated during this time period, but also focuses on the role of Māori hapū, ancestral descent groups and their leaders, including the political economic influence of extensive marriage alliances between them. The ethnohistorical approach developed here may be useful to other studies of governance, indigenous resistance, and reform, whether in New Zealand or elsewhere.