Dystopic pasts: Missionaries, Māori and literacy sense-making in nineteenth-century New Zealand

Abstract

Sometimes insights into the future, including possible dystopic futures, may be gleaned from examining dystopic pasts. Early European settlement in Aotearoa New Zealand, including the arrival of new diseases for which the people had no defences, created many dystopic outcomes for Māori. However, Māori realized how European technologies, including literacy, could be usefully adopted and adapted. By the early 1800s, probably more Māori were print literate in the Māori language than Pākehā (European New Zealanders) were literate in English. Different literacies, including sign and recitation, were employed within the intensely oral lives of Māori. While the exceptional memorization skills of pre-European Māori would gradually decline as conventional forms of literacy became embedded, a new synthesis of literacy and orality developed. Literacy did not prevent colonization’s dystopic outcomes, but it became a technology that Māori selectively modified and was influential in their retaining agency in creating their future.