what great doom lies in a land of settlers with never a soul at home

I have James Belich's email address. So of course I have to write him and ask him something...anything. But first I have to reread Paradise Reforged. Luckily I still have Bard's copy, which I am assuming I will have to give back before I can get my transcript. I am a shameless library criminal. James Belich is the author of The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict and two really wonderful, thorough, and hard-hitting historical volumes: Making Peoples (polynesian settlement to 1880) and Paradise Reforged (1880-2001). I don't even know who we would compare him to here.

I've been thinking a lot about my new piece which is just now in its pre-pre-development stages. It's that frustrating time at the beginning of a project where you have to hunt out the questions that you want to be answered by the process...find someway to start articulating a purpose before you can even start developing a research plan. And while I'm still overwhelmed by all the many possibilities, I think I know where to start.

In the last section of my senior project, "Becoming Tangata Whenua," I talked about a recent publication by the leader of the Green Party of New Zealand, Nandor Tanczos, about the need for a more tangible Pakeha indigeneity. He writes: "Until Pakeha are able to feel certain about our place here, we will continue to show signs of anxiety, defensiveness and intolerance, always underlined by the question 'when do I become tangata whenua?'" And it's really a good point. The politics surrounding the Treaty of Waitangi (might be compared to the politics around our constitution) delineate a bicultural New Zealand, tangata whenua (roughly translated as people of the land) and tangata tiriti (people of the Treaty). So it makes sense that Pakeha, people of the treaty, in the process of claiming indigenous status, are going to be making a discursive and emotional turn to the land. It's fairly straightforward. It begins to make perfect sense why more and more white New Zealanders moving out into the country to run self-sustaining farms or moving into communal eco-villages. While fundamentalist Christians have increasingly been pulling their kids out of school in the expanding American Bible Belt (Homeschooling), liberal middle and upper-class white New Zealanders have been opting out of the cities and suburbs of industrialized New Zealand and developing really interesting relationships to the physical landscape (Homesteading). It's really quite fascinating.

And the cool thing is that I've seen this kind of reclamation of cultural identity through the land played out historical fiction. And I made a lot of kinda shaky connections to a contemporary New Zealand reality based on what other academics were writing. I'm really excited to explore it on my own.