Picking up the narrative where Kāwai: For Such a Time as This left off, Monty Soutar’s second instalment in the series takes careful, treacherous steps into a bleeding world about to have its wounds ripped open by talons of change. The legacy of cyclical intergenerational vengeance and violence that defined the cultural milieu of pre-European Aotearoa takes a dramatic turn with the arrival of the musket, and the consequent collapse of the tikanga of close combat as an honoured if deadly social ritual: He patunga take kore tino kōhuru; Killing without motive is murder indeed.
This first in a cascade of blows will signal the beginning of the decline in the pre-European Māori way of life. Soutar starts with a complex weave of tradition and history and, one by one, teases out the threads comprising that weave to bring the reader to a deeper understanding of the world that was. He explores how those threads combined to form the weft of a society on the fringes of the globe, and how they frayed and came apart when the reach of colonialism extended so far that Aotearoa was no longer hidden from the rest of the world.
He turns those threads over, inviting the reader to rethink and reimagine the deep history of our country and the impact of those changes, taking us to a place and time where the old gods were retreating into the twilight of mythology. Each thread becomes its own story, to be woven back together in a new form, mostly recognisable but fundamentally altered, heavy with the ache of something lost, bright with the possibility of hope, shadowed with fear of the unknown. Along the way, he casts light into dark and secret places, where bones and spirits lie hidden.
The advent of muskets placed the power of fire and death into the hands of any iwi with the cunning, the connections and the economic capacity to possess them. In so doing, the musket undermined the foundations of Māori society, including the mana of the tohunga, upending their command of magic and their bond with the spirit world through its blind disregard for the sacred pageantry of war, death and the interweaving of these things with all that is tapu.
This in turn paved the way for European missionaries to bring stories of a different god, a new perspective on faith and the sanctity of life, and irrevocable change.
Soutar uses this narrative to explore the power of words, both the writings of men who claimed to be holy and the fractious ink of te tiriti, whose intentions remain contested to this day. By stepping back into the modern era and re-examining the space between, Soutar delves into the conflicts that arose from the sharing of these different writings, inviting us to cast fresh eyes over the ghosts of the past and the struggles of the present.
Once more, Soutar writes with an authenticity that speaks to a people in the crucible of change, facing the end of an era, torn and divided by the upheaval of their beliefs.
We as readers are left with a sense of unease, knowing that the coming years will be much harder than those already laid out on the page – in the toll of blood still to be paid and in the pressures Māoridom will face to retain their identity in the age of colonialism.
Kāwai: Tree of Nourishment, by Monty Soutar (Bateman, $49.99), is out now.
