Ko te Whenua te Utu / Land is the Price: Essays on Maori History, Land and Politics

For over a half century, New Zealand’s leading historian Keith Sorrenson—himself of mixed Maori and Pakeha descent—has dived deeper than anyone into the story of two peoples in New Zealand. From the origins of Maori (and Pakeha ideas about those origins), through land purchases and the King Movement of the nineteenth century, and on to twentieth century politics and the new history of the Waitangi Tribunal, Sorrenson brings together his major writing from the last 56 years into a powerful whole. Throughout his career, Sorrenson has been concerned with world views—to understand Maori conceptions of Kingitanga or Pakeha ideas of racial hierarchies from the inside. And he has been determined to tell the real story of Maori losses of land and their political responses as, in the face of Pakeha colonization, they became a minority in their own country. Ko te Whenua te Utu is a powerful history of Maori and Pakeha in New Zealand.