New Zealand Studies Network Event - Disciplining the Europeans: Earliest Maori engagement with pen, paper, school

New Zealand Studies Network Event

Disciplining the Europeans: Earliest Maori engagement with pen, paper, school

28th October 2011, 6pm
Room: 251 Malet Street, Birkbeck (Off Torrington Square)

This illustrated talk gives an account of how Englishmen were invited by Maori leaders – who were aware of the dangers of such an invitation – to establish the first school in New Zealand (the school was built in 1816). The talk will  focus on the earliest Maori instruction of the European teachers, the Maori desire for writing, and make new connections with England through a series of unpublished letters about the Industrial Revolution written by two young Maori men who stayed in Shropshire in 1818, and saw ‘the iron run down like water’.

The research was carried out by Professor Alison Jones and Professor Kuni Jenkins. Professor Jones will also talk about the possibilities and impossibilities in telling ‘other people’s stories’.

Alison Jones is a Professor of Education at the University of Auckland. She currently teaches and writes in the field of Maori-Pakeha (indigenous-settler) educational relationships. She and Kuni Jenkins have completed a book entitled Words Between Us: He Korero: First Maori-Pakeha Conversations on Paper, due from Huia Publishers, NZ, later this year.

Alison works on the Maori Missionary Register and on Tuai and Titere, and Maori/Pakeha Conversations in the 19th century