I-ngā-rāo-mua

Abstract

‘Time’ or temporal time and how it shapes the past and Māori oral tradition is an area that New Zealand scholars have yet to fully examine, although Anne Salmond and Judith Binney have both noted it as an issue for further discussion. In 1983, Salmond’s article ‘The Study of Traditional Maori Society: The State of the Art’ outlined the issues of time for Māori, but within the wider ambit of matauranga Māori. Salmond’s article underpins much of the discussion that dominates the Māori academic world today, namely: what are the epistemological foundations of matauranga Māori? When Salmond said, ‘Approaches which draw on both Maori and European ways of interpreting the past seem likely to be far more productive than a strategy based on epistemological arrogance’, she established a model for historians to use in their attempts to see the past and write history. Binney’s concern was primarily a matter of managing the problems that Salmond outlined, so that much of her work articulated not just another perception of the past, but an altogether different world view. In 1987 she gave us the intriguing thought, ‘Maori oral history is not merely another source of information, nor even of perception. The purposes of the oral narrative tradition are to establish meaning for events, and to give a validation for the family’s and the group’s particular claims to mana and knowledge’. Unfortunately Binney did not elaborate further on this point, not because of her tragic death in 2011, but because she was more concerned with mapping the fault-lines than ran between each culture and establishing clear signposts as to where the space of difference lay.