Ko te Whenua te Utu / Land is the Price

Book excerpt: For more than half a century, Keith Sorrenson – one of New Zealand’s leading historians and himself of mixed Maori and Pakeha descent – has dived deeper than anyone into the story of two peoples in New Zealand. In this new book, Sorrenson brings together his major writing from the last 56 years into a powerful whole – covering topics 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. Throughout his career, Sorrenson has been concerned with the international context for New Zealand history while also attempting to understand and explain Maori conceptions and Pakeha ideas 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 colonisation, they became a minority in their own country. Ko te Whenua te Utu / Land is the Price is a powerful history of Maori and Pakeha in New Zealand.