Between 1942 and 1945 more than two million servicemen occupied the southern Pacific theater, the majority of whom were Americans in service with the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. During the occupation, American servicemen married approximately 1,800 women from New Zealand and the island Pacific, creating legal bonds through marriage and through children. Additionally, American servicemen fathered an estimated four thousand nonmarital children with Indigenous women in the South ...

From whalers and traders marrying into Maori families in the early 19th century to the growth of interracial marriages in the later 20th, Matters of the Heart unravels the long history of interracial relationships in New Zealand. It encompasses common law marriages and Maori customary marriages, alongside formal arrangements recognized by church and state, and shows how public policy and private life were woven together. It also explores the gamut of official reactions—from condem...

In/visible Sight is a fascinating exploration of a little-known part of our history: the lives of part-Māori, part-Pākehā New Zealanders in the nineteenth century.Focussing on interracial intimacy between Ngāi Tahu and Pākehā settlers, it explores how intermarriage played a key role in shaping colonial encounters. As Ngāi Tahu sought to fight the alienation of their land and protect their natural resources, marriage practices and kinship networks became an increasingly important way to con...

A transformative account of Māori society during World War II.Te Hau Kāinga unveils the untold stories of the Māori home front during World War II, exploring how this pivotal conflict reshaped Māori communities, culture, and identity. Through vivid narratives and meticulous research, the authors shed light on the challenges and triumphs of Māori whānau as they navigated wartime mobilization, economic shifts, and social change.Discover how Māori lea...

Over the course of World War II, two million American military personnel occupied bases throughout the South Pacific, leaving behind a human legacy of at least 4,000 children born to indigenous mothers. Based on interviews conducted with many of these American-indigenous children and several of the surviving mothers, Mothers’ Darlings of the South Pacific explores the intimate relationships that existed between untold numbers of U.S. servicemen and indigenous women during the war ...

As modern European empires expanded, written language was critical to articulations of imperial authority and justifications of conquest. For imperial administrators and thinkers, the non-literacy of “native” societies demonstrated their primitiveness and inability to change. Yet as the contributors to Indigenous Textual Cultures make clear through cases from the Pacific Islands, Australasia, North America, and Africa, indigenous communities were highly adaptive and created novel,...

In contrast to much scholarship on cross-cultural encounters, which focuses primarily on contact between indigenous peoples and ’settlers’ or ’sojourners’, this book is concerned with migrant aspects of this phenomenon – whether migrant-migrant or migrant-host encounters – bringing together studies from a variety of perspectives on cross-cultural encounters, their past, and their resonances across the contemporary Asia-Pacific region. Organised thematically into sections focusing on ’imper...

Understanding the history of care requires attention to personal narratives, such as a Maori grandmother's story, a Rarotongan leader's concept of duty to her people, or the sense of service that drove a long-term social worker. The case studies examined focus on the everyday nature of care operating across domestic, institutional and political spaces, and build upon areas of strength in women's history with its interest in family, motherhood, health, welfare, education and employment.