Questions and Sources

This like any good PhD project  is a significant endeavour with lots of questions that motivate research and the hope that there will be sufficient sources of information to adequately answer them.  Next week I will be visiting 10 museums in the Waikato and King Country region.  I will be looking for documentary sources, visual sources and objects that might shed light on my questions. 

 I will also peruse the official records of births, deaths and marriages, and the census, to see what they reveal about the living conditions of different communities. This may also give an indication of internal migration and transience. Among the early settlers were share-milkers, a particularly mobile population. I expect that such mobility had impacts on community building. How did changing demographics impact on cross-cultural relations? The opening of the aukati provided some opportunity for Māori, in terms of employment on the railways, improved land values and access to markets. Did this result in Māori becoming more ‘settled’? Raymond Firth’s early work on Māori economics and Andrew Francis’s more recent reports for the Waitangi Tribunal provide some useful analysis and a starting point for this part of my investigation. 

I expect that the opening of the aukati and the resultant change of demography and socio-political arrangements would have led to the shifting of other boundaries, including sociological, cultural, and psychological. I will investigate any shifts in Kīngitanga aspirations, and in the way kingite and kūpapa Māori saw themselves in this era. How did settlers arriving in the King Country impact on Māori identity and belonging? As well as moves that bring the races together, I expect to find a degree of racial separation and thus I will be asking questions about the retention of boundaries and the creation of new boundaries. In what ways did settlers separate themselves from Māori and vice versa? How did the interactions with and separation between the races affect the sense of identity and belonging of each?

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