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Rethinking oral history and tradition: an indigenous perspective
The trauma inflicted upon indigenous people by colonialism reaches into many realms. In some cases, the trauma reached the level of genocide and utter annihilation of the original inhabitants of some areas. At other times, the trauma also entailed the exoticization of native populations and the consignment of their ways of being and knowing to superstition and mythology. The aim of this book is to retrieve Ngati Porou’s oral history tradition from entanglement in Western post-colonial narratives. Writing from a post-modern and critical tradition, the author attempts to reconstruct in text the purpose and meaning of oral history in his tribe’s life in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The author is a professor of History at the University of Waikato. He is fascinated by the differences between Western and indigenous approaches to history and has pursued the decolonization of Maori oral history as his academic project. The author’s focus is deeply personal. One of his motives for embarking on an academic and historical career was his discovery of his own community’s oral histories concerning Maui and Paikea, which were lumped together with fairy tales like Cinderella and Rumplestilskin in the bookstores and libraries of his youth (8). As a student of history, he learned how Maori history was appropriated by colonial authorities and relegated to the realm of myth, fantasy and folklore (10). Mahuika questions the use of the term ‘oral history’ which is a Western academic term that in practice is a reduction of tradition into a recorded, transcribed interview. The practice of gathering that information was seen initially as ‘democratic’ reform of the discipline of history, but in practice duplicates colonial practices of reducing indigenous knowledge to superstition and mythology. For him, the correct term correlates to ‘what is handed down’, and is indivisible from the larger body of tradition from stories shared at funerals to what one learns from parents concerning subsistence. He argues that the holistic approach held by his community/tribe towards oral history is very different than the approach used by mainstream approaches (14).