Grad's guide to graduate admissions essays - Colleen Reding 2015

University of Minnesota - Department of anthropology
General graduate studies

I am interested in the production of public history in New Zealand and the ways it is constituted by and affects matauranga Maori, or Maori forms of knowledge. The Waitangi Tribunal, an official body convened for the purposes of redressing Maori grievances against the state, is the most visible participant in the production of these histories and investigates the colonial archive to construct official narratives of the history of Maori marginalization at the hands of the state. The historical narratives produced by the tribunal have been referred to as “revisionist history” by New Zealand historians and scholars writing on issues of Maori sovereignty and self-determination because of their penchant for judging the actions of historical actors according to modern sensibilities for the purposes of reconciling New Zealand’s colonial past with its contemporary image as a bicultural liberal nation state. I am interested in studying the histories produced by the Tribunal, as well as other forms of public history in New Zealand, to uncover the ways in which they have both transformed Maori historical consciousness and informed the development of a contemporary Maori identity. Furthermore, I want to investigate the influence of these histories on the machinery of advocacy the New Zealand state has developed for mediating Maori-state relations and the ways in which Maori assert their agency as political actors in these encounters as a result of their transformed historical consciousness.

Much of the literature devoted to the issues of Maori self-determination and state sponsored biculturalism has dealt with the political ramifications of these concepts, inquiring into their effects on the New Zealand constitutional order and Maori social policy. Rather than looking at the outcomes of Maori-state encounters and assessing their impact on the advancement of Maori self-determination, I propose to dig deeper and look at the historical origins of Maori-state relations and the epistemological orientations that structure these interactions. Anthropologists such as Thomas Abercrombie, Joanne Rappaport, Marshall Sahlins, and Carolyn Hamilton have written on the issue of indigenous historical consciousness and the ways that cross-cultural interactions transform the structures of historical memory. My project will engage New Zealand in this literature to add another dimension to the debate on biculturalism and Maori self-determination by looking at the ways that the production of public history both enables and constrains the advancement of these concepts within the New Zealand political sphere.

The project I completed at the University of Chicago provided me with a starting point for thinking about many of the issues this work will touch on. I focused on a specific report produced by the Waitangi Tribunal regarding a claim brought by a group of Maori known as Moriori. I found that the Tribunal’s process of historicizing the Moriori claim forced Moriori to inhabit an image of themselves rooted in Western social scientific categories for the purposes of achieving legal recognition. Thus, in order to capitalize on their status as indigenous and receive all of the rights and privileges that come with it, Moriori forms of historical consciousness and processes for identity formation were subjugated to Western practices of historicism and legal determination. Given the opportunity to expand upon and develop this project, I would hope to provide an account of Maori practices associated with historical memory and the way those practices have been transformed by participation in Tribunal proceedings. Ultimately, I am interested in how Maori historical knowledge has been transformed by the production of public history in New Zealand.

My interest in the South Pacific began during my undergraduate career, where I took advantage of the courses offered by the Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies at Georgetown University on topics such as New Zealand race relations and the politics of indigenous visual and performing arts. My interest in the intersections of anthropology and history also took shape during this time, and was enabled by the topic I chose for my BA thesis, which explored the cultural implications of colonial rule in Western Samoa. In researching this project, I made extensive use of the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau, which is a collection of documents relating to the history of the Pacific region. In the spring of 2007, I took a semester abroad at Auckland University where I was first exposed to the issues surrounding the Treaty of Waitangi that I later explored in my MA thesis by taking courses on New Zealand history and Maori culture. My graduate education at the University of Chicago allowed me to continue working on the interests I fostered at Georgetown while rounding out my training as an anthropologist through courses on anthropological and postcolonial theory and ethnographic fieldwork.

The opportunity to work with the anthropology department at the University of Minnesota will provide the resources I need to carry out this project. David Lipset’s work on the intersections of indigenous tradition and modernity in Papua New Guinea would benefit my project by providing me with the theoretical tools to investigate the development of Maori modernity, while the work of Jean Langford on the practice of historical memory in South and Southeast Asia aligns with my interest in the production of public history in New Zealand and its implications for the production of Maori culture. I would be delighted to work with either of these faculty members and feel that the department at the University of Minnesota provides the best fit for my regional and theoretical interests. I firmly believe that the resources and guidance I would receive there would allow me to successfully carry out my proposed project.