Being Pakeha now

the long version

In Being Pakeha Now, Michael King carries the cultural debate forward. While recognising and respecting the place of Maori in New Zealand, he argues that Pakeha too belong inescapably to this country and have no other home. Just as imported East Polynesian ingredients were eventually transmuted into Maori culture, so the attitudes and values carried by Europeans have been transformed here in interaction with forest, mountain and sea, and with Maori. They have coalesced into a second indigenous culture, that of Pakeha New Zealanders. The wooden church and the macrocarpa, King asserts, are as much a part of the spiritual and physical landscape of Aotearoa New Zealand as the meeting house and the cabbage tree. ..."--Back cover.