Oral Traditions and Modern Histories of Ngai Tahu

The story of Ngai Tahu is a fascinating example of a small impoverished community of tribal members who by the 1970s had been reduced to a membership of less than 400. Within two decades this tribe had emerged as one of the largest corporations in the South Island with a tribal membership of over 40,000. It is the largest land-owner in the South Island with significant interests in fisheries and tourism. Explaining how and why this happened will be one of the core themes of this course. The first part of this course will look at the oral traditions and myths of Ngai Tahu with a particular emphasis on narrative templates and how these templates are reproduced in the oral traditions that outline the tribe's migration from Wellington to the South Island. The second part of the course will look at Ngai Tahu's movement from its pre-contact era to initial contact with early explorers, the settler government and the subsequent land transactions that ran from 1844 to 1864. The course will then finish with an overview of how Ngai Tahu and the Crown negotiated on the largest Treaty settlement packages in the nation's history.