Potiki

Patricia Grace was born and raised in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. The daughter of a Māori father and a Pakeha (a White New Zealander descended from the original colonists) mother, Grace never became fully fluent in Māori because the language was, during her childhood, only spoken at formal events. Grace attended Catholic primary and secondary schools, where she experienced anti-Māori bias and prejudice from her teachers. She subsequently attended college to become a teacher, but she also started writing around the same time. She published a short story titled “The Dream” in 1966, and her first novel, Waiariki, in 1975. Although her work was widely praised, it wasn’t until the mid-1980s that she quit teaching to focus entirely on writing. Grace has published fiction and non-fiction for both children and adults—a total of more than 20 books—and her body of work focuses on New Zealand and in particular centers Māori culture, history, and experience. She has won no fewer than a dozen awards and recognitions for her books or for her career as a whole, including the New Zealand Award for Fiction for Potiki (1987), the Kiriyama Prize for Fiction for Dogside Story (2001), the Neustadt International Prize for Fiction for distinguished career, and Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her community service work, which includes a focus on justice and support for Māori communities. Grace was married to fellow writer Kerehi Waiariki Grace, with whom she had seven children, until his death in 2013. 

The Māori characters in Potiki live in the long shadow of the colonization of New Zealand by European powers. Dutch explorers first arrived and mapped the island nation’s shape in the late 1600s, but it wasn’t until the late 18th century that Europeans—first traders and whalers and later missionaries—started to arrive in numbers. New Zealand was made a British colony in 1840 with the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi between the British Crown and several hundred Māori representatives. Written in English and translated into the Māori language (but in ways that worked to obscure the full scope of the British government’s colonial ambitions), the treaty formally made the Māori into British subjects and granted them the legal possession of their own lands while placing them under the authority of Queen Victoria. The British government largely ignored the rights given to the Māori people in the treaty; seizures of Māori lands began in the 1840s and lasted for more than a century. The story of the Te Ope community in the novel echoes the history of the Tainui people, whose land was appropriated by the government for an airstrip during WWII and was subsequently turned into a golf course. Māori activists occupied the golf course from 1975-1983 and brought complaints to the Waitangi Tribunal, a body established in 1975 that investigates claims of treaty violation. The Tainui people were partially successful in their protest and legal action, finally receiving some (but not yet all) of its land back in the 1980s.

When Patricia Grace began publishing her in the 1960s, Māori writers were just beginning to come to widespread attention on the New Zealand literary scene. With her focus on Māori identity and issues, Grace’s work naturally fits alongside that of other important Māori writers, including Witi Ihimaera, who published the first Māori short story collection (Pounamu, Pounamu) and first novel (Tangi) in English. Ihimaera’s work, including Tangi, focuses on the lives of modern Māori people and the social and cultural impacts of colonization in New Zealand. Grace’s own body of work focuses on similar themes, especially the concept of whanau or extended family and community. In this vein, her 1992 novel Cousins explores the lives of three female cousins navigating 20th century life as Māori women, while Dogside Story (published in 2001) explores a community grappling with encroaching tourism and all that it entails while trying to preserve the familial ties within the community itself. In its focus on the challenges of navigating Indigenous identity in the context of colonial history, as well as its emphasis on the importance and complication of family bonds, Potiki also resonates with works such as the Indigenous Canadian Eden Robinson’s 2000 Monkey Beach. Potiki also contains many allusions to Māori myths and legends. Some of these take the form of tales retold directly by Roimata or Toko. Others are more tangential, such as the many allusions to the life of the Māori trickster figure, Maui, in Toko’s life. Like Maui, Toko was born prematurely and rescued from the sea shortly afterwards. Toko’s big fish story also resembles an episode from Maui’s life in which Maui outfishes his brothers.