Beschreibung:
<jats:p> This article examines the land and its biota as actors in colonialist and postcolonialist processes in Aotearoa-New Zealand. It provides a cultural analysis of Monday’s warriors, Maurice Shadbolt’s novel of cultural encounter between Maori prophet Titokowaru and nineteenth-century colonials, Herbert Guthrie-Smith’s environmental history Tutira: the story of a New Zealand sheep station, and the author’s ethnographic fieldwork in the South Island pastoral high country. These narratives of Aotearoa provide an opportunity for a productive convergence of modes of discursive analysis and detailed observation. They suggest how textual, historical and ethnographic analysis can examine the significance of land and place in relation to biogeophysical and cultural components. The article argues that introduced grass as a material commodity with social value, and as an instrument of colonial domination and its accompanying agricultural conquest, is an ecological signifier through which identity can be emplaced and land embodied for pakeha and Maori actors. Thinking through grasslands better enables us to consider the mixed authenticities of place and identity. This works as a device for revealing the twisted entanglements within emergent postcolonialism, as Aotearoa, like other settlement nations, collectively invents itself and discovers that there is no fixed place to which one can return. </jats:p>