Exploring our joint intellectual heritage

Dame Anne Salmond at Old Government House. File picture

GISBORNE-raised Professor Dame Anne Salmond will receive funding of $685,000 over the next three years from the Marsden Fund to explore the intellectual history of Maori from 1900 to 1950.

Professor Salmond, of the University of Auckland, will lead a team of researchers who will investigate how the interweaving of Maori and European ideas, institutions and technologies generated ground-breaking programmes in the arts, sciences, law and economy.

The 1900 to 1950 period is seen as a crucial time in Maori history. Alliances between Maori and Pakeha leaders and scholars produced a series of globally unique socio-cultural experiments that transformed colonial relations and drew international attention to New Zealand.

Combining matauranga and toi Maori (Maori ancestral knowledge and art forms) with European knowledge, traditions and technologies opened the way for today’s Waitangi Treaty processes, along with cultural and economic revitalisation. Despite the impact of these initiatives at the time, and their relevance today, knowledge of these developments during the years 1900–1950 remains fragmentary.

Professor Salmond’s team will use museum and archival research, cutting-edge technologies and ancestral frameworks to explore the ideas generated by the pioneering initiatives.

Many of the scholarly taonga are scattered across institutions in New Zealand and internationally. Reassembling and celebrating them is an important part of the project.

The $685,000 will cover salaries (these include post-doctoral fellowships and postgraduate stipends where applicable), and overheads.

The Marsden Fund has announced total funding of $54 million, which has been distributed to 92 research projects.

Marsden Fund Council chair, Professor Juliet Gerrard, said the Fund encouraged New Zealand’s most talented researchers to explore their most exciting ideas.

The Fund is administered by the Royal Society of New Zealand on behalf of the government. Professor Salmond was born in Wellington and raised in Gisborne.

She is a trustee of both the Te Ha 1769 Sestercentennial Trust and the Longbush Ecological Trust and is the patron of Whinray Kiwi Trust, Motu. Professor Salmond was New Zealander of the Year in 2013.