The Impact of Family Memory on the Descendants of a Missionary-Settler Family

Abstract

Henry and William Williams came to New Zealand as missionaries to Maori in the 1820s. Today many of their descendants still believe the family has a special relationship with Maori. Life narrative interviews were analysed to explore the ways in which this belief plays out in the lives of 5th and 6th generation descendants. Many simply believe they have greater empathy with Maori than most Pakeha, but for some it has greater significance, providing them with a sense of identity and belonging. The family myth is shown to act synergistically with the modern ideology of biculturalism and other cultural myths.

Heather’s Homestead/Marotahei: The Invasion of the Waikato and Ways of Knowing Our Past in Aotearoa New Zealand

“…While the story of the Heathers, once fully realised, speaks to the micro-level effects of colonisation, and their lives exemplify a very important kind of colonial transition from shared to separated worlds, there is a second dynamic that requires reflection: how we know these stories and how the search for family histories shapes our understanding of a shared or separated past and has the potential to enact its own small moments of de-colonisation. These are the kinds of questions being wrestled with by both Pākehā and Māori researchers, including the current crop of historians examining Pākehā family histories-most recently Green (2019), Moodie (2019) and Johnson (2019)-who are using family history as a lens to understand deeper colonial and gender dynamics, alongside Māori historians such as Mahuika and Kukutai (2021) who are arguing for a different ontological lens for enquiry into family pasts, placing relationality into the foreground of enquiry and in doing so creating a fuller understanding of our ancestors and the indigenous/colonised worlds that they experienced. This body of work in Aotearoa New Zealand is highly informative for the pursuit of Critical Family Histories as a mode of enquiry, and the special dynamics of critical family history at key frontiers in the Antipodes are now beginning to be brought into clearer view through the work of Bell (2020), Shaw (2021) and Morris (2021) in recent issues of Genealogy.…”

“…For Pākehā family histories, these wider historical discussions are well-exemplified by a 2019 Special Issue of the Journal of New Zealand Studies including useful articles/essays written by Green (2019), Moodie (2019) and Johnson (2019) that all inform some of the argument in this article.…”