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Whare Karakia: Maori Church Building, Decoration, and Ritual in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1834-1863. By Richard Sundt. (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2010, Pp. 240. $49.95)
This important new book chronicles the church architectural dimensions of early encounters between Maori, the indigenous Polynesian inhabitants of New Zealand, and Päkehä, or Anglo-European settlers. Its focus is the houses of prayer - whare karakia in Maori - built on New Zealand's North Island between c. 1839 and 1856 in a distinctive new style indebted both to indigenous building traditions and Anglican ecclesiastical patterns. The last remaining example of these churches burned in 1995.
Richard Sundt, professor in Art History at the University of Oregon, engages with an impressive variety of primary sources in his investigation of the history of this group of churches: sketches and (when available) photographs from the earliest periods of Mäori-Päkehä contact; published and unpublished missionary letters and reports; contemporary architectural plans; and the analyses of scholars working with extant whare karakia, as well as archeological materials excavated since their destruction. He charts gradual changes in missionary attitudes and Maori reactions during the five decades beginning in 1814, when the Reverend William Williams celebrated the first Christian...