This Pakeha Life: An Unsettled Memoir

(Paperback)

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Description

This book is about my making sense here, of my becoming and being Pakeha. Every Pakeha becomes a Pakeha in their own way, finding her or his own meaning for that Maori word. This is the story of what it means to me. I have written this book for Pakeha - and other New Zealanders - curious about their sense of identity and about the ambivalences we Pakeha often experience in our relationships with Maori. A timely and perceptive memoir from award-winning author and academic Alison Jones. As questions of identity come to the fore once more in New Zealand, this frank and humane account of a life spent traversing Pakeha and Maori worlds offers important insights into our shared life on these islands.

Author Bio

Alison Jones is an educational researcher and a Professor in Te Puna Wananga, the School of Maori and Indigenous Education at the University of Auckland. Her first book with Kuni Kaa Jenkins, He Korero: Words Between Us - First Maori-Pakeha Conversations on Paper (Huia, 2011), won the Nga Kupu Ora Maori Book Awards, the PANZ Book Design Award, and the Best Book in Higher Education Publishing (Copyright Licensing New Zealand) in 2012. Tuai: A Traveller in Two Worlds, co-authored with Kuni Kaa Jenkins, won best illustrated nonfiction book at the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.