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Diggers, Strangers, and Broken Men Environmental Prophecy and the Commodification of Nature in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People laura wright Late in The Bone People (first published in 1985), New Zealand author Keri Hulme’s only novel to date, the Maori elder Tiaki Mira imparts a prophecy that requires that he “wait until the stranger came home or until the digger began planting, or until the broken man was found and healed”(360)beforehecandie.Thefictionalfulfillmentofthisprophecy attheendofthenovelisachievedwhenthethreeprotagonists,Kerewin, Joe, and Simon—previously separated from one another through acts of violence—come together to reinvent and reinterpret the concept of family and, in so doing, generate a multicultural national model for the future of Aotearoa. My reading of this familial reconstitution requires an understanding of the ways that Hulme’s narrative problematizes and de-essentializes the ostensibly ecofeminist Kerewin’s signification as an “Earth Mother” figure in order to engage in an act of postcolonial environmental mythmaking. The resultant myth engages traditional Maori legend in a way that heals the cultural “dis-ease” (Wilentz 127) that has resulted from a history of indigenous cultural repression and environmental destruction, and far from idealizing an assumed inherent Maori environmentalism, Hulme’s novel holds Maori and white populations equally responsible for the compromised landscape that they share. The peoples of New Zealand, the narrative suggests, must form a new identity in order to move forward and care for the land and its creatures. In my reading, that care is initially ecofeminist, originating with Kerewin and later influencing Joe, who will, one hopes, pass it along to future Maori and Pakeha generations, starting with the transnational Simon. According to Janet Wilson, “In New Zealand since the Seventies, writers who have adapted intertextual strategies have focused more on myths and legends of the Maori oral tradition, and those of the Pakeha [white] New Zealand literary tradition than on European texts of the colonial encounter” (271). Margery Fee claims that the story of the bone diggers, strangers, and broken men 65 people “cannot, ultimately, be told straightforwardly because the text is attemptingtoreworktheoldstoriesthatgovernthewayNew Zealanders . . . think about their country” (54). This lack of straightforward narrative is manifest in The Bone People through the text’s layered spiral nature, a narrative strategy that Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, in Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures, claims is indicative of “a trope that symbolizes dynamic interrelation between the temporal and spatial” (162). In her study Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific: Reading History and Trauma in Contemporary Fiction, Susan Y. Najita describes the narrative’s spiral shape as indicative of Maori conceptions of time: “as in Hawaiian notions of time, the Maori past (mua) occurs in front and the future (muri) occurs behind” (100). Both NajitaandDeLoughreyacknowledgethe“layered design ofwhakapapa, Maori genealogy” (Najita 99) as it pertains to the overlapping of past, present, and future in Hulme’s novel, and DeLoughrey points to the connection between whakapapa and a Maori environmental ethos that emerged in the 1970s: “scholarly interest in whakapapa as a methodology and metonym for identity emerged in the late 1970s, in a large part due to Maori land and resource claims against the breached Treaty of Waitangi” (Routes 166). The “rhizomorphous system of relation” (164), she claims, establishes relationships between all life forms and inanimate matter. The Bone People’s engagement with whakapapa allows the text to challenge and complicate binary distinctions—Maori or Pakeha, linear or nonlinear—which were still in place as New Zealand moved toward a realization of itself as a bicultural nation, a place shaped by both indigenous and colonial influence, but a place, in the 1980s world of Hulme’s narrative, in which the nature of Maori and Pakeha identity were dependent upon ancestral, “blood”-based percentages.1 According to Philippa Mein Smith in her Concise History of New Zealand, New Zealand took until the 1990s to consider itself a “multicultural” nation: “The country first had to grow more diverse before acknowledging cultural difference. . . . The multicultural idea transferred belatedly, from the 1980s in law and policy, and effectively from the 1990s” (242). The law and policy of which Smith speaks include the Waitangi Tribunal, which formed in 1975, and the 1985 Treaty of Waitangi Amendment Act, which allowed the tribunal to investigate land claims dating from 1840, when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed (Howard 199).2 Through the prophecy of the digger, stranger, and broken man, The Bone People generates a myth that shapes New Zealand’s national identity and, per- [18.117...

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