The Politics of ‘Periodical Counting’

Race, Place and Identity in Southern New Zealand

Bibliographic Data

ID23712084
AuthorsAngela Wanhalla (0000-0003-0882-7072, corresponding author)
Year2010
Pages198-217
Publication date2010-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueMaking Settler Colonial Space (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9780230277946_13
OpenAlexW2501077935
ISBN9780230277946
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited14

The historic relationship between Ngāi Tahu, the predominant Māori tribe of the South Island of New Zealand, and the census-taking process over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was one fraught with material, spatial and political implications for the tribe. 1 Census taking provided evidence for the erasure of Ngāi Tahu land ownership and territorial rights, while enumerators also reconstructed the tribal population as ‘white’. ‘Periodical counting’ played an important role in the progress of settler colonialism, as well as the spread of colonial authority, and of course, underpinned the production of knowledge so crucial to the imperial project of expansion. Indeed, the ‘census represents a model of the Victorian encyclopaedic quest for total knowledge’. 2 But the gathering of statistics involved more than the production of knowledge to fix, bound, control and intervene; periodical counting also pointed to erasures upon many indigenous populations in former colonies through law and violence. Throughout the nineteenth century the census was resisted, engaged with, and sometimes accommodated by indigenous peoples in settler societies. Indeed, the census was not merely just an act of counting people. As this chapter explores, it also embodied indigenous resistance to settler colonialism, as demonstrated by Ngāi Tahu leaders during the Middle Island Native Land Claims Commission (1890). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Census · Colonialism · Ethnology · Genealogy · Geography · Identity (music) · Indigenous · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · Tribe · Australian History and Society · Demography · Ecology · History · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Law · New Zealand Economic and Social Studies