Austronesian literary migration
The fourth issue of Maori literary journal ‘Ora Nui’ is a collaboration with Taiwanese creatives, featuring writing, art and academic studies by Aborigines or about Aboriginal issues
By Han Cheung / Staff reporter
“You were colonized a long time before us yet the pain never lessens. Even if the methods were just as brutal and last a longer time,” Maori writer Gerry Te Kapa Coates writes to Taiwanese Aborigines in the poem, Walking in Your Shoes We the Colonised Unite.
The indigenous peoples of Taiwan and New Zealand share a common Austronesian ancestry, and it’s widely believed that the Austronesian migration to New Zealand, Southeast Asia and the Pacific originated in Taiwan. There have been rich exchanges between the two groups in recent years, but Anton Blank, founder of Ora Nui, New Zealand’s only Maori literary journal, says the connection is still seldom discussed in his home country.