This is an enormously detailed and densely argued history of the colonisation of New Zealand, as told from a Māori perspective. As such, it is very much a history of injustice, of exploitation and marginalisation and land grabs, but it is also, as the latter chapters of the book especially make clear, a history of resistance - and an increasingly successful resistance at that.

Walker is an academic and it shows - it took me a long time to slowly make my way through this, but it was well worth the effort. It's the last from a list of ten books from the Spinoff Anti-Racist Reading List for New Zealanders and, not gonna lie, it's taken me years to get through those ten books. They are admittedly challenging books, both on a moral level - the history of racism in this country is appalling, and one which privilege has often allowed me to ignore - and often on a technical level as well, as they frequently grapple with concepts and jargon which are unfamiliar to me (I had to do a lot of explanatory googling with Linda Tuhiwai Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies, for example, not knowing anything about anthropological methods). So, a long reading journey, but absolutely worthwhile. I feel as if I have come away from it with a better understanding of my own country, and the history of injustice that exists here - a history that still very much impacts on the present and the future.