![]() ![]() The songs, language and customs of the Te Ope had been “rubbished or ignored,” their homes taken from them. ![]() ![]() The situation involving Roimata and fellow villagers is similar to that of another community earlier. “Potiki” focuses on the conflict between the development interests of some whites and the rights of natives to their ancestral land. The literary form itself brings to life the past and celebrates the Maori heritage, exploring contemporary issues of native/white relations through the style of myth and structure of storytelling. Herein lie some of the themes of Grace’s narrative, such as the pervasiveness and significance of traditions in our lives and the need in the present to cherish the past and respect the future. The “centred being” reaches out toward the outer circles called “past” and “future.” “So the ‘now’ is a giving and a receiving between the inner and outer reaches, but the enormous difficulty is to achieve refinement in reciprocity, because the wheel, the spiral, is balanced so exquisitely.” “It was a new discovery to find that these stories were, after all, about our own lives, were not distant,” says Roimata, “that there was no past or future, that all time is a now-time centred in the being.” ![]()
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