Ta‘isi O.F. Nelson and Sir Maui Pomare Samoans and Māori Reunited

Abstract

This paper unearths the friendship between Samoan nationalist leader Ta‘isi Olaf Frederick Nelson and Ma ¯ori politician Sir Maui Pomare during the early period of New Zealand’s administration of Samoa. It examines the role this friendship played – especially as a line of communication between the Samoan protest movement or Mau, of which Nelson was a leader, and the highest echelons of the New Zealand government – in those years of fraught relations between Samoa and New Zealand. It also explores the significant historical connections that were made, or remade, through this friendship. The relationship between these two men brought Polynesian peoples together in new ways and also directly linked Parihaka, a 19th-century Ma ¯ori community known for its non-violent resistance against European colonialism, with the later Samoan Mau