From Chapter 2: Abominably Saucy

No Maori will tell you everything all at once, and Seven was no exception to this rule. And even when I thought I had some of the answers, I was aware that there were things I didn't understand. This feeling of not quite getting what was going on would dog me whenever I was in New Zealand. Indeed, it seemed only to grow stronger with each visit. I like to think this is how astronomers feel: with each new discovery of somthing curious—quasars, black holes, dark matter—the universe grows not more comprehensible but less, though the hope endures of a simple, unifying explanatory narrative.

But back in the beginning, in the pub, I had only the merest signs to go on: the offer of a light, the flicker of a smile. It was like a code that needed cracking, a language that with effort one might finally comprehend. I was a tourist who should have been on a bus back to where I came from. Instead I found myself in a house long after midnight with a bunch of Maoris I didn't know. That was the night I missed my bus and then I missed my plane.

From Chapter 2: Abominably Saucy

I have often thought of that night as a contact encounter. "Contact" is what we call it when two previously unacquainted groups meet for the very first time .... Contact, whatever else it is, is a matter of confusion. One side may have technological superiority; the other maybe have numbers on its side. But when they first come together, there is, for a limited time, a kind of parity, the parity of incomprehension. Each side constructs hypotheses, tries to assess the other's strength, to parse the other's utterances, to deduce the other's purpose and intent. Neither fully understands what's happening and neither can say with confidence what's going on.

The absolute truth of this, and its applicability even to contemporary situations, was impressed upon me that evening after I left the Kerikeri pub. My bus to Auckland had been scheduled for ten o'clock, but somehow ten had come and gone and, before I knew it, the pub was closing and there I was with all my gear and no place to go. "You can come with us," said Seven. And so I did.

From Chapter 7: A Natural Gentleman

The idea of a Noble Savage may sound condescending to modern ears, but by eighteenth-century standards it was the highest kind of praise .... Perhaps I should hardly have been surprised, then, that when Seven arrived in Boston, he attracted a similar sort of admiration. Far from being snubbed or patronized, everywhere we went he was the belle of the ball. People peppered him with questions about who he was, where he'd grown up, what kind of foods they ate in New Zealand, what languages they spoke. Women, especially, gravitated to him, though he was also popular with men. And while they sometimes seemed to be at cross-purposes in their conversation—it was often hard for people in Boston to tell what Seven was thinking and equally difficult for him to decode them—they appeared to be delighted with one another.

From Chapter 7: A Natural Gentleman

I had worried that, in some way, Seven would be unacceptable, or that somone would be rude to him, or that they would all be so bafffled by one another that everyone would just give up. He, after all, had little idea how things were done among people like my parents and could no more have been expected to know what passed for good manners among them than they would have known the protocol for being invited onto a Ngati Rehia marae. But I gave them all too little credit. My family was genuinely interested in him and he acquitted himself admirably. Whether by temperament, training, tradition, or some happy combination of all three, he appeared, as Fanny Burney once put it, "in a new world like a man [who] had all his life studied the Graces ... politely easy & thoroughly well bred!"

"A natural gentleman," said my mother.

"Errghh!" said my brother, rolling his eyes.

"Oh, dear. Well, you know what I mean."

From Chapter 12: Once Were Warriors

It is a "basic Pakeha [European] misunderstanding," writes the philosopher John Patterson, "that deep down, Maori and Pakeha are very similar." In fact, he argues, deep down, Maoris have very different ways of understanding the world. Some of these ways may look familiar—Maori respect for the natural world may look, for example, like environmentalism—but they stem from a quite different system of understanding. The basis of Pakeha concern for the environment is essentially utilitarian—we value the earth for what it can give us—while the Maori view is, at least originally, genealogical. They value the earth because it is effectively their kin....

Maori values are tribal values: what is good for the group is good for the individual, whereas the reverse does not necessarily hold true. In the ideal Maori community, there is a sharing of both resources and obligations. Sacrifice is often demanded; loyalty is highly prized. Competitiveness—unless in sports—is generally discouraged, while greed and selfishness are openly despised. The result is a society in which everyone is cared for, but also one in which individual achievement is the exception rather than the norm. One consquence of this is that, from the Pakeha point of view, Maoris often look unambitious, while Pakehas, seen from the Maori perspective, look ruthless, isolated, and cold.

I had seen, firsthand, how this worked in Boston, where Seven's lack of ambition struck my family as, well, odd.

"What does he want to do?" my father would ask me, meaning, what future did he envision, what plans did he have, what ladder did he see himself ascending?

"I don't really know, Dad. I'm not sure he wants to do anything at all."

I suppose this dynamic must have played itself out in reverse when it came to Seven's family, and I sometimes wondered if they saw me as hopelessly self-absorbed and striving, dragging my family around the world in the pursuit of some crackpot career. But it didn't help me one little bit to see both sides of the problem. When it came to Kura [Seven's sister]—or any of my own children, for that matter—I could never resist the imperatives of my own upbringing. They could lie on the floor and watch monster trucks all they liked, so long as they were living with me, I was going to make sure they went to school.