This is the story of how you met your husband, who is a member of New Zealand's indigenous population. Can you tell us a little about who the Maoris are and where they came from?

The Maori people are Polynesians. They are closely related to Tahitians, Hawaiians, Cook Islanders, Samoans, Tongans, and the other Polynesian peoples of the Pacific. They are thought to have originated in Southeast Asia, and over the course of some few thousand years they island-hopped their way across the Pacific to central Polynesia. About 2000 years ago, in the final stage of one of the greatest migrations in human history, they pushed north to Hawaii, east to Easter Island, and south to New Zealand, across thousands of miles of open ocean in voyaging canoes. And then, for reasons that remain unknown, their long-distance voyaging came to an end. So that when the Europeans arrived in New Zealand in the seventeenth century, the Maoris had lived there in isolation for about a thousand years.

You're an American. How did you come to be in New Zealand?

I grew up in Boston and after attending college in New England I moved to the west coast, where I worked for a couple of years as a secretary. The jobs were so boring that I decided I'd better go to graduate school and somehow I got the idea of applying for a fellowship to study in Australia. I enrolled for a Ph.D at the University of Melbourne and I was about two years into the program when I made a trip back to the States to visit my family. On my return I stopped in New Zealand just to have a holiday and see what it was like.

And that was when you met your husband?

Yes, I was staying in a little town in the Bay of Islands and the night before I was supposed to leave I went over to the local pub. I was just hanging out there, talking to people, when suddenly this fight broke out between a white guy and a Maori. I was quite startled by it—it hadn't seemed like that sort of place—and I turned to the guy standing next to me and asked him what it was all about. That, as it happens, was the fellow I eventually married.

This is not the only fight in the book. The early encounters between Maoris and Europeans appear to have been quite violent. Can you talk a little about that?

One of the interesting things about Maoris is that, unlike a lot of Polynesians—Tahitians, say, or Hawaiians, whom we tend to think of as island beauties and dancers—Maoris have traditionally been described as extremely aggressive. Darwin, for example, called them "the world's most warlike people." And it is certainly true that they attacked the first Europeans they encountered. Cook, who was really the first navigator to get to know the Maoris in any degree, claimed that whenever they saw a European ship they would come out in their canoes and wave their weapons in the air and yell out: "Come here, come ashore, and we will kill you." But the Europeans were not shy of fighting either and, as most people are aware, it was the Maoris that suffered most in the long run.

What about the Maoris you encountered, and particularly your husband, what were they like?

One of the things I wanted to do with this book was to look at the past through the lens of the present, and to look at the present through the lens of the past. So, for example, the fact that Maoris (and particularly Maori men) were said to be notoriously fierce struck me as oddly ironic, given that my husband was such a gentle man. He is very large and strong and certainly could be dangerous if he wanted to, but he is remarkably even-tempered, even placid, good-natured, wonderful with children, very easy to be with.

But isn't that another stereotype about Polynesians, that they are laid-back?

Indeed it is. And I've thought a lot about how the different notions that Europeans brought with them into the Pacific, and those that arose from their earliest encounters, continue to influence the lives of people today. For example, there are times when my husband seems to exemplify the most obvious clichés, in his inability to plan for example, or his superstitiousness. But I also sometimes seem to myself like a caricature of "European" attributes, in my preoccupation with the future and my rigidly analytic point of view.

So what about your own background? Is that part of the story too?

I could hardly ask all these questions about my husband's people without turning them back upon myself. The point at which this became most interesting for me, however, was when we started having children.

There is a letter in the book addressed to your children in which you say, "in each of you is a little bit of the conqueror and the conquered, the colonizer and the colonized." What does this mean for you?

There are innumerable challenges to raising children in a cross-cultural marriage, and I was always afraid that they were being deprived of the benefits of full membership in either community. But what I really wanted them to understand was what they did have: which is an interesting story. It's much more than that, of course, it's a story of great complexity and sadness. My people dispossessed their father's people. Their father's people did their best to resist. But my people were too many for them and the consequences for the Maoris have been hard. And yet it seemed to me that they themselves are proof of its redemptive potential.

Your children are still too young to appreciate this, but what does your husband think about the book?

To be honest, he hasn't read it! Maybe that's an indication of nervousness on his part, or maybe it's laziness. But I'm inclined to think it's just a matter of trust.