We Are What We Write

In this wide-ranging collection, award-winning historian Aroha Harris brings together more than two decades of writing. The essays move across time and place: from the intimate spaces of whānau memory to Māori land struggles, the quiet determination of nurses, aunties and activists, and the futures our mokopuna might inherit.

Harris writes with characteristic warmth and intellectual clarity, returning always to a central conviction: that Māori history — foundational and continuous — connects past, present and people across time. 

Drawing together public lectures, essays, tributes and previously unpublished refl ections, the collection explores the tensions between policy and people, the reshaping of Māori–Crown relationships, and the everyday acts of remembering that shape Māori worlds.