Terra in Our Mist

Description

Terra in Our Mist examines the persistence of state violence against Ngāi Tūhoe – the illustrious People of the Mist – whose ancestral homeland of Te Urewera stands as one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most storied and contested landscapes. It focuses on a pattern of police violence: the 2007 anti-terror raids, codenamed Operation Eight, which centred on Ruatoki – one of the principal valleys of Te Urewera – and subsequent operations in 2012, 2014 and 2016. The book asks why such actions continue, and what they reveal about the unfinished nature of colonisation today.

These events are situated within a longer whakapapa (genealogy) of colonial engagement: a history of invasion, confiscation and control stretching back to the nineteenth century. Putting Indigenous scholarship in conversation with Michel Foucault’s ideas on power and the state, the book explores how differing understandings of land – terra, a space claimed through violence, and whenua, a living ground of ancestral belonging – continue to shape the relationship between Tūhoe and the state.

The police raids are shown not as isolated excesses, but as contemporary expressions of a colonial logic that has long sought to discipline Indigenous peoples and their sovereignties. By drawing these connections, Terra in Our Mist argues that the state’s claim to sovereignty depends on periodic re-enactments of force upon Indigenous communities. Blending ethnography, visual narrative and political critique, this book traces how the ground itself becomes a site of contest: over history, authority and the meaning of place in an unsettled world.