title: Communicating towards justice in ‘The Subaltern Voice’ (TSV)

authors: Humphries, Maria

subjects: subaltern

abstract: We write with a voice of the marginalised in mind, as both marginalised women scholars writing from a critical perspective on human organisation and as privileged human beings with concern for those more dangerously excluded from The Master’s House. The voice we raise does not plead for assimilation into circumstances as they are. It calls for radical change. Our ideas originate in research with Māori women accountants employed in organisations expressing commitment to Māori involvement. From that research we learned that aspiring to bicultural ways of being in a context prematurely deemed post-colonial is fraught with risks of co-option and unintentional collusion. Accordingly we are committed to further exposing neo-colonialism and to experiment with The Subaltern Voice (TSV) as a heuristic for this work. Asking what might be said in TSV that is different from what can be said in more commonly heard voices calling for inclusion has brought us to new thoughts about our own engagement with ‘The Empire’. Not only as it continues to colonise Māori locally and indigenous peoples globally, but from the myriad of places we take our positions to speak, sometimes ‘from the margins’ and other times from within the relative comforts of The Master’s House.

text: Communicating towards justice in ‘The Subaltern Voice’ (TSV) We write with a voice of the marginalised in mind, as both marginalised women scholars writing from a critical perspective on human organisation and as privileged human beings with concern for those more dangerously excluded from The Master’s House. The voice we raise does not plead for assimilation into circumstances as they are. It calls for radical change. Our ideas originate in research with Māori women accountants employed in organisations expressing commitment to Māori involvement. From that research we learned that aspiring to bicultural ways of being in a context prematurely deemed post-colonial is fraught with risks of co-option and unintentional collusion. Accordingly we are committed to further exposing neo-colonialism and to experiment with The Subaltern Voice (TSV) as a heuristic for this work. Asking what might be said in TSV that is different from what can be said in more commonly heard voices calling for inclusion has brought us to new thoughts about our own engagement with ‘The Empire’. Not only as it continues to colonise Māori locally and indigenous peoples globally, but from the myriad of places we take our positions to speak, sometimes ‘from the margins’ and other times from within the relative comforts of The Master’s House.

year: 2009

title: Tribal guns, tribal gunners : A study of acculturation by Maori of European military technology during the New Zealand inter-tribal musket wars

authors: Bentley, Trevor William

abstract: The Musket Wars were New Zealand’s longest and most costly war. Some 20,000 Maori perished in the raids, battles and sieges that convulsed the tribal societies during the 1820’s and 1830’s. The rise of powerful musket armies set in train forty major hekes or tribal migrations that emptied vast reaches of country by 1840, paving the way for European settlement that proceeded largely unopposed until the 1860’s.

There is little known about the nature of Maori warfare in this period for the Musket Wars have yet to receive the same kind of intense study currently being given by New Zealand historians to the Northern and New Zealand Wars. While other nations have conducted exhaustive research into the military history of their indigenous people, the Musket Wars remain New Zealand’s least known war.

The paucity of information on inter-tribal; warfare in this period is sourced in the fact that native warfare was actively discouraged by the missionaries, judged barbaric by most early visitors and regarded as an inferior form of warfare by settlers and English military men. Later nineteenth century writers perpetuated a distorted view of the Musket Wars as chaotic inter-tribal conflicts in which Maori fought and destroyed Maori. This distorted view has its origins in the two widely divergent systems of values that operated in nineteenth century New Zealand and in the dominance of Victorian ideas about race and colonialism.

This thesis is revisionist only in its attempt to demolish the entrenched colonial view of Maori musket warfare as disordered and exclusively Maori. It endeavours to fill specific gaps that exist in the research on this period by examining the role and purpose of the European gun trading enterprise in New Zealand and the extent of European involvement in Maori warfare. The thesis explores the deployment and effectiveness of European guns during the three phases of Maori warfare that characterise the period; predatory raiding, the great rakau-musket battles and the musket to musket conflicts of the 1830’s. The thesis also develops the theme that while the Musket Wars were shaped by non-Maori influences they were distinctly Maori in style.
While the bulk of evidence is provided by contemporary European observers and nineteenth century historians, every attempt has been made to provide a more balanced picture of Maori warfare by reporting Maori experiences wherever possible. The thesis consequently draws on current Maori oral testimony, the evidence of contemporary Maori eyewitness and the substantial and well developed body of written tribal history currently available.

The Musket Wars represent a fascinating but largely forgotten military age in New Zealand where Maori armies of unprecedented size employed powerful armaments of flintlock guns and ships cannon on long distance campaigns against remote enemies. This period has provided a unique opportunity to research the ways an indigenous warrior society acculturated European firearms technology in established tribal rituals and in warfare, independent of European military influences and in a purely Maori context. Most importantly the Musket Wars have provided the opportunity to examine Maori tactical developments through the critical stage between classical Maori warfare and the clashes with British and Colonial forces during the Northern war of 1845 and New Zealand wars of the 1860’s.

text: Tribal guns, tribal gunners : A study of acculturation by Maori of European military technology during the New Zealand inter-tribal musket wars The Musket Wars were New Zealand’s longest and most costly war. Some 20,000 Maori perished in the raids, battles and sieges that convulsed the tribal societies during the 1820’s and 1830’s. The rise of powerful musket armies set in train forty major hekes or tribal migrations that emptied vast reaches of country by 1840, paving the way for European settlement that proceeded largely unopposed until the 1860’s.

There is little known about the nature of Maori warfare in this period for the Musket Wars have yet to receive the same kind of intense study currently being given by New Zealand historians to the Northern and New Zealand Wars. While other nations have conducted exhaustive research into the military history of their indigenous people, the Musket Wars remain New Zealand’s least known war.

The paucity of information on inter-tribal; warfare in this period is sourced in the fact that native warfare was actively discouraged by the missionaries, judged barbaric by most early visitors and regarded as an inferior form of warfare by settlers and English military men. Later nineteenth century writers perpetuated a distorted view of the Musket Wars as chaotic inter-tribal conflicts in which Maori fought and destroyed Maori. This distorted view has its origins in the two widely divergent systems of values that operated in nineteenth century New Zealand and in the dominance of Victorian ideas about race and colonialism.

This thesis is revisionist only in its attempt to demolish the entrenched colonial view of Maori musket warfare as disordered and exclusively Maori. It endeavours to fill specific gaps that exist in the research on this period by examining the role and purpose of the European gun trading enterprise in New Zealand and the extent of European involvement in Maori warfare. The thesis explores the deployment and effectiveness of European guns during the three phases of Maori warfare that characterise the period; predatory raiding, the great rakau-musket battles and the musket to musket conflicts of the 1830’s. The thesis also develops the theme that while the Musket Wars were shaped by non-Maori influences they were distinctly Maori in style.
While the bulk of evidence is provided by contemporary European observers and nineteenth century historians, every attempt has been made to provide a more balanced picture of Maori warfare by reporting Maori experiences wherever possible. The thesis consequently draws on current Maori oral testimony, the evidence of contemporary Maori eyewitness and the substantial and well developed body of written tribal history currently available.

The Musket Wars represent a fascinating but largely forgotten military age in New Zealand where Maori armies of unprecedented size employed powerful armaments of flintlock guns and ships cannon on long distance campaigns against remote enemies. This period has provided a unique opportunity to research the ways an indigenous warrior society acculturated European firearms technology in established tribal rituals and in warfare, independent of European military influences and in a purely Maori context. Most importantly the Musket Wars have provided the opportunity to examine Maori tactical developments through the critical stage between classical Maori warfare and the clashes with British and Colonial forces during the Northern war of 1845 and New Zealand wars of the 1860’s.

year: 1997

title: The efficacy of path loss models for fixed rural wireless links

authors: Phillips, Caleb

subjects: computer science

abstract: In this paper we make use of a large set of measurements from a production wireless network in rural New Zealand to analyze the performance of 28 path loss prediction models, published over the course of 60 years. We propose five metrics to determine the performance of each model. We show that the state of the art, even for the “simple” case of rural environments, is surprisingly ill-equipped to make accurate predictions. After combining the best elements of the best models and hand-tuning their parameters, we are unable to achieve an accuracy of better than 12 dB root mean squared error (RMSE)—four orders of magnitude away from ground truth.

text: The efficacy of path loss models for fixed rural wireless links In this paper we make use of a large set of measurements from a production wireless network in rural New Zealand to analyze the performance of 28 path loss prediction models, published over the course of 60 years. We propose five metrics to determine the performance of each model. We show that the state of the art, even for the “simple” case of rural environments, is surprisingly ill-equipped to make accurate predictions. After combining the best elements of the best models and hand-tuning their parameters, we are unable to achieve an accuracy of better than 12 dB root mean squared error (RMSE)—four orders of magnitude away from ground truth.

year: 2011