Keywords
Māori, stairway to heaven, missionaries
Abstract
Jason Hartley’s book manifests a passion for alleviating the problem of Māori surging into the prisons of Aotearoa/New Zealand2 by restoring their old, traditional religious ethos and the social control that hinges on the recovery of the old belief that they are potentially noble children of God. In setting out his own disappointing discovery of the roots of both a growing problem and what he believes is the solution, he describes how he came to learn the arcane moral teachings, or old stories, that once buttressed Māori social order. For Latter-day Saints, he also demonstrates that for some Māori, despite much degradation, the Heavens are still open, just as they were when Latter-day Saint missionaries first encountered a people prepared for them and their message by their own seers, thus also implicitly challenging recent efforts to downplay or explain away the old stories as mere embellishments, wishful thinking, or an implausible founding mythology.
Recommended Citation
Midgley, Louis
(2014)
"The Māori Stairway to Heaven,"
Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship: Vol. 12, Article 8.
Available at:
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/interpreter/vol12/iss1/8
