Keywords
Māori Latter-day Saints
Abstract
Selwyn Kātene has again assembled twelve essays written by the descendants of famous Māori Latter-day Saints. This volume flows from a revival of interest in the ground and content of the faith of early Māori Saints that began in the late 1990s. In various ways the essays in this volume add to and amend what has previously been known about what began unexpectedly on Christmas Day in 1882, when the first group of Māori joined the Church of Jesus Christ. Not only did the Māori have Seers who opened the way, some of those elite Māori men, who had been initiated into Māori esoteric knowledge of divine things, also found that their temple endowment fit rather snugly with their previous initiation ceremonies. Unlike other Christian missionaries, Latter-day Saint missionaries did not see the Māori as primitive heathens, and Māori saw in the restored gospel crucial elements of their own deeper understanding of divine things. Latter-day Saint missionaries were seeking to liberate Māori from the soul- destroying vices brought to them or enhanced by British colonization, while relishing the most noble elements in the Māori world.
Recommended Citation
Midgley, Louis
(2019)
"The Māori Latter-day Saint Historical Narrative: Additions and Amendments,"
Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship: Vol. 32, Article 11.
Available at:
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/interpreter/vol32/iss1/11
