Modernization and Colonial Violence Theme Analysis

“Journey” follows the thoughts of a 71-year-old Māori man as he reckons with the modern development projects that white New Zealanders are bringing to the area where his family has lived for generations. The story occurs over the course of one day, as the narrator travels into the city to meet with planners about the future of the land his family owns. At the beginning of the trip, the narrator’s observations suggest that modern development has brought economic improvement to the area. However, the narrator’s memories of the landscape soon reveal that modernization is actually a continuation of white New Zealanders’ historic violence towards Māori land and communities. His meeting with the city planners confirms this conclusion, as the officials make thinly veiled racist remarks and threaten him with violence, and he ultimately leaves powerless to change the city’s plans to turn his land into a parking lot. “Journey” therefore argues that “colonization,” meaning the theft and occupation of Indigenous lands, did not end when New Zealand stopped being a British colony. Rather, colonization continues into the modern day.

At the beginning of the narrator’s trip into the city, the narrator’s observations allude to the fact that modern development has brought economic improvement to the area. As the narrator is leaving in the taxi, he notes that the shops in his town are “doing all right these days, not like before.” Here, the narrator remembers a time when the shops, and by extension the town’s entire economy, were doing worse than they are in the present. The narrator speaks to just how much worse the economy was in the past when he enters the railroad station in the city and remembers that the station used to be crowded with starving people, who came there “to do their dying.” In this memory, he is describing a time of economic depression so intense that many people in the area starved to death. The fact that people can now afford to support the butcher and fruit shops in his town indicates that the area’s economy has improved drastically from those “hard times.” Modern development seems to have had a large role in causing this economic improvement. Throughout his train ride into the city, the narrator observes a landscape that is undergoing rapid change, as the train passes many new houses and ongoing construction projects. Although he disapproves of these changes because they alter the landscape, he reasons that they are meeting many people’s basic needs for shelter, food, and transportation. He admits that “people [have] to have houses, [have] to eat, [have] to get from here to there.”

However, other details of the story suggest that the narrator has good reason to distrust the modernizing changes that have occurred in his area. Namely, through modernization, white New Zealanders have continued the colonial violence they began when they first settled the island, destroying Māori land and attempting to erase Māori communities. When Europeans began colonizing New Zealand in the 1800s, they occupied Māori land, often using violence and coercion to build European settlements and extract resources. Although New Zealand is no longer a colony, the Māori narrator’s experience of modernization demonstrates that this colonial violence is still ongoing in the modern day. For example, the train passes over a strip of land that used to be sea. Here, the narrator remembers harvesting pipis, a shellfish that is an important food source for the Māori people, before white New Zealanders filled this part of the harbor with land in order to make room for more cars. Long after the end of New Zealand’s colonial period, white New Zealanders are continuing to expand their access to traditional Māori lands and waters, preventing Māori people from engaging in culturally important practices in that area. The violence of these modernizing projects is clear in the narrator’s descriptions. As the train passes more construction projects, the narrator describes the construction machines “slicing the hills away.” When it rains, “the cuts will bleed for miles and the valleys will drown in blood.” With these violent verbs, the narrator implies that white New Zealanders continue to control the island through violence, just as they did historically.

 The same colonial violence is on display during the narrator’s meeting, when the city planners use anti-Māori racism and violent threats to prevent the narrator from defending his land against development. At the narrator’s insistence that his family live on their land together, the city planner responds that “you people all living in the same area [...] immediately brings down the value of your land.” Even though he is using the modern, respectful language of a bureaucrat, his racism towards Māori people is clear: he thinks of the Māori with the dehumanizing phrase, “you people." Furthermore, this position reveals the racism of the entire real estate system: the land’s value will decrease because white New Zealanders do not want a visible Māori presence on the land. In this way, the city planner demonstrates that, despite white New Zealanders’ attempts to appear respectful of the Māori, they are still attempting to erase Māori communities. Finally, after the narrator damages the official’s desk out of frustration at this overt racism, all three of the officials in the office threaten him with violence, suggesting that he should be institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital. The narrator returns home in defeat, unable to prevent the city from taking his land. Just like their colonial forefathers, the city planners use the threat of violence to appropriate Māori land and break up Māori families.

“Journey” complicates the idea of modernization in New Zealand. While modernization may have brought economic improvement compared to the recent past, it also perpetuates a longer history of colonization. By showing how white New Zealanders continue to steal land from the Māori through modernizing projects, Patricia Grace suggests that colonial violence did not end in the 1800s. Rather, colonial land theft is an ongoing process that continues to define New Zealand’s society in the present day.