Tourism, Space and Agency: Unpacking Māori Guides’ Creation of “Imagined Whakarewarewa”

Abstract In the late nineteenth century, the highlight of many Europeans’ visit to New Zealand's ‘thermal wonderland’ was a guided tour of Whakarewarewa – the Māori village and adjoining thermal belt. From the outset, the villagers controlled tourism on their land. However, the settler government was also keen to control tourism in the region. This paper examines the villagers’ resistance to the government's attempts to take over. While initially able to mitigate governmental interference, once they lost ownership of the lucrative thermal belt to the Crown, their physical control over this land receded. However, tourist guiding provided village women with the opportunity to enact another form of agency: to retain control over how the land was (re)presented to others. Indeed, the guides created, controlled and shared their representation of Whakarewarewa with large numbers of tourists. Ignoring the government's imposed ‘legal’ boundaries, the guides incorporated ‘sights’ from both Te Arawa and Crown-owned land, thus constructing imagined Whakarewarewa as a single ‘place.’ While the historiography often focuses on tourism as a tool of colonisation, this paper demonstrates that through guiding the women of Whakarewarewa challenged the supposed substantive sovereignty of the Crown and undermined the cultural processes of colonisation.