





































Ecclesial Futures
2024 – Volume 5 – Issue 2

108
Ecclesial Futures – DOI: 10.54195/ef19878

B O O K  R E V I E W

DOI: 10.54195/ef19878

Shaw, Richard. 2024. The Unsettled: Small 
Stories of Colonisation

Auckland: Massey University Press
ISBN 978-1-99-101668-3

Reviewed by Steve Taylor

A few years ago, I booked myself in for a spiritual retreat. The five-day experience 
offered a focus on land and place and the opportunity to hike parts of Rakiura 
National Park, a nature reserve park located on Rakiura/Stewart Island at the bottom 
of Aotearoa, New Zealand.

A few hours into a day walk, I encountered a sign “Māori Land. Access courtesy of 
landowners.” A Google search once the retreat ended revealed that this particular 
part of Rakiura National Park was owned by indigenous people, who had generously 
agreed to allow walking across their land.

The words of the sign have left me pondering my hermeneutical location. The walk 
I had made was a privilege. The beauty, birdsong and access were a gift courtesy of 
another.

The single sign is part of a larger story. I read, write and work as a New Zealand 
Pākeha. I am part of a history that has been unavoidably and powerfully shaped 
by my ancestors’ actions as they migrated from Great Britain to Aotearoa New 
Zealand during the nineteenth century. How do I respond to what is privilege? Can 
the systems that support local Christian communities today be disentangled from 
the actions of my ancestors, who profoundly reshaped Aotearoa New Zealand? What 
does it mean for me to write and think about the development and transformation of 
local Christian communities “courtesy” of another?

The Unsettled, by Richard Shaw, provides an excellent resource for exploring 
these questions. The book opens with a photograph of Shaw’s great-grandfather 
surrounded by his rugby team, the Armed Constabulary Coastal Rugby team. The 



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date is 1881, and the photograph was taken a few kilometres from the Parihaka Pā, 
which the Armed Constabulary invaded in 1881. Around 1,600 men were impris-
oned without trial. Women were raped. Houses were torn down and crops were 
destroyed. Then, in the years that followed, Shaw’s great-grandfather became the 
owner of three farms in the area.

Richard Shaw describes growing up with stories of milking and rugby, but never of his 
great-grandfather’s involvement in the invasion of Parihaka and his acquiring confis-
cated land. The farms of the family were part of the 1,275,000 acres that the Crown 
confiscated during the mid-1860s (Waitangi Tribunal, 1996).1 The Unsettled explores 
why some stories fall out of collective memory and what it might mean to ask the 
right questions about our ancestors’ histories.

Asking questions about the past involves encounters with pioneer stories. How did 
migrants acquire the land they did? Richard Shaw’s questions about what it means 
to remember rightly and live justly are significant for those writing about the devel-
opment and transformation of local Christian communities on lands with long settler 
histories.

Shaw works with small stories as a research methodology. Shaw interviews people 
wrestling with their origin stories, which Shaw calls “secular creation stories”. These 
stories are woven through The Unsettled ’s nine chapters.

Shaw also researches his own small story and the lives of his Irish ancestors. He 
ponders how those oppressed by patterns of colonization in Ireland became imple-
menters of these patterns in Aotearoa New Zealand. He tracks the way that law, 
transport, communication and the forming of local constabularies were used to 
generate wealth. He asks why indigenous voices are silenced – “whited out” – by the 
processes of colonizations.

Shaw makes no explicit claims to be doing theology. He writes as a Professor of Poli-
tics at Massey University. However, theological themes are present in The Unsettled. 
There is the language of bearing witness, defined as the courage to take “a public posi-
tion … a decidedly active thing to do” (171). There is a discussion of religious murals 
that hung in Taranaki churches, including cross-cultural motifs in works painted by 

1 For a summary, see Tom Bennion. “Review. The Taranaki Report: Kaupapaptuatahi Muru me te 
raupatu. The Muru and Raupatu of the Taranaki land and people by the Waitangi Tribunal.” Waikato 
Law Review 23 4 (2), 180-189. http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/WkoLawRw/1996/23.pdf.

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/WkoLawRw/1996/23.pdf


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Michael Smithers (126–7). There are several uses of the phrase “touch the hem of the 
unknown garment” (178, 192) a phrase with origins in a Gospel story in Matt. 9.20-22 
and Luke 8.43-48. Shaw uses the phrase to advocate for new forms of community in 
which future ways of being emerge “from and in concert with memories of past ways 
of doing” (178). Shaw concludes with a concluding experience of sitting with two nuns 
and realizing that their story of service to God could be applied fruitfully to the future 
facing Pākeha in Aotearoa New Zealand. These motifs – of witness, crossing cultures 
and new ways of being – are instructive starting points for those pondering doing 
faith on “Māori Land” by courtesy of prior landowners.

There is a growing body of theologians writing about settler colonial theology. 
Writing about Aotearoa New Zealand from English shores, Richard Davis argues 
that settler colonial theology is a more just framing than decolonial or post-colonial 
theology. Davis points out how “de-” and “post-”, when attached to “colonial”, imply a 
moving beyond colonialism. The reality is that colonizers are always walking on land 
with history, among traditional owners with stories of dispossession and injustice. 
For Davis (2022), the phrase “settler colonial” allows the settler to “face their own 
complicity in narratives of ongoing colonisation and aim at their undoing”. For South 
African theologian Steven Theo Savides (2022: 1) we are all “implicated as witness 
to, participant in, and beneficiary of settler colonial systems”. This requires identity 
work that respects the significance of the past, even in the present, and constructs 
new structures of relationship. Writing from the United States, Enns and Myers (2021: 
10) call for settler “response-ability”. They challenge settlers to respond to their small 
stories by investigating how settler colonialism structures our current relationships.

These voices are raising themes that those of us writing and thinking about the 
development and transformation of local Christian communities need to heed. 
While making no explicit theological claims, The Unsettled offers important resources 
for those willing to name their privilege and justly name the legacies of colonization. 
The focus on small stories provides ways for individuals to examine their genealo-
gies. The motifs – of witness, crossing cultures and new ways of being – are stepping 
stones for a public theology that takes “response-ability”.

About the Reviewer
Steve Taylor, Director AngelWings Ltd, Ōtepot, Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand. 
Contact: kiwidrsteve@gmail.com



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References
Davis, Richard A. 2022. “Settler Colonialism.” Political Theology Network, https://politicaltheo-

logy.com/settler-colonialism/.
Enns, Elaine, and Ched Myers. 2021. Healing Haunted Histories: A Settler Discipleship of Decoloni-

zation. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books.
Savides, Steven. 2022. “Unsettling the Settler Colonial Imagination: Decoloniality as a Theolog-

ical Hermeneutic in South Africa.” PhD diss., University of Notre Dame.
Waitangi Tribunal. 1996. “The Taranaki Report. Kaupapa Tuatahi.” Wai 143. Wellington: GP 

Publications, https://ndhadeliver.natlib.govt.nz/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_
pid=IE28689604.

https://politicaltheology.com/settler-colonialism/
https://politicaltheology.com/settler-colonialism/
https://ndhadeliver.natlib.govt.nz/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE28689604
https://ndhadeliver.natlib.govt.nz/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE28689604

