Samuel Carpenter, Review of Jeffrey Sissons, The Forgotten Prophet: Tāmati te Ito and His Kaingārara Movement (Bridget Williams Books, 2023), in Anglican Journal of Theology in Aotearoa and Oceania 3/1 (2024): 121-23.

An excerpt from my recent review and the review itself for download below:

“… this book is a significant contribution to the literature on Māori prophetic movements. If we needed a further reminder, Sissons has underlined how the prophetic movements and leaders were intertwined with political opposition to colonial policy. He has effectively shown how the prophets cannot be
understood without their missionary education in literacy and scriptural knowledge, which inspired new forms of cultural expression and protest against government policies. These were sad, dark days in Taranaki, as Sisson’s pages reveal. The miracle is that prophets such as Te Ito maintained their hope, including through Parihaka community building – a community joined by Te Ito later in the 1860s. Te Ito was Taranaki’s first prophet, argues Sissons, and we
need to see how the prophets “formed a cluster” of leaders in the 1850s-80s period, rather than being leaders who claimed descent from each other, as Binney argued. (151) Ultimately, these are deep histories of spirituality in Aotearoa sourced in both te ao Māori and the Bible, which was not always interpreted according to the Protestant orthodoxies of its CMS translators. Truth may be stranger than it seems.”