Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All

An extraordinary love story between a Maori man and an American woman, that inspires a graceful, revelatory search for understanding about the centuries-old collision of two wildly different cultures. Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All is the story of the cultural collision between Westerners and the Maoris of New Zealand, told partly as a history of the complex and bloody period of contact between Europeans and the Maoris in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and partly as the story of Christina Thompson’s marriage to a Maori man. As an American graduate student studying literature in Australia, Thompson traveled on vacation to New Zealand, where she met a Maori known as “Seven.” Their relationship was one of opposites: he was a tradesman, she an intellectual; he came from a background of rural poverty, she from one of middle-class privilege; he was a “native,” she descended directly from “colonizers.” Nevertheless, they shared a similar sense of adventure and a willingness to depart from the customs of their families and forge a life together on their own. In this extraordinary book, which grows out of decades of research, Thompson explores the meaning of cross-cultural contact and the fascinating history of Europeans in the South Pacific, beginning with Abel Tasman’s discovery of New Zealand in 1642 and James Cook’s famous circumnavigations of 1769-79. Transporting us back and forth in time and around the world, from Australia to Hawaii to tribal NewZealand and finally to a house in New England that has ghosts of its own, Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All brings to life a lush variety of characters and settings. Yet at its core, it is the story of two people who, in making a life and a family together, bridge the gap between two worlds. Reviews * “[A] fine account. Her observations about the enduring effects of colonization [are] penetrating. She puts her vantage point of insider-outsider to good effect, tracing the genealogy of racial stereotypes and cutting through some of New Zealand's most cherished myths about itself.” -New York Times Book Review * Thompson is never dully tendentious or dogmatic. The narrative moves smoothly by way of well-told anecdotes both personal and historical. Her prose never disappoints.” -Publishers Weekly * “Perceptive, endearing look at the often fraught contacts between Maoris and Westerners. A candid examination of persistent, troubling issues of race and stereotype in the history of the two cultures’ encounters. Honest…forthright…well-wrought.” -Kirkus Author Biography Christina Thompson was born in Switzerland in 1959 and grew up in a suburb of Boston. In 1984 she received an ITT International Fellowship from the Institute of International Education in New York. She also received a fellowship for graduate study at the Univesity of Melbourne, where she later did a PhD. She is author of numerous essays, stories and reviews, and her work has appeared in literary and scholarly journals. In 1998, Christina and her family returned to the United States after a decade in Australia. She is currently editor of the Harvard Review.