Biography in the court room? : far from a final judgment

The Maori scholar Aroha Harris, writing a biography of her grandfather Joe, asked, Once again I find myself in search of that happy but elusive equilibrium between telling Joe’s story and “doing” history, mining one man’s past for solutions to methodological puzzles: How do I write the hard stuff ? How do I academically distinguish between Joe’s emotions, my emotions and the biography? How do I write over and around my own emotional responses? And on the other hand—on the Maori hand—should I? With its appreciation of subjectivity, does Maori scholarship seek some connection. . . . But then, if Maori scholarship calls me to embrace my personal responses, does it also call forth more problems, for instance, allegations of bias or of academic restraint to the detriment of academic freedom? (96) How much more acute is the predicament of this Indigenous woman, steeped in such cultural discontinuities between Western and non-Western modes of thought, than that of a non-Maori biographer? This chapter takes the dilemma a little further. Granted that such cultural tensions are very likely to be encountered by biographers like Harris, we may expect a situation more unsatisfactory still when an Indigenous plaintiff asks a court of Western law to make cultural and historical judgments about a life history.