Item Detail
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25420
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2
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0
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English
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Mormonism, the Maori, and Cultural Authenticity
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Latter-day Lore : Mormon Folklore Studies
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Salt Lake City
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University of Utah Press
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471-482
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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints launched a sustained mission to the New Zealand Maori beginning in the 1880s. Within a few short years thousands had been baptized. By the turn of the century, the church counted nearly a tenth of the total Maori population as members, with a significantly higher percentage in certain pa (settlements) along the east coast of the North Island from the southern Wairarapa to Poverty Bay and beyond.1 Part of the reason Mormonism was so well accepted among a significant minority of Maori in the final decades of the nineteenth century and why it continues to thrive among them on the eve of the twenty-first century is that it provided an unusually rich, culturally compatible resource for shaping and proclaiming their identity. [From the text]