While the disabilities of the child protagonists of Keri Hulme's the bone people (1983) and Patricia Grace's Potiki (1986) are often commented upon in critical readings, they are usually interpreted in terms of the texts' Maori cultural politics, the disabled child being read in terms of possible narratives of indigenous disempowerment, survival and activism. It is certainly the case that both texts are primarily concerned with issues of Maori cultural participation and viability. Grace represents an autonomous Maori community and its struggle for sovereignty within capitalist society, while Hulme offers a less politicised vision of a 'commensal' bicultural nation, denoting a version of cohabitation in which difference can be maintained and respected. Within these contexts, the disabled child is seen to signal the future of Maori culture in New Zealand: Simon is the focus of the bone people's commensal vision, representing the challenges to be faced in the movement towards a true biculturalism, and Toko, in Potiki, who narrates his story after his death, can be read as the symbol of continuing Maori agency in the face of cultural oppression and violation. I want to argue, however, that while the texts' politics are primarily cultural in focus, Grace and Hulme both characterise disability in ways that coincide with progressive notions of disabled social agency, and utilise strategies of representing disability that are politically enabling in terms of both disability and culture. Rather than symbolising Maori culture's continuity either despite their disabilities (and Toko's death) or even because of their status as damaged yet triumphant representatives of a surviving community, Simon and Toko function as integrated and engaged members of their communities, as active agents within the cultural and political negotiations of the texts. Their disabilities are not abstract metaphors for a damaged, yet surviving, nation, but markers of the writers' commitment to a definition of social agency that actively includes all members of New Zealand society. Reading these texts in conjunction with disability theory, as I propose to do, therefore facilitates a subtly nuanced social analysis which reveals the exact function of Simon and Toko as disabled agents within the cultural narratives of Maori sovereignty and activism.
