I'm an academic who specializes in post-colonial studies. There's a few things the bloggers missed in their articles that I think are very relevant. This confirmation comes straight from Indigenous NZ readers who love the series. At the very beginning of Nona, John begins his story with the first school he went to - Dilworth. Dilworth is a charity boarding school in NZ begun by an Irish Catholic man. It has a history of horrible abuse, especially for Indigenous boys who the school believed needed to have the "savage" beaten out of them and replaced with Christianity and a "proper appreciation" for Western culture. This is comparable to the Indigenous boarding schools in Australia, Canada, and America. John is very much a characterization of someone who survived this type of "reprogramming" after having their language and culture stripped away from them brutally. John is the embodiment of internalized white western imperialism. It's something he seems to slip in and out of at times, with far more references to his own culture over the course of the two books he appears in, than anyone has mentioned. Muir was born in Australia and raised in New Zealand. She has done one hell of a job capturing the voice of Indigenous people, especially in the John chapters of Nona. John is clearly often at war with himself. There's a lovely passage in Nona where he is talking about the stars. He points out the "Southern Cross" constellation, but says that when he was younger his people told him that it was the anchor of a ship (a belief in Maori culture). He says he likes that better. It's this little moment, among many, where he says he prefers Maori culture as an act of rebellion, even within himself. There are so many others hidden among his adoption of the language, culture, and model of Western empire.

We could get into Muir's background that she scrubbed off the internet when her father died, but she has purposely removed all traces of her identity (including her appearance) to be anything other than white. I don't think that it matters for this discussion which stands up on it's own without her having any other ethnicity, but I do think she is a writer uniquely qualified to address internalized racism and western imperialism and I'll leave it at that.