Hoare, Nicholas2021-10-191449-0854http://hdl.handle.net/1885/251038Leela Gandhi demonstrates that friendship is the lost trope in anticolonial thought. Following Gandhi, this article highlights a series of cross-cultural friendships between mostly Pākehā metropolitan dissidents in New Zealand and Pacific Island anticolonial actors in the early to mid-twentieth century. In doing so, this article sheds new light on the well-trodden histories of interwar resistance in Sāmoa (the Mau) and post-World War II agitation in the Cook Islands (the CIPA). While the symbolic act of cross-cultural, anticolonial friendship may have done much to undermine New Zealand’s colonial artifice, it was not enough to guarantee that disaffected Indigenous voices would be adequately heard.application/pdfen-AU© 2018 Australian Historical AssociationPolitics of friendshipanticolonialismthe MauCook Islands Progressive AssociationR.A.K. Mason201810.1080/14490854.2018.14855022020-11-23