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Book scavenger and Maori literature

One from Eastern Europe finds Maori literature quite late. The awareness of such a literary fact first dawned upon me more some time around 2015, when I bought the book under the title Trans-indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies, by Chedwick Allen (published in 2012), for the library of my faculty in Warsaw. This is how I could learn about Witi Ihimaera's The Whale Rider (1987), most probably as one of very few Polish scholars to become aware of such things. Perhaps those from the departments of English may have heard about such things; but I never saw any criticism on such phenomena published in Polish journals. Of course, the Maori literature was not such a novelty for anyone else. No wonder that, after I settled in Leiden, I could scavenge some yellowed and eared Maori novels from the public shelves where the Dutch leave the books they don't wish to keep at home any longer. One of them, Keri Hulme's The Bone People (1983). Not exactly a novelty, but still the first Maori book that I could actually read.  
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