In their representation of history and in particular of the nineteenth-century New Zealand Wars from a Maori perspective, The Matriarch and its sequel The Dream Swimmer are the most political works by Maori writer Witi Ihimaera. While the complex metafictional structure of the two novels has been the subject of much scholarly investigation, critics have largely ignored the influence exerted by Italian melodrama on them, testified by the numerous quotations from Giuseppe Verdi’s operas (especially the patriotic ones, Aida and Nabucco, but also Macbeth, Don Carlo, Otello, La forza del destino and Un ballo in maschera) interspersed in the narrative. In this paper I will examine how Ihimaera’s use of Italian melodrama is not limited to the construction of a vague political allegory, but becomes a strategic appropriation of a European genre, with its attendant rhetoric, values and nationalist implications, which the author takes over as a subversive counter-discourse in the service of the Maori cause to legitimate their struggle for self-determination and the recognition of their rights.