This article examines what happens in Alan Duff’s trilogy, Once Were Warriors (1990-2002), to the Western novelistic device of individualisation of characters that takes its roots in the European Renaissance. In Duff’s novels, the development of characters is reconfigured through their relation to others as they experience a form of cultural and bodily rebirth in their own community. The trilogy thus offers an alternative to traditional Western characterisation, by deploying other ways of constructing subjectivity.