A mature nation owns its history - the good and the bad

Monday, 6 August 2018

On March 9, 2018, people from across the country gathered for the first national day of commemoration of the New Zealand Land Wars, Te Pūtake o Te Riri. (First published August 6, 2018.)

OPINION: Tūrangawaewae – a place to stand. For me Allen Curnow's immortal lines 'Not I, some child, born in a marvellous year/Will learn the trick of standing upright here' are the starting point. Has that child been born yet? I hope so. I think so. Perhaps they come from Ōtorohanga, where a school trip back in 2014 led to a petition, and big things grew from there.

And what is that trick? Well, I would suggest a big part of it is reconciling ourselves with the history of this country. Not the imagined history of a plucky wee nation at the bottom of the globe, punching above its weight, egalitarian and forward looking. I'm talking about the messy, complicated history of how Pākehā colonised this land. Then-Prime Minister John Key's 2014 insistence that New Zealand was settled peacefully was widely ridiculed at the time. But the sentiments that underlay that statement retain an enduring appeal for some. Those people haven't learnt the trick.

A mature nation takes ownership of its history, not just cherry-picking the good bits out to remember but also acknowledging the bad stuff as well. Moving confidently into the future requires a robust understanding of where we have come from and been.

* Ngāpuhi's struggle: 'People can't even agree what damn day it is'

In 2015, Ōtorohanga College students and their supporters presented a 13,000 signature petition to Parliament, calling for a national commemoration of the 19th-century Land Wars.

* Special feature: Two tribes and their two long fights**

Ōtorohanga College students Rhiannon Magee, Tai Jones and Leah Bell started the petition after a school trip back in 2014.

Reconciling ourselves to the history of this land – finding a place to stand – is not just about supporting the settlement of historical Treaty of Waitangi claims. That's part of the story but not the whole solution. It's about ordinary New Zealanders taking the time to acknowledge and even own this history. Learn about it, respect it, pass it on, make sure your children and their children learn these stories too. Not so they can feel guilty or ashamed about the actions of their ancestors. But so they can be big enough, and confident enough, to say, 'yes, this is part of our history too' (alongside the things we feel good about today, like all those people who stood up against injustices in the past when they saw them).

The Waitangi Tribunal has said: 'While only one side remembers the suffering of the past, dialogue will always be difficult. One side commences the dialogue with anger and the other side has no idea why. Reconciliation cannot be achieved by this means.' And so it is time for New Zealanders to learn about this other history that iwi have carried alone for so many generations.

Vincent O'Malley pictured with Dr Joanna Kidman at the New Zealand Post Book Awards in February.

A big part of this history is the tragic story of the wars fought on our shores. The New Zealand Wars of 1845 to 1872 in which thousands died and which had devastating and far-reaching consequences. Wars that were not just important locally but also for a time of global significance given the huge number of British imperial troops brought here to fight them. Wars that many Pākehā New Zealanders have until quite recently preferred to ignore, pretending they never happened or that if they did, they were best forgotten. Let sleeping dogs lie, said one commentator. But they never say the same thing about World War One. Instead, they say, 'we will remember them'. So what about these other conflicts, ones that don't give us warm, fuzzy patriotic feelings?

Well, the purpose of remembering isn't to sow division and disharmony but to bind us together as a nation that can openly and honestly confront its past. That's not about assigning blame. Just about growing up as a nation. Being big and brave enough to own our history, warts and all. Learning the trick of standing upright here. Saying, yes, this is us, Aotearoa New Zealand, land of the long white cloud. A place where we don't colour our history in rose tints. Where we walk backwards into the future, determined to learn from (and accept) our mistakes. And where we acknowledge the tangata whenua of this land and the real pain and harm endured over many generations.

That might even have some practical benefits, allowing people to better understand the world (and landscape) all around them. They might learn that there's a history behind disproportionately-high levels of Māori poverty today. That it wasn't always this way and that in the story of how all this changed lies a darker national narrative than the one many prefer to imagine.

Many New Zealanders probably pass sites of immense historical significance each day, oblivious to the history all around them. Sometimes, as in the case of Ōrākau pā, the roads were built directly through those sites in a deliberate act of cultural erasure. Not just forgetting but destroying the tangible reminders of that history as if it never existed. It's time we protected and recognised the sites and fragments of sites that remain. It's time this history was taught in our schools.

Ironically, as the Ōtorohanga College petition that led to the national day of commemoration for the New Zealand Wars has shown, the kids themselves are asking for this. It's just the adults (and especially the bureaucrats at the Ministry of Education) who have some hang-ups about it. Maybe we should let our rangatahi take the lead on this. They seem to have a better sense of the kind of country they want to grow up in. It's one that doesn't turn its back on its own past.

Dr Vincent O'Malley is the author of The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800-2000 and is currently working on a short history of the New Zealand Wars, to be published by Bridget Williams Books in 2019.