New Zealand history can be contentious, and some ideas are just plain wrong
Friday, 13 September 2019
Now that the Government has decided the teaching of New Zealand history will be compulsory in all schools, the Ministry of Education has the job of working out what will go into the curriculum.
Stuff has been championing the cause of ensuring all New Zealand school students learn about their country's past.
Here are a number of myths about NZ's past that need to be dismissed once and for all.
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Moriori settled NZ first but were forced out by Māori settlers
Correcting this misinformation is easy. In August, the Crown and Moriori initialled a deed of settlement that includes an agreed historical account.
Previously it was widely but wrongly believed that Moriori were the survivors of a pre-Māori mainland population, forced from the North Island by Māori settlers.
As the deed points out, the myths were popularised and spread through The School Journal, and caused much damage to Moriori.
According to the agreed historical account, Moriori were the original inhabitants of the Chatham Islands, arriving sometime between 1000 and 1400. They lived undisturbed until their first contact with Pākehā in 1791.
Plentiful resources and the absence of outside threats had allowed the development of an egalitarian society. Warfare and killing was outlawed.
Pākehā sealers arrived on the islands by the early 1800s, and whalers soon followed. By the 1830s, possibly earlier, seal rookeries of tens of thousands of seals had been virtually wiped out, depriving Moriori of their major source of winter clothing and a major source of food.
In late 1835, people of two Māori iwi travelled to the Chathams on a British ship, the Lord Rodney, after hearing of the islands' attractiveness for settlement and believing Moriori would offer little resistance.
The newcomers soon began to take the land in accordance with their custom. A few Moriori resisted but were killed. In early 1836, many Moriori were killed after holding a meeting to decide how to respond. Those Moriori who survived the invasion were then enslaved and subjected to harsh treatment and forced labour.
By 1870, the number of Moriori on the Chathams had fallen from a pre-contact population of at least 2000 to just 90.
We can't know about pre-European NZ because there was no written language
Oral tradition tells of ocean-going waka that made their way from east Polynesia to land at various points on the New Zealand coast. Te Ara - The Encyclopedia of New Zealand says oral traditions also tell of explorers who travelled throughout the country, so that by the end of the 14th century the whole country had been explored.
In the South Island, for example, Māori developed greenstone trails, tracks for moving raw materials from west to east for trade with northern tribes. Among the routes were the present-day Heaphy, Milford and Routeburn tracks, and the Lewis, Arthur's and Haast passes.
Then there's archaeology. According to the New Zealand Archaeological Association, the country has a rich heritage of archaeological sites which illustrate its 800-year history. There are records of more than 60,000 archaeological sites.
Heritage New Zealand says archaeological sites include Māori pa sites and the remains of cultivation areas and gardens - which can be seen in soils and in the form of lines or walls of loose stones or stone mounds, artificially levelled terraces, and pits for storing kūmara.
There are also middens that may contain shells, bones, artefacts, charcoal and sometimes oven stones, and there are rock art sites which may contain paintings, drawings, carvings or engravings.
An example of the role of archaeology can be seen at Mangahawea Bay in the Bay of Islands - believed to be one of New Zealand's earliest sites of Polynesian settlement. Heritage NZ says archaeological evidence and features uncovered during excavation at the site complement oral traditions. They link Mangahawea Bay to Polynesian voyaging in the Pacific.
Artefacts recovered from the area included obsidian believed to have originated from Mayor Island, moa and seal bone in abundance – often an indicator of early habitation – and evidence that fish hooks were manufactured on site.
Māori are not indigenous
According the the United Nations they are. The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues says an official definition of indigenous has not been adopted by any UN-system body, because of the diversity of indigenous peoples.
Instead, a modern understanding of the term has been developed based on a range of factors. Among those are historical continuity with pre-colonial and/or pre-settler societies, strong links to territories and surrounding natural resources, distinct social or political systems, and distinct language, culture and beliefs.
Maori were entirely uncivilised before Pākehā came along
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a civilised society or country has a well developed system of government, culture and way of life that treats the people who live there fairly.
On that basis, there are arguments to be made about 18th and 19th century Britain. It didn't stop sending convicts to Australia until 1867, and most of those were for petty crimes. Slavery wasn't abolished in most British colonies until the 1830s.
From another perspective, the technological and intellectual achievements needed to build and navigate the craft that carried Polynesian settlers across vast reaches of ocean to New Zealand were remarkable achievements.
Celtic people were here, too
This theory has gained some visibility from the two-part documentary New Zealand: Skeletons in the Cupboard, which was watched more than 4000 times when it was available for two weeks on TVNZ OnDemand. It's also been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on Youtube.
A Radio New Zealand item, also published in Stuff, said the documentary claimed, among other things, that the Polynesian demi-god Māui was a real-life explorer who not only discovered New Zealand but claimed much of South America for Egypt; that Australian aboriginals arrived in New Zealand tens of thousands of years before Māori; that seven foot tall, red-headed Celts built complex astrological stone monuments; and that pale-skinned fairy-like people taught Māori how to weave fishing nets.
A more sober ripple in the widely accepted account of the settlement of New Zealand involved the radiocarbon dating of kiore bones. In 1996, scientist Richard Holdaway had rat bones found in New Zealand radiocarbon dated. That work suggested some of the bones were almost 2000 years old.
Holdaway raised the possibility there was an earlier visit to New Zealand. There was no settlement that time but some rats were left behind.
The radiocarbon ages found in Holdaway's research were controversial and had no supporting ecological and archaeological evidence.
Holdaway has described Skeletons in the Cupboard as total rubbish. There was absolutely no evidence of people settling in New Zealand before the arrival of Polynesians around 650 years ago, he said.
Later researchers, led by Dr Janet Wilmshurst from Landcare Research, spent four years on a study, which Landcare said showed conclusively the earliest evidence for human colonisation was about 1280-1300.
The finding was based on new radiocarbon dating of Pacific rat bones and rat-gnawed seeds.