It’s a surprisingly persistent view, but Māori have not forgotten the land wars

Friday, 28 January 2022

NZ History Teachers’ Association chair Graeme Ball talks to the Maori Affairs select committee about the need for teaching the country’s colonial history in schools. (First published June 20, 2018).

Whanganui-based historian Dr Danny Keenan completed a PhD on the Native Land Court in 1994 and has published widely on Māori and New Zealand history

OPINION: When Buddy Mikaere of Ngāi Tamarāwaho co-authored Victory at Gate Pā? with Cliff Simons in 2018, he remembered his tūpuna (ancestor) Pārone Koikoi, who had fought against the British Army at Pukehinahina and Te Ranga.

Subsequent generations, writes Buddy, never lost sight of who he was, and where he came from. Across the years, Koikoi’s inspiration endured.

In his 2000 PhD thesis, Monty Soutar of Ngāti Porou recalled the herculean endeavours of his tūpuna Rapata Wahaha, in fighting to keep Māori insurgents, and Crown depradations, at bay.

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Iwi leader and former Waitangi Tribunal director Buddy Mikaere, of Ngāi Tamarāwaho, remembered his tūpuna, Pārone Koikoi, when he co-wrote the 2018 book ‘Victory at Gate Pā?’, writes Danny Keenan.

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Tony Sole of Ngāti Ruanui remembered the old people who had died alongside Tītokowaru. And of his tūpuna Te Whiti O Rongomai, Te Miringa Hohaia wrote of the tools of resistance embedded in Te Ao Māori which gave “enormous potency in the struggle to withstand invasion”.

We should not be surprised that Māori have not forgotten the land wars, or their old people, with stories, memories and histories embedded in the spoken and expressional culture.

What is surprising is the view that persists, among Pākehā historians in particular, that the land wars have been forgotten. Only now, we are told, are the wars being recognised, to be taught in our schools thanks to the efforts of, among others, a group of young Pākehā students.

Yet it is not Māori who forgot the wars. Unfortunately, what is not made clear these days is that rehabilitating the wars is a Pākehā conversation that does not involve Māori.

Danny Keenan: “What is surprising is the view that persists, among Pākehā historians in particular, that the land wars have been forgotten.”

Pākehā historians don’t always make this clear, but they should.

Rehabilitating the wars, too, runs a number of dangers. Promoting the wars as a colonial contest of sovereignty, which Māori lost though noble in the struggle, forever consigns Māori to accommodating an essentially hostile Crown in the search for justice as a subaltern Treaty partner.

It’s a powerful narrative, and it’s a hard one to shake, even though, as Ranginui Walker has written, Māori do see it differently, with counter-narratives emerging from generations of domination by “European expansionism and colonialism”.

To some extent, as Monty Soutar has written, it all comes down to knowing your audience. This is especially so for Māori. Māori historians generally have a good idea of their Māori audience; and how critical that audience can be.

As a consequence, care is needed when consulting customary sources, like waiata, tauparapara and whakairo, which open windows to a time before Pākehā arrival.

Research methods need to comply with marae convention – for instance, the memories of kaumātua are not interrogated, given their immense value both for what is said, and how it is conveyed.

Customary structures are engaged, like whakapapa, described by Sir Eddie Durie as a flexible system which, by telescoping time, allows ancestors of distant epochs to talk to each other. They also talk to the present, he writes, relaying messages, conveying wisdom and transmitting values, ensuring that challenges are met with cultural integrity.

Acccordingly, tūpuna like Pārone Koikoi, Rapata Wahawaha, Tītokowaru and Te Whiti O Rongomai were constantly able to draw upon ancestral memory, and precedent, fortifying their roles “as traditional leaders and liberation theologians”, to quote Te Miringa.

And integral to everything they did was the maintenance and assertion of mana. In bringing such tūpuna to mind, we remember their assurance of our continuing status, land rights, authority, kinship, knowledge and capacity.

As with all compartments of Māori knowledge, not least history, there is a lot going on at once. In the end, though, everything comes together. We see this when, before a critical audience, our kaumātua issue forth on the marae, prescribing the paepae as the controlling site of all Māori knowledge, including knowledge of the past.

The land wars undoubtedly inflicted Pā and papa kāinga with hurt, dispossession and loss. As Joseph Ānaru Pere of Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki has written, the imprint of Pākehā upon Māori was unavoidable.

Yet, though egregiously afflicted, writes Joseph, the transmission of histories through language, carvings, chants and karakia endures, deeply interwoven within the culture and the land, forever the source of identity, mana – and memory.

Danny Keenan completed a PhD on the Native Land Court in 1994 and taught at Massey University. He had published widely on Māori and New Zealand history and lives in Whanganui.