Dialogue: Making history our whipping boy

Unlike many comparable countries, New Zealand does not adequately feature the study of history, either its own or that of anybody else, during compulsory schooling. Thus public awareness and discussion of historical issues is not well developed.

It might be argued that there is no real harm in this.

However, it has now created a rather unhealthy emotional breeding ground for those who would wish to inform us about our past using extremist perspectives, catchcries and slogans.

There have always been extreme views about the past, but when they increasingly come from politicians and others who have the capacity to capture dramatic media headlines, there is cause for concern.

Debates about New Zealand history have generally been confined to academia. It has been far less common for historical interpretation to become an issue in day-to-day politics.

This situation has slowly been changing since the 1980s with the growing political significance of the historical relationships between Maori and Pakeha in the context of Treaty of Waitangi issues.

Now it seems that hardly a day goes by when there is not some sort of comment from Government MPs and others about the evils of New Zealand's past.

We are being exposed to new politico-pop New Zealand history.

It is not an organised conspiracy, but the cumulative assertion of a particular ideological-moralistic perspective, which meets little contradiction.

Even the Attorney-General threatens to make a nationwide lecture tour to tell us all what we should know about our bad past.

This form of history has two particularly pernicious characteristics.

First, history is used as a whipping boy. Today's values and social policy ideals are imposed upon the past.

The past is found wanting and thus condemned. There is no attempt made to understand the past in terms of its own values and perspectives.

Somehow the notion of history as an evil in itself has come to prevail. Who has committed the greatest abuses? Who is the victim? Who will atone? History equals grievance.

Secondly, no effort is made to convey the incredible complexities of the past. Instead, a simplistic binary world, now divided by gaps, is constructed - Maori-Pakeha, urban-rural, rich-poor, possessed-dispossessed, holistic-materialistic, healthy-sick. Colonialism was bad; post-colonialism is good. Maori were destroyed; Pakeha flourished.

The complex processes of cultural interaction that these simplicities deny are further reduced to historical absurdity by various highly emotive terms and catchcries. Among the more recent notable ones are "holocaust," "genocide" and "post-colonial traumatic stress."

The debates tend to be about the contextual naughtiness or otherwise of using such terms.

The real issue should be less about their assumed relevance to our history, and more about the stupidity of encapsulating complex human events in a single word or phrase.

It might be helpful if some of those who speak with such simplistic passion became a little better informed about the scholarly literature on New Zealand history and its research strengths and weaknesses, and also about how themes in our history fit into the broader perspectives of Pacific and world history.

For example, the arrival of Western diseases was not some organised colonists' plot. It was the result of the transference of microbes all around the world that began from about 1500 onwards with the development of Eurasian expansion.

Eurasia just happened to have the greatest range of domesticated animals, from which derived many of its human diseases. And it was not all one way - for example, syphilis from the Americas ravaged Europe. Global transference of microbes continues today.

No culture or nation has ever owned a disease. Moreover, the relationship between new diseases and depopulation is extremely complex.

Any discussion requires an understanding of location, environment, accurate population figures, cultural practice, the timing and epidemiology of introduced diseases, and natural and acquired immunology.

Again there is a good academic literature on these matters, especially for the Pacific Islands and elsewhere, though it is still under-researched in the case of New Zealand.

Nor does any nation or culture have a monopoly over virtue or harmony.

Painful though it may be to some, the wars of the 1860s were as much a civil war among Maori as they were a conflict between the Government and some Maori tribes.

Probably most Maori remained either neutral or fought on the side of the colonial forces. By far the greatest military devastation of Maori took place by Maori during the so-called Musket Wars of the 1820s and 1830s, before European colonisation began.

To say these things is not to attempt to whitewash or denigrate any one side, merely to indicate that human affairs are not simple.

And as for the apparently newly claimed Pakeha evil of Maori urbanisation, it should be remembered that in 1800 2 per cent of the world's population was urbanised; now, it is over 50 per cent and growing exponentially. This is a broad consequence of the Industrial Revolution, not a Pakeha plot.

I am not advancing an argument against acknowledging human suffering or injustice, or the imbalances of power relationships of the past and present.

But I am making a plea that history should be about acknowledging and trying to understand the complexity of the human journey, rather than a moralising mission.

The two key themes in human history are human relationships with each other and with their environment. New Zealand was the last part of the habitable world to be settled by humans.

In less than 700 years it has been the site of events that in most other parts of the world have been developing for tens of thousands, often hundreds of thousands of years. Let's not become too pompously myopic.

It is sometimes claimed that history is too important to leave to historians. As a historian, I would claim in defence that it is positively dangerous to leave it to people who embrace uninformed and extreme views.

Gordon McLauchlan expressed it brilliantly when he wrote: "Without sincerely and, as accurately as possible, respecting the past, we remain rootless in the present and flounder towards the future."

* Kerry Howe, professor of history at Massey University, Albany, is a specialist in New Zealand and Pacific history.

Herald Online feature: Closing the Gaps