Dialogue: Why Waitangi Day should remain a national festival

Americans live happily with sharply competing histories. So why, asks DANNY KEENAN*, do we have such a problem with our national day?

Early this year, Waitangi Day was again the focus of heated debate. And with Anzac Day approaching, questions about our national day will arise again.

In February, while staying in Washington DC, I was a little surprised to see Waitangi Day issues negatively reported in the local press, right on the heels of the most affirming presidential inauguration coverage you were ever likely to see.

Americans seem a little perplexed that New Zealand has this national-day problem. It does not quite match their image of wonderful scenery and friendly people.

It was reported in Washington that there was a strong push developing in New Zealand to change the timing and focus of our national day.

It all made for disquieting reading as I sat among superb national monuments, such as the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.

These are the places to which thousands of Americans come each year, paying homage to the positive histories they represent.

And the Vietnam Memorial, alongside which veterans sell their distinctive memorabilia, reminds us that Americans also have their sharply contested shrines and histories. In fact, they seem willing to persist with the heated argument generated by sharply competing histories.

Why then can New Zealanders not deal with robust historical argument in the same way? And why the push to change our national day - and to eradicate the history it represents?

At least since the 1970s, February 6 celebrations at Waitangi have been marked by protest, remonstration and occasional violence. Many different groups of Maori and some Pakeha have used the moment to focus attention on the many inequities of our colonial past - inequities that are seen to be unresolved.

This is especially so where the negative treatment accorded to the Treaty of Waitangi and its Maori co-signatories is concerned.

Therefore, over the years, a small number of Pakeha dignitaries and visitors have felt themselves chastised, humiliated or worse. Governors-General, judges and diplomats have been left seething, and they have said so.

And Maori themselves have not escaped the attention of protesters. Some Maori who maintain traditional roles at Waitangi have denounced other protesting Maori for trampling on the mana of tangata whenua, thereby bringing the marae and the people into disrepute.

Local tribal kaumatua then have often felt themselves to be the target of much of the dissent. And the media have captured it all, passing on to New Zealanders a disapproving impression of misdirected Maori protest.

As a consequence, Maori have been roundly condemned for disrupting this solemn national occasion. Protest at Waitangi is denied to Maori because the issues touch raw nerves.

As historian James Belich has argued, New Zealanders would rather forget. That is why Waitangi Day remains the focus of sometimes bitter debate.

Pressure has, therefore, been building to change the national day. Some have asked whether there is another date that might be more acceptable, where a certain rhetoric of national unity and celebration might find better traction than seems the case on Waitangi Day.

To most, the historical issues that divide Maori and Pakeha are seen to be too complex to deal with in the course of their everyday lives, much less to even acknowledge as an integral and possibly normal part of our national day.

Perhaps we should look elsewhere for another day, it is said, where expressions of national unity and common purpose might find a more ready cause for celebration.

Two possible alternative days have emerged - Anzac Day and Dominion Day. Since the early 1990s, much has been made of Anzac Day attendances. In the mid-1990s, huge numbers of Kiwis began turning out to watch Anzac Day parades and to acknowledge our veterans.

There was much to celebrate on that day, especially the fact that our boys had gone overseas to bravely sacrifice their lives for king, country and democracy. There was a special reverence for our soldiers who in 1915 spilt their blood at Gallipoli. As a consequence of this sacrifice, New Zealand had come of age. Gallipoli is said to have forged our nationhood. At least, Anzac Day would take us away from the divisiveness of Waitangi Day.

But, Anzac Day is not entirely a day for remembering. That many hundreds of New Zealanders also died on our own soil, in the 1840s and 1860s, fighting in defence of tribal home and hearth, continues to escape attention - possibly because those dead were Maori.

They were, in fact, fighting a land war that was more significant than Gallipoli. It was a civil war that would substantially define what New Zealand is today.

If Anzac Day is to become our new national day, whose sacrifice should we be remembering?

We may even need some new war memorials, such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.

The other alternative is Dominion Day - September 26. In 1996, former Governor-General Dame Catherine Tizard led the charge, advocating this as our new national day. Yet the day hardly warrants the attention lavished upon it. September 26, 1907, was the day New Zealand ceased to be a colony within the British Empire, although trade and foreign relations remained the responsibility of Britain.

Not exactly a July 4. But there was something symbolic and this was a day when it might also be said that New Zealand came of age.

Yet, again, what escaped everyone's attention was the significance of Dominion Day for Maori. If this was the day when a certain nationhood was conferred upon New Zealand by Britain, for Maori this new status starkly emphasised the losses that came with colonisation, especially in economics, resources and land.

And for Maori, Dominion Day would always represent their greatest loss - that of a recognition of their own nationhood and sovereignty. Long denied since 1840, this was fought over on our battlefields for 30 years, against the very British who were now deigning to grant this country nationhood.

Dominion Day would always be seen by Maori as emphasising their loss of nationhood. It would be a day to acknowledge their forced assimilation into this new state. Waitangi Day, on the other hand, at least called to mind a covenant that had promised much more.

To celebrate Dominion Day or any other day as our national day, New Zealanders would be asked to forget the turbulence of our past, or to subsume that past beneath a new and contrived national unity. Dominion Day would become Amnesia Day.

Waitangi Day, on the other hand, challenges all New Zealanders to remember the past and to persevere with dialogue as Maori and Pakeha continue to seek reconciliation, as was envisaged in the Treaty of Waitangi.

Reconciliation, and a celebration of strength in diversity, as you will see among the imposing Washington monuments, should be the purpose of our national commemoration.

That is why Waitangi Day should remain New Zealand's national day.

* Dr Danny Keenan, who lectures in New Zealand history at Massey University, Palmerston North, has just returned from research leave in Washington DC.