New Zealand history is so dangerous it’s only recently been approved for teaching in schools, with a new curriculum that will, as the Ministry of Education website sententiously describes it, “support ākonga [students] to be critical thinkers and understand our past, in order to make sense of the present”.
Previously, our history has been deemed safe only in the hands of experts, but now children as young as 5 will be allowed to use it.
New, or at least different, ways of thinking about the past are the subject of Rowan Light’s Why Memory Matters: ‘Remembered Histories’ and the Politics of the Shared Past. This is not quite as daunting as it sounds. Light is a historian and curator at the Auckland War Memorial Museum as well as a lecturer in history at the University of Auckland.
The subtitle refers to the ways in which different groups perceive, describe or remember the history that most of us have in common.
It would be fair to say that Light sees history as a malleable phenomenon. It’s a subject he touched on in his previous book, Anzac Nations: The Legacy of Gallipoli in New Zealand and Australia, 1965-2015. This was an account of the different ways those events and their commemoration have been seen in the two countries. It outlined the differences between Australia – where governments have staged anniversary events to suit the political agenda of the time – and New Zealand, where this has not been the case. It also looked at how the meanings people have given to commemorations of April 25 changed over the years, from an adventure in which proud sons of empire answered the call of home, to the forging of a nation with its own identity, to a wider acknowledgment of involvement in all sorts of conflicts since 1915.
The teaching of history at our universities may be under threat as part of the general assault on the humanities, but its survival in schools is assured, not just through the new curriculum but also by the increasing willingness of politicians to hitch it up and drag it through the main street behind their hobby horses. Once-abstruse debates are directly affecting how your tax dollars are spent. They have given us such highly speculative and intriguing revisions as the notion that Māori are not indigenous.
Why Memory Matters is built around case studies of contested histories: the decision by a local newspaper to use only the Māori name – Takarunga – for what had for some time been known as Mt Victoria in the Auckland suburb of Devonport; Anzac Day itself; the troubled James Cook 250th anniversary in 2019; and a debate between two historians over an incident in the New Zealand Wars.
So, lots of argy and no shortage of bargy. Light says conflicts are the focus because they naturally throw issues into relief and make them easier to talk about, but he could equally have included examples of collaboration over how we remember history to make his point.
“One example that was really interesting was looking at the Boyd incident at Whangaroa [in Northland] in 1809, a key moment in our colonial history,” he says. As nzhistory.govt.nz describes it, the sailing ship Boyd was “attacked by a group of Māori who killed most of the crew and passengers in retaliation for the captain’s mistreatment of a young local chief, Te Ara”. The incident had considerable colonial ripples. It “delayed the establishment of the first Christian mission in New Zealand, cemented a view of New Zealand as the ‘Cannibal Isles’ and challenged the notion that Māori were ‘noble savages’”.
So, a bloody event that inspired much resentment. But, says Light, “how that’s been remembered is really interesting. The bicentenary, in 2009, was led by Pākehā communities around the Whangaroa Harbour who worked with Māori. The approach was very much one of listening and talking and trying to understand the different threads of the story and how it’s shaped communal life. It was a very good example of how commemoration can be done really well and produced this fruitful new set of relationships for Whangaroa communities.”
In this vein of fruitful remembering, he hopes the new book will encourage people to question how they think about the past in their own lives. “This is something I always return to with my students: how does the past pattern your life? Where do you situate yourself? What are your communities? I’m thinking often about a Pākehā audience, because that’s my background, that’s my family. Those are some of the conversations that we’ve been having.”
Personal & public
The notion that people should not be clinging to long-ago events in the present day but should “just get over it” does not sit well with him. “The past is experienced collectively and it produces powerful patterns of collective life. To say, ‘Just forget it’, is an existential challenge to these communities. One thing I tried to draw out in the book is how the past and memory sit at the heart of collective lives. If we can understand that better, then we can start to understand precisely what’s at stake in these public debates.”
The first book led naturally to the second. “I was interested in the New Zealand Wars, and why that hasn’t fitted into the military tradition of commemoration,” says Light. “The book tries to show how these are personal as well as public questions. There were conversations I was having with family and friends and students about belonging, and the role of the past and what we give credence to, in terms of the ways that the past seems to legitimise certain politics and certain policy, and the extent to which we should do that.”
Which brings him naturally to the Treaty of Waitangi/Te Tiriti o Waitangi. “[Act leader] David Seymour’s desire to legislate the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi is an interesting example of how the past, particularly around treaty history, is recognised as legitimising our constitutional life. [His] policy attempts to constrain that and put the genie back in the bottle, but it still recognises the power of the past.”
Light points out that what happens after a historic event affects how we see it. Our experiences “are used to fulfil certain cultural and political needs. An example of that would be the treaty. It’s a historical moment in 1840, but its meaning has changed and it’s been used in different ways and different contexts, whether it was in the 1860s, the turn of the 20th century, or up to the 1990s. And today, we’re seeing a different shift. So the role of history is to show those political and cultural needs shifting.”
And continuing to shift up to last December and the protest over the two-treaty display in Te Papa. “I think the protest was saying they’re not on equal footing. They’re not two equal parts. More appropriately, it’s the te reo Māori version that is the treaty that was signed by rangatira. It’s how they understood this relationship between kāwanatanga [authority], governments and rangatiratanga, ideas of sovereignty and self-determination. And what is being disputed is whether those English words on that wall were a colonial gloss or a sort of act of deception.”
Light quotes the work of historian and lawyer Ned Fletcher, who “has shown that our assumptions of what the English translation or English language text means need to be more carefully thought about. What sovereignty meant in a British context in 1840 is not perhaps as straightforward as we may assume.
“The place of te tiriti in public life is probably a really good example of contested histories, that many are tied to collective memories, and how communities have survived and responded to colonisation. As a symbol and a reference point for collective life, it has obviously changed over time.”
Amplified claims
Light says he has a responsibility as a historian to take critical knowledge and ways of thinking about the past into the public arena, where treaty revisionism is a much hotter topic than it was when he began writing. This is a substantial burden for a museum curator and university lecturer to take on when there are politicians who are determined either to forget the past or, more often, to insist that other people forget their own interpretation of the past.
Now, when a politician says Māori aren’t indigenous because they came from somewhere else, or there are no Moriori because he or she says so, they get a lot of attention, whereas the counter-narrative struggles to get anything like the same amount of notice.
“It’s very hard and frustrating as a historian when you hear these kinds of claims made in public. There’s this abbreviated online discussion – and whether you can even call it a discussion is a question. Politicians making big claims like that isn’t just a phenomenon of social media, but obviously, it’s been amplified and intensified by them. I’d like to think [that] in the future we can move beyond that. But [for now] I think that’s part and parcel of a public life.
“A more fruitful, constructive kind of response is for people to slow down a little bit, ask more questions about the claims being made, and to think more critically of their own collective context, and why they might be using certain terms and language to frame the past and the relationship to the past. Why are those different to [the views of] other groups that they’re encountering, with different political and ideological commitments?”
In other words, how has who I am and where I come from shaped my thinking about history and how it relates to my life today? With this mindset, as happened with the people of Whangaroa, positive results can occur. “I’m very optimistic about the potential for when you sit down and talk with people. This is something I’ve appreciated working in the museum. Museums tend to be much more trusted institutions than [universities].”
When it’s suggested that maybe the reason people don’t trust universities as much as they do museums is that no one got taken to a university on outings when they were kids, Light does not demur. Similarly, museum visits, unlike university lectures, tend to be intergenerational, with a diversity of voices able to be heard at once.
“I’ve had conversations which start out in terms that you might describe as ignorant and quite offensive, but over the course of a conversation – and particularly one where you have different generational voices contributing, not just me as an expert talking down to people – you can start to shift attitudes. But I don’t think you solve any of these debates quickly. I think they are intergenerational.”
Why Memory Matters: ‘Remembered Histories’ and the Politics of the Shared Past, by Rowan Light (BWB Texts, $17.99).
Whose history is it anyway?
The historian Michael King came under fire late in his career for telling Māori history to which, in some people’s eyes, he had no right. His motives and skill were never questioned, but his understanding of issues around Māori history were. Rowan Light agrees that King believed he was writing something that needed to be told because it hadn’t been written about. But as far as Māori were concerned, they didn’t need anybody to tell it to them. They already knew it.
“We are at a very different place now,” says Light, reflecting the big shift in Māori history since the time when Pākehā historians had so much of the field to themselves.
“When King was writing, there were fewer Māori histories. That’s no longer the case. There are more Māori historians. And that’s probably taken some of the defensiveness out of what you might call a territorial dispute.”
For historians now, “it’s not good enough to simply slot Māori in as one aspect of our history. There’s a foundation there in language, in ways of life, that are key to understanding our histories. It’s probably too general to say we’re better at acknowledging the Māori language, for example, but I think we [historians] are getting there as a discipline. That’s a very contested thing at the moment. But there is a stronger recognition that we can’t write New Zealand history without Māori language.”
Light adds that the collaborative approach could be central to how history is told.
“Attention to memory has to be more part and parcel of the historian’s approach. We probably need to get used to collaborative research; research that’s much more centred in communities, recognition that the researcher has a really crucial part to play but that they have to be more collaborative in how they approach narratives of the past. I think we probably need to get more comfortable with things like co-authorship.”
