Moana Jackson is a Wellington-based lawyer with a Ngāti Kahungunu and Ngāti Porou whakapapa.
For many years he has been one of the country’s leading thinkers, especially on the subject of the relationship between Māori and the Crown.
So he’s not easily won over by the Crown’s recent undertaking to “commemorate” the 19th century wars when it wrested so much land from Māori and assumed a sovereignty that was never agreed.
History always promises opportunities for truth. The debate generated by the petition from students of Otorohanga College to have the wars of the 19th century commemorated has led to the possibility of one such moment. The Crown announcement that a day will be set aside for commemoration appeared to indicate that the moment might be grasped, but unfortunately, that may not be the case.
The announcement noted the day would be a chance for “retelling of new histories that we have not heard before”. Yet the histories are not new to most Māori. The costs and consequences of the Crown decision to wage war against iwi and hapū have been a living history for generations.
The fact that there will, at last, be some other commemoration is welcome. But how will the wars actually be remembered?
Will there be an honest accounting of their brutality? And will there be any questioning of the power and wealth which the Crown acquired because of them — and which many Pākehā now take for granted?
Or will there simply be a revisionist and incomplete accounting that leaves the current power structures unchanged and unchallenged? What (or whose) history will the commemorations represent?
The history of war is never a simple remembering, because its truth always jostles uneasily with what people think about themselves and their past. This is especially the case in the wars of colonisation because they were merely the most extreme expression of the violence needed to take over the lands, lives, and power of others.
Colonisation is an inherently brutal process and, in New Zealand, warfare was an inevitable part of the colonisers’ need to establish their power in a land where they had never had any before. It was the raw acting out of a colonising will to dispossess — an unwarranted assault against innocents whose only offence was wanting to defend their homes.
In the Māori remembering of those wars, it is that defence of home which gives context to the never forgotten rape and aggression of every assault and every whim of the Crown’s aggressive intent. It is the love of home which also gives meaning to the defence as both the expression and protection of tino rangatiratanga. It is found in a remembering in the land that still calls if people care to listen.
At Parihaka, it floats in the mist when it hangs low and hides the face of the maunga Taranaki, which the people there love so well. It sounds in the waiata which they still sing, and in the soft tapping of their poi or the steady beating of their drums. Each one remembers the promise of Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi to cherish peace, while never forgetting that being peaceful in the face of invasion was a noble act of resistance.
Not far away, near Tauranga Ika, the remembering lies in what is now a quiet field and the terror-filled stories of playing children cut down by the colonisers’ guns and sabres. Wi Te Tau Huata, who had been a chaplain in the Māori Battalion and knew the dread of war, once called that place “he whenua pōuri”: the land still wracked with grief because of what was done there. The field is now covered in soft grass, and the past has been furrowed deep in the land with each new planting. But the histories remain.
The same sad honesty and unequivocal defiance is found in other stories too.
In Whakatōhea, the people do not flinch from the hostility of the wars, nor from the reality that they fought for the mana which they had been entrusted to hold for their mokopuna.
The original text on the memorial they erected at Te Tarata did not speak of someone else’s nation building but of the stark facts of what happened there: “In memory to the 45 Ngāti Ira and others who were tragically slaughtered by cannon, the blade of the sword in the only cavalry charge in Aotearoa under the direct punitive scorched earth policy of the Crown during its raupatu and confiscation in October 1865.”
The painful courage of that honesty is now commemorated in nine pou embedded deep in the earth, as if they are drawing the stories up into the light.
Yet such stories are a recapturing of truth as much as a statement of record. For, once the wars had been fought, and written history replaced experience as the vehicle for understanding them, the colonisers tried to silence whatever iwi and hapū knew. Their causes and costs became a mere footnote in a story about building the new New Zealand nation and the new Kiwi identity. It did not suit the colonisers’ interests to question the unjustness of the wars, or the grievances they caused to iwi and hapū in terms of human suffering and the confiscation of millions of acres of land.
It suited them even less to question the overarching grievance of colonisation because to do so would have questioned the legitimacy (and the ethics) of both the wars and their claim to power.
Instead, truth and history were collapsed into a self-proclaimed innocence in which the takeover of the Māori world eventually became a takeover of historical memory. As a result, a strange silence fell over the wars, which clouded the truth like the smoke that had long faded over the battlefields.
Sometimes that silencing is described as a “social amnesia”, in which the past has slipped from the mind in the kind of almost accidental and blameless forgetting that occurs with the passage of time.
However, the wars never just wilted away as if by chance or a simple forgetting in the haze of long ago.
Like the other great misremembering, in which the Treaty of Waitangi is characterised as a voluntary giving up of iwi and hapū authority to the Crown, the stories of the war were consciously redefined in a way which flew in the face of Māori political and social realities.
Ceding mana or sovereignty in a treaty was legally and culturally incomprehensible in Māori terms — and the stories that eventually became the dominant narrative about the wars were similarly at odds with every belief iwi and hapū ever had about their authority and the grounds upon which they would take up arms to defend it.
There was no amnesia at play but a deliberate misremembering and renaming.
The renaming began with the “Māori Wars”, as if Māori were the belligerents and the colonisers were the aggrieved. Māori were described as “rebels” or mocked on memorials to those who upheld “law and order” against the forces of “fanaticism and barbarism”. The fanatics and barbarians were the “non-friendly” Māori who opposed the Crown, of course, and the “law and order” was the authority the Crown wished to impose by destroying the law and order implicit in tino rangatiratanga.
The term “land wars” then became popular, which unwittingly recognised that the taking of land was fundamental to the taking of power. However, it simplified the conflicts into the colonisers struggle to become “settlers” without acknowledging that in settling the land they were unsettling the people to whom it belonged.
But even the most persistent renaming could not entirely remove the reminders of what had been done, because the descendants of those who had been slaughtered were too close at hand. Renaming the past is best done when no one is around who lived the truth and most suffered its consequences.
Trying out the new Kiwi identity was thus a wayward and uncertain affair that always seemed caught between the cultural cringe of looking back to England as home and the nagging cringe of knowing what had happened here in someone else’s home.
But with the invasion of Gallipoli in 1915, a morbid ANZAC fantasy provided a distant and safer source of identity. The sacrifice of a far-away battle became a sad but more comforting expression of “Kiwi-ness” which was different from Englishness and unencumbered by the fatal proximity of the wars fought here. Gallipoli, of course, became a misremembering too, but its obsessive romanticism further silenced what had been done to Māori.
It is unfortunate that the recent commemoration discussions are based on the same misremembering. Their violence is less easily marginalised now because our people are more open to sharing the experience of a great wrong and less willing to accept the pulp fiction of those who committed the wrong. However, while the Crown now acknowledges and “regrets” the wars, it is also naming them as “the wars which shaped the nation”.
This is just another misremembering because the assaults on iwi and hapū were always an attack on their political authority and thus their sense of independent nationhood. Just as the term “settler” misrepresents the reality of dispossession, so the claim that the wars shaped the new nation ignores the fact that they purposefully misshaped the nations that were already here.
A proper commemoration of the wars means acknowledging all those different realities and accepting that they were neither the “Māori Wars” nor the “Land Wars” nor even “the wars that shaped the nation”.
As some have noted, they were “sovereignty wars”, which more aptly recognises them as colonising wars to take power. To properly name them in that way is recognition that, in the end, any remembering of the pity of war is necessarily a political and historical act as well as a deeply human one. It requires an honest and even moral reckoning with the past, and a context which explains why certain things happened, and the consequences which flowed from them.
Because colonisation is the context, then dealing with the wars must also be part of dealing with all that it has done, including the constitutional and political power structures which it imposed. If a commemoration merely expresses regret for the painful wrong of the wars without having the courage to address those structures through a process of constitutional transformation, it is not a commemoration at all. It will simply be a deceit, rather like a burglar regretting the wrong but keeping the spoils.
It will not be easy to find that more honest commemoration, because historical truth can be discomfiting and seem impossible to change. It may even raise concerns about waking up dangerous sleeping dogs, but because the wars have never slept in the collective Māori consciousness, there is a greater risk in not addressing the need for a just remembering that seeks conciliation and an easing of the fretful reminders of a land that is not yet properly healed.
The Treaty held out an ineffable hope for such conciliation — and the memory of all those who suffered in the wars certainly deserves nothing less.
Only a commemoration which honourably remembers the past and paves the way to dealing with all that it has wrought can help us achieve that longed-for goal. Without it, the country will have forfeited this chance for truth in a history that is still with us.
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Thank you for this thought
Thank you for this thought-provoking article – and some thoughtful responses. I wish we could have the same debate in Australia – notwithstanding the complexities of 500 Aboriginal nations, each with their own language. But unfortunately many of our politicians seem to be in a state of permanent denial. As Judge Joe Williams said at the 40th anniversary of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS ) at the ANU a few years ago ‘Never let us pretend that the process of colonisation has been fun.’ I wonder if any future commemoration of the ‘sovereignty wars’ might also recall the role that Australia played in the conflicts in Aotearoa (e.g. Jeff Hopkins-Weise’s ‘Blood Brothers: The Anzac Genesis’. Rosedale, North Shore, New Zealand: Penguin Books, 2009. (Also published by Wakefield Press, South Australia, 2009).
At least with the British
At least with the British there was a treaty to be disputed. There would not have been a debate if it was French, German or Belgian. Compensation should be made by the British Government, but NZ would have to stand in line behind other former colonies ie India. The British are unable to pay compo, because they haven’t yet repaid the US for their loans during WW2. The NZ Taxpayer cannot continue to pay compo, in many cases to themselves.
This article shows how any
This article shows how any day of remembrance could be hijacked and become poisonous.
There is no attempt to understand the motivation of diverse people on both sides, which surely must be part of any national commemoration worth having.
I find it odd that the author here seems wary of revisionist historians. That is not automatically a dirty word, or anti-Maori (in fact, more the opposite).
Part of remembrance and commemoration should be a minimal degree of mutual respect, reflection, and attempt to understand…not just a beat up or mudslinging.
The article is heavy on emotion and metaphor and much sparser in terms of facts or fairness. It then asks for honourably remembering the past, which it makes no attempt to do itself.
Given the whakapapa of the author some perspective beyond the NZ Land wars as simply a brutal race-based war would have been more helpful if we are talking about facing the truth.
What events preceded the wars? Who & what groups was involved? Why? How was war conducted by Maori & Europeans?
The answer is that this was not a sports field. There were more than two teams involved (not just Pakeha vs Maori, or even ‘Good’ vs ‘Bad’).
Maori and Pakeha were diverse groups in terms of their motivations or commitments and their loyalties even to each other.
I see little attempt to face any truth here, only a part, and only one revisionist aspect to be a stick in the eye of the non-Maori public.
The claim that Maori already know the history and Pakeha don’t isn’t true. Having been part of the Waikato 150th commemorations (literally front and centre at some events) and discussing both with the Maori who organised these events & outside the events, I find Maori are no better or worse than Pakeha when it comes to real knowledge.
Some know only enough to be dangerous and twist or invent history, same as Pakeha.
The history has enough that is shameful without fiction & emotion layered upon it. The effects of confiscation and collective punishment is unjust enough to not invent anything more. What we would consider now as war crimes did occur on BOTH sides, but also examples of chivalry. And this was also just as true in Aotearoa before the Pakeha came.
Just one example in this article of the twisted perspective: The sabring and shooting of “…..children playing near Tauranga Iki pa….”. The group the cavalry attacked was found because they were outside the pa walls slaughtering a pig with a pocket knife and the squeals brought the troopers. There were children amongst them. Now, if the Maori found a young Pakeha doing farms chores they would have killed them too (and Maori did kill children in just the same sort of circumstances. Wiremu Tamehana even warned Gov. Grey in a letter early during the Waikato War about the Maori method of warfare). Maori killed Pakeha and Maori killed Maori at this time.
So there is blindness and selective memory on both sides, and twisting of details like “children playing”. War is war and murder is murder. Let’s try and reflect back without prejudice and hatred when we view the past. Otherwise people get so twisted inside it is not possible to have any dialogue. I would love to be able to discuss history like this more often but people like Mr Jackson mean that any commemoration, insight or understanding of OUR ancestors is made more difficult.
Chivalry on both sides? You
Chivalry on both sides? You miss the point completely. We are the invaders. The rapists. The thieves. We took it all. Illegally. Even by the standard of our own imposed laws. Please, don’t ask for the commemoration, insight or understanding to be easy.
I think summing up Pakeha,
I think summing up Pakeha, and ‘we’ (as in all of us…. forever) as “rapist and thieves” shows that some people are just as ill prepared for commemoration as the public they want to brow bear into learning about the Land Wars.
Remember we are talking about the Land Wars specifically here.
There were people of honour/principles and many voices & opinions at the time. And the reverse is true: monstrous people and ruthless people. I know the people, their faces and their words since I read the primacy sources where possible.
History should not be reduced to being cardboard cut outs & 1 dimensional fantasy. As far as literal raping going on, murder and rape occurred in the later Land Wars most certainly. The clearest records are the followers of Te Kooti, rape and sexual enslavement, coming from Maori sources. (Maori suffered more from Te Kooti than the Pakeha). The government passed a Disturbed District act to allow for summary justice after the Poverty Bay massacre. And Maori fought for & against the crown, or remained neutral, or swapped sides over time. Some of the worst atrocities that are firmly established were perpetuated by Maori on both sides in the later Land Wars. European commanders can be condemned for not restraining some of the killing of prisoners in the East Coast Wars, and the bounty and head hunting in Taranaki & Te Urewera. I find the summary that ‘we’ are thieves and rapists so twisted it is hard to believe you made any effort to develop an insight of any sort. This is complex history and requires studying decades of events across different regions of NZ, different iwi and hapu, and this takes a lot of effort across many sources. The story & character of the Land Wars was not the same at any one time and any one place to be summed up easily. Land was stolen, land was sold, land was gifted, land was swindled. Mixed communities existed from the earliest times, trade, intermarriage, and the flipside of the coin is could be to focus on the broader aspects around changes in both societies and standards of living, food production, technology, cooperation etc. Not all that happened is shameful or terrible. It is ironic you say I miss the point when this era and this history is my main passion & I have made more effort than many to get into the heads and understand the times and people and pressures from their own perspective and from a historians perspective without twisted emotion and rage. A good quote comes from James Cowan, who interviewed some of the veterans on both sides while they still lived: “..So ends a story in which both races may find much for pride as well as for regret…” (I have used that quote in a presentation on the NZ Land Wars, along with a picture of me chatting to Tama Iti. When I discussed the NZ Land Wars with him we both agreed there is ugliness to the history but it needs to be remembered. The issue is in the ‘How’, and just how unreasonable some of the slurs and unbalanced accusations are while we try to have that mutual conversation. Slander will turn people off, you won’t reach any hearts and minds, especially when the appeal for others to remember is framed with emotion & ignorance itself.
your quote it needs honest
your quote it needs honest and moral reckoning………..the Japanese soldiers who came as part of the reconstructed Samurai in the Taranaki hills in 2003,could not speak full english,enjoyed mixing with the locals from Parihaka………it was an interesting time for tourism and publicity in media for NZ………..remembering 2003 and what took place………….
I am the son of English
I am the son of English parents, who came to New Zealand to start a new life after the devastation of World War II. While growing up in the areas around Rotorua and Hamilton as a child and into adulthood, I was privileged to have many Maori friends and later those of other Pacific Islands. It became obvious to me that there were many untold stories and the official history was that of the colonizer seeking to make what had been done more palatable to themselves. I have never really known what to do other than acknowledge the wrongs done, outwardly and openly, and keep my wonderful friendships alive.This article is so raw and powerful that I am in tears reading it. KIa kaha, kia toa.
The church is also a.big
The church is also a.big factor in this and I.would.like.to see.Arch Bishops of the Anglican church take a position.
Thought provoking, honest, to
Thought provoking, honest, to the point. Naming this part of history also appeals to me, from now on my reference will be to the Sovereignty Wars of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Our children, Maori and Pakeha, need to know the truth, need to know our and their own history, this really does need to be taught in our schools without prejudice. Thank you Mr Jackson – I for one appreciated reading your article.
A very thought provoking
A very thought provoking article and it re-iterates the consequences of war not just here in Aotearoa but throughout history in all countries where the indigenous people have been suppressed and land annexed. To the victors go the spoils whether they be just or not. We can’t change history but we can create a better one for the future – by what we do now. As Maori we should be focusing on improving the future for our children and mokopuna by setting higher standards of behaviour and education. Let’s make Family Violence socially abhorrent – to be mocked and ridiculed by peers and family. That would work better than just writing new laws to punish offenders. Let’s make it a target to have drastically reduced numbers of prison inmates, of unemployed and homeless people. Let’s make a target of more University graduates in Law, Business and Medicine so Maori fill the key roles in Business and Government – not just token representation. Do this and we will have the ultimate utu – we will win the war of business by being better than we are now ! There are some exciting inroads to achieving these goals already but we just need more of it and the sooner the better! Then we will at least have a fair share of the spoils.
This is a very difficult call
This is a very difficult call. On one hand a day of commemoration is an acknowledgement of these wars and the brutality suffered historically against Maori. On the other hand it appears from those in authority to be a little more than lip service offered to the Otorohanga students petition for their efforts. I sincerely hope NOT.! Your excellent article offers a challenge to further debate so many other elements that this history of colonization raises. Maybe together with the petition makers you can determine where your views and perspectives can be offered and accepted for the betterment of determining policy.around ‘the truth’. Kia ora pai rawa.
Excellent article. I hope the
Excellent article. I hope the truth and the pain of this penetrate the denial around this part of our history.
You know 230 years of
You know 230 years of Colonisation is possibly still fresh and raw in a lot of folks minds and this is a legacy we continue to carry to this very day.All history ,no matter how horrible,would need to be acknowledged.I think the time has arrived to ignite what I see as a way forward in the real healing process of a nation. Mauri Ora !!
A gentle reminder about the
A gentle reminder about the consequences of war raged on one’s whanau, hapu and iwi by the Crown.
Good article thanks
Good article thanks
The first casualty of War is
The first casualty of War is truth, (all Wars) and to build a remembrance is usually an act of forgiveness (Memorial) my personal belief is History is History, and with the Internet it is there for all to read, the biggest loss is we never learn. History will tell you that. And those that suffer the most are the ones that serve, not the ones that lead.