There is no shame in us pausing to grieve over the horrors and waste of human life in our overseas campaigns such as Gallipoli, but we shouldn’t be proud of the way we pay so little attention to the homegrown battles that shaped our nation.
No one has built a tomb of the unknown toa. We don’t keep a cenotaph for the defeated tauā. There isn’t an obelisk for great rangatira. And, while we build and care for monuments to the men and women who perished in wars on foreign soil, as well as dedicate a day to those who fell at Gallipoli, we continue to ignore the lives lost in the New Zealand Wars.
It doesn’t quite add up. We commemorate New Zealand soldiers who were slaughtered for empire in the Turkish sands while we overlook the New Zealand soldiers and fighters — both Pākehā and Māori — who were slaughtered for empire in the muddy trenches at Orakau. Yet there is an explanation. New Zealand has got into the habit of tracing its nationhood to foreign campaigns in the early 20th century.
The nationhood myth, though, is misleading — maybe deliberately so — because it wasn’t a bitter defeat on foreign soil which forged modern New Zealand. It was the New Zealand Wars which did that.
New Zealand wasn’t like Australia, a vast and disconnected land which came together as a federation only in the early 20th century. Our nationhood really arrived before that with the war for control of the North Island. In eliminating the well-governed and well-functioning society which the Kīngitanga had built, the government could finally cement the foundations of the New Zealand state.
Although ANZAC Day represents a kind of retrospective nationhood, the New Zealand Wars more accurately represent actual nationhood. Perhaps we ignore them because it’s not so clear who was dying for glory or good. War is often portrayed as a drama of opposites, but who was fighting for what in the New Zealand Wars?
The ANZAC Day narrative has become a simple story of bravery, comradeship, freedom, and sacrifice. But the narrative for the New Zealand Wars hasn’t been shaped as clearly or as acceptably. The truth is that invasion of the Waikato was a blatant land grab — Pākehā were never going to ignore the economic potential of Kīngitanga lands. And so the Crown soldiers who died in the New Zealand Wars died for Pākehā control over the indigenous people and over the New Zealand economy. That competition for control may be understandable but it doesn’t seem especially noble.
The Māori warriors who died did so in trying to preserve their rangatiratanga. That seems more noble as well as being understandable. So how do Pākehā come to terms with that?
Telling ourselves that we were on the right side at Gallipoli is more comforting than the moral ambiguity of the New Zealand Wars. That’s not to say the New Zealand Wars can be reduced to a morality tale. But it is true that the tales of bravery we hear on ANZAC Day are far more comforting for a young nation.
ANZAC Day encourages us to commemorate and honour the dead and the wounded from our overseas wars. There is nothing wrong with that. But before we can do that for victims in the New Zealand Wars we need to ask some questions — and come to terms with what happened. And why it happened.
New Zealand wasn’t ready to do this in the 20th century. But, with the historical settlement process coming to an end, now is the perfect time.
Michael King used to describe ANZAC Day as “the necessary myth”. Necessary in the sense that we needed a story about the birth of our shared sense of identity. And necessary as well in the sense that New Zealand needed an occasion of gravity to acknowledge the unimaginable suffering at Gallipoli and beyond. Surely that necessity now extends to the identity forged through the suffering on our own soil.
Thank you for reading E-Tangata. If you like our focus on Māori and Pasifika stories, interviews, and commentary, we need your help. Our content takes skill, long hours and hard work. But we're a small team and not-for-profit, so we need the support of our readers to keep going.
If you support our kaupapa and want to see us continue, please consider making a one-off donation or contributing $5 or $10 a month.
I tend to agree with the
I tend to agree with the article but the ‘elephant in the room’ is the musket wars which caused ten times the casualties- 20,000 vs 2,000 Maori. Most Maori I talk to are very uneasy or even embarrassed in discussing this and what took place. We decry the victims of the NZ wars yet feel pride about the 28th Maori Battalion and revere Willie Apiata.
War is murky and ugly, right from the geo-politics that start it, down to the blood that is spilled on the battlefield and the history that is written by the victors afterwards.
Maoridom is torn between its warrior identity and lamenting the loses that were suffered and subsequent impacts those have had. Live by the patu, die by the patu?
I feel uneasy about our resurgence in our warrior identity, our embracing of ‘staunch’ etc. While we are ‘rebuilding’ our culture why not focus on creating tohunga / ‘expert practitioners’ rather than warriors? Imagine that… a tribe of tohunga – imagine what they could accomplish in today’s world!!!
We don’t all have a shared
We don’t all have a shared history, not even concerning the New Zealand Wars. See http://www.putatara.net/2015/05/anzac/ for another view.
Kia ora tatou ano. I speak in
Kia ora tatou ano. I speak in relation to the recent 100th year commemoration of ANZAC.
In 2003 shortly after the US led invasion of Iraq at Auckland University, I spoke as one of the key speakers at a forum hosted by Palestinian Students for Justice. My intention was to make a link between the ‘Al Nakhba’ (the catastrophe) which Palestinians commemorate in regards to the Zionist State of Israel in 1948 and ANZAC.
Your average Kiwi looks at the continuous bloodbaths happening in the Middle East and says “look at those silly buggers slaughtering each other; they’ve been doing it for hundreds of years. Got nothing to do with us.”
Well this perception is completely false. Peaceful co-existence between Moslems and Jews stretching back to biblical times and into the centuries of relative peace under Ottoman Rule before its bloody demise, were shattered by Western Imperialist powers as early as Crimea in the 1850’s culminating in the events of 1914-1918.
The bloodletting we see today Syria, Iraq…Yemen, are but the latest manifestations of a process begun by British And French Imperialists at beach-heads like Gallipoli in 1915. The intention of Gallipoli was to seize, carve up and steal every resource they could get their bloody hands on. Indeed Gallipoli 1915 marks the true ‘Al Nakhba’ for the entire Middle East and its people.
For the antipodean lackey’s Australian and New Zealand, the whole ugly story has become a source of national identity and sold to their respective populations already tainted by British Imperialist rhetoric and mythology. In the modern environment of US controlled mass media (Warmedia), this has leaped to even more absurd levels.
I’m reminded of a Dick Cavett interview with Jimi Hendrix in 1969, when aware of the youth symbol that Hendrix represented, Cavett tried to make an association between Hendrix (ex-Airborne paratrooper) and the youth counter culture that was opposed to US militarism. Cavetts intention was to make it ‘cool’ to be in the military, just look at Jimi. Hendrix himself just brushed it off and his response was not what Cavett was hoping.
In Australia and New Zealand, the association between youth and warmongering manipulation by both States, has seen youthful backpackers on their OE corralled into the ANZAC Gallipoli euphoria of war in a way that Cavett failed to do with Hendrix.
Unfortunately in a NZ society driven by US corporate electronic narcissism, the need to get your moment of fame no matter what, leaves people particularly youth, open to State manipulation through media as a means of political control.
Which brings us to all the hype around ANZAC. Here in the Waikato, Rangiriri is not too far up the road. All around are the historic places of where many of our Tupuna fell fighting the colonials. The descendants of those Land Wars from both sides are all around us and yet the monuments peppered up and down this country are symbolic of some of the dumbest acts of human stupidity imaginable. This is what our colonial masters had in mind for us; an identity and association of the worst kind. The logic suggests that the NZ and Australian States think we are all a pack of idiots. They could be right.
ANZAC is an Imperialist fetish the Australian State has imposed on its population. New Zealand as its junior semi-colony, has swallowed the whole deal hook line and sinker relegating ‘Te Tiriti’ with Tangata Whenua to a lesser position of importance or preferably, out of sight. The NZ States obsession with building an identity based on a borrowed Australian ANZAC myth, just doesn’t cut it.
For Imperialism and its lackeys like the NZ State, Te Tiriti represents a greater threat to its objectives of total war against sovereignty than many realise. The US initiated TPPA and TTIP are mechanisms of Imperialist enslavement.
Short of a workers led International Revolution (I ain’t holding my breath), Te Tiriti (which was a deal stitched up between two lots of Ruling Classes) at least forms the basis of an identity founded on this Whenua and not at some distant place called Gallipoli.
F
This is such a good analysis
This is such a good analysis of 2 things – silence on the NZ Wars and commemoration of Gallipoli, which is not as convincing as a nation building myth as many people (especially some politicians) like to emphasise. The Gallipoli campaign too was an unjustified attack on Turkish sovereignty just as the NZ wars were an attack on Maori sovereignty. I wonder how modern NZ would have constructed itself without the Gallipoli myth? The truth is that NZ Wars are not commemorated because, as Morgen Godfrey rightly implies, those representing British/Pakeha interests were on the side of wrong. A bitter pill for modern Pakeha to swallow because it questions our very existence on this piece of the Earth.
Thank you for sharing this.
Thank you for sharing this. It is a topic we have discussed on a number of occasions, with similar sentiments. It appears that ‘marketing’ the losses on both sides due to the NZ Land Wars is not a high priority. Nga mihi!
The British have been raping
The British have been raping lesser countries for hundreds of years, & in doing so went about destroying the lives of indigenous people in the name of greed. India, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, USA just to name a few .Other countries, Spain, Holland & Portugal did the same.
Not much to be proud of. If a
Not much to be proud of. If a country were to do that today, how would it be described? Still I believe the English were better invaders than the Spanish.
You are so right and I have
You are so right and I have never been to a dawn parade in my adult life but I went while I was young and because my dad was part of the ceremony.
The point you have made is something I have thought about a lot of times because it doesn’t make sense that we celebrate other peoples future instead of our own and our own whanau and whenua although many families are proud that their whanau went to this world war to help others and today the government is spending money on sending our troops to another country while our country pay their expenses and the reason being there is because NZ Army are intelligent and well advised which should be at the expense of that country who need help.
I wish that all NewZealand look at what you believe we should be celebrating and I hope that Maanu Paul sees this and then maybe the people of NewZealand will see the new future of those we forget to remember on our own whenua of our own pakanga and memorials placed for them so that we can remember them too
KIA ORA TATAU
KIA ORA TATAU
Indeed, it’s more than time that the New Zealand Government and its institutions acknowledged the true nature of the land wars by establishing some formal and appropriate means of recognising and honouring Maori who died and suffered in defending their lands an taonga against the then still expanding and self-justifying British Empire. Maybe Anzac Day or some equally appropriate day, should become New Zealand’s National Memorial Day to recognise all and everybody who died or was injured for the cause they held to and to recognise and honour the right and justice of what they fought for.
I was talking to some whaanau
I was talking to some whaanau about this Kaupapa ANZAC day for me as a uri of Ngaati Ruanui and Ngaa Rauru KII Tahi I see any maaori names on the crosses in our Town in Patea and also watch on maaori TV Te Raa O Hune on what happen in Tainui I want out Iwi to have a day we we remember our Tupuna who were killed. In the land wars and the other Wars our whaanau fought in
To admit the NZ Wars into the
To admit the NZ Wars into the pantheon of myths would be to admit that this land was taken by force (murder, rape, torture) alongside the pen (legislation, confiscation) for the benefit of Imperial Britannia. A large number of pakeha do not wish to hear, see or taste such a narrative!
NZ history is very much
NZ history is very much missing from the cirriculum when I was at school over 20 years ago. Hence the widespread ignorance by most and frustration by many pakeha about treaty claims. Time to replace British Curriculum with NZ curriculum.
You are absolutely right
You are absolutely right Morgan Godfrey there has been too much emphasis on battles fought outside of Aotearoa however the New Zealand Land Wars is hardly ever recognized as a genuine war that has shaped this country especially from the out come. Today 97% of land is owned by the pakeha and the Crown. Hence this is the epitaph that would go out to the community, “STOLEN LAND” because in the 1800’s after the New Zealand Land Wars the Crown started to legislate ownership of land to themselves and the incoming settlers. That is one of the reasons why I get so angry when they have a celebration about the formation of the Kawerau township in 1954 when this community in pre – European times was predated by Ngati Tuwharetoa and still is today.. I don’t think the Crown is ready to acknowledge that they are the thief when our New Zealand history of war was about land.