We should at least remember them
Apart from historians and academics, the New Zealand Civil War is something few people want to know about.
On Saturday we marked the first official New Zealand Land Wars Day, just 157 years after the outbreak of hostilities.
For some reason, while we commemorate the New Zealanders who served in the South African War of 1900, the First World War of 1914-1918, the Second World War from 1939 to 1945 and armed conflicts in Korea, Malaya, Vietnam and other places, we seem to have forgotten our first war and the only one we fought at home.
It was also the first time Australians and New Zealanders fought side by side, some 55 years before the Anzac tradition was born at Gallipoli.
The armed conflict, known variously over the years as The Ma¯ ori Wars and the New Zealand Wars, was in fact about much more than land and those involved were not strictly Ma¯ ori on one side and Pa¯ keha¯ on the other.
While the spark which ignited the conflict, on March 17, 1860, was the forced sale of land at Waitara, there were also serious misunderstandings about the meaning of sovereignty and long standing intertribal conflicts in the mix.
The land wars came three decades after the intertribal conflicts known as the Musket Wars. Memories of past battles were still raw. These issues flowed back and forth in priority throughout the conflict.
Not all Ma¯ ori were victims of the land wars and not all Pa¯ keha¯ were aggressors or land sharks. For a number of tribal groups, particularly along the North Island East Coast and in the Far North, who had long-standing and mutually beneficial trading relationships and intermarriages with Pa¯ keha¯ , there was too much to lose in a civil war. Even though Ma¯ ori had a newly established king, there was no single, united Ma¯ ori political entity. The first two Ma¯ ori kings, Potatau Te Wherowhero and his son Tawhiao, who succeeded him, both advised their people to keep out of the fighting and to try to live in peaceful harmony with Pa¯ keha¯ . The Kingitanga was not intended to be an all-powerful ruler. Instead its main function was to try to unite Ma¯ ori against land losses and to preserve their traditional way of life. In spite of having their own king, the loyalty of all tribal leaders was to their own people first. Many remained neutral during the wars and many fought alongside the British.
On the other side not all Pa¯ keha¯ supported the wars and many, particularly clergymen who had worked in Ma¯ ori communities for several decades, were very outspoken against the New Zealand government. Other disaffected Pa¯ keha¯ , most notably Kimble Bent among others, joined with and fought alongside Ma¯ ori.
The British government also expressed alarm and concern as the conflict spread from a minor confrontation in Taranaki in 1860 to a full scale invasion of Waikato three years later. Wars, however, are easier to start than to finish and the fledgling colony was almost abandoned by the British before it was over. The land wars were in fact New Zealand’s civil war and should be remembered as such.
The history of this important phase in the development of modern New Zealand has never been comprehensively taught in our schools and, with each passing generation, fewer people seem even remotely interested in what they were all about.
At the height of the conflict in the 1860s, about 18,000 British troops, supported by artillery, cavalry, local militia and Australian volunteers, fought an estimated 4000 Ma¯ ori, men and women and a few Pa¯ keha¯ , in a massive imbalance of manpower and weaponry.
Over the course of the initial Taranaki and Waikato campaigns, 1800 Ma¯ ori and 800 Europeans were killed and total Ma¯ ori losses over the course of wars which spread to the East Coast of the North Island may have exceeded 2100 from a total population of about 120,000 people. Today, only a few battle sites have been preserved, and only a few monuments and gravesites are known, while the names of most of those who fought and died have all but been forgotten.
The American Civil War of the 1860s is remembered throughout the United States with monuments, parks, reserves and even full dress re-enactments.
By contrast, apart from historians and academics, the New Zealand Civil War is something few people want to know about.
The commemorative day should not be about winners or losers or even rights or wrongs. Those matters are for other times and places, but we should remember the time in our shared history when people fought and died for what they believed in. We owe them that if nothing else.