Facing up to our history
Glossed-over lessons about European settlement are facing an overdue reckoning
It’s clear we are heading for a reckoning in this country over the history of how the country was settled by Europeans in the 19th century. With the drive towards knowing our own real history, not the sanitised, dumbed-down version that was fed to most of us at school, will come a call for redress and a disbelief that we, as a country, are living with the outcomes of the deaths of people either at their own hands with the use of European weapons or at the hands of the later colonising powers.
Many will feel ashamed about what they learn, many will not care — different time, different values — but we all live with the fallout of those events today, both Ma¯ori and Pa¯keha¯, with other cultures now in the country trying to understand it all.
With the renaissance of things Ma¯ori in the past 50 years, the acceptance of te reo as an important part of our country’s culture and the attempt to address historic wrongs there is a coming unrest among younger people, both brown and white, who will not accept what has preceded them.
Thankfully our children seem, as a generation, to be more accepting and open to difference in every way than us.
For the generation that enjoyed being hippies, free love, dope and the right to express ourselves in whatever way we felt we are a bunch of old stuffed shirts, really.
Mind you I was never a hippy and certainly never got much free love, which was probably a blessing really.
But some did push things politically, normally university students and Ma¯ori “radicals” back in the late 60s and 70s. The rest of us were too busy trying to make a living and saving for our first home.
When Te Atawhai o te Ao Research Institute reveals that a survey conducted of 2000 Ma¯ori
A survey conducted of 2000 Ma¯ori reports that
93 per cent of Ma¯ori experience racism every day of their lives and that 96 per cent say racism is a problem
for their wha¯nau.
across Aotearoa-New Zealand reports that 93 per cent of Ma¯ori experience racism every day of their lives and that 96 per cent say racism is a problem for their wha¯nau, we have an issue.
These figures surprised and saddened the Ma¯ori researchers. Racism is, based on this research, well-embedded in our society despite the country portraying itself to the world as a racial paradise.
Some of you may say that perhaps the participants are just a little over-sensitive. Maybe, but I doubt it. I believe racism can be subjective but it is still racism, no matter how it is perceived.
This comes back to the subject of “white privilege”, a topic I have mentioned before in this column.
It is a very difficult topic for many people of a paler hue to understand as they are not affected by the results.
Like many Pa¯keha¯, I did not consider myself privileged until I began to look at the concept through the eyes of others.
I am privileged, the society I am descended from made this country, made the laws, enforced the laws, wrote the sanitised history we all learnt, put to bed the stories of atrocities committed during the wars of the 19th century by the colonising powers, not wanting to go back to those memories, moving on.
Well, you see, it was easier for people with the white skin to move on as it was not them that lost everything.
Apart from Irish settlers, few early settlers knew what it was to be colonised and to have your whole way of life taken away from you, including your language, your customs and your food sources.
Indigenous people do not have the luxury of forgetting and moving on.
They are on the rough end of the health outcomes, the underachievement in education, the shortened life spans, the employment issues and the resulting crime figures which have over half the prison population in New Zealand Ma¯ori when Ma¯ori make up 16.5 per cent of the country’s population.
The reasons for these figures can be argued all day but the over-riding reason in my opinion is colonisation.
You invade a country of people happily minding their own business, set in place a new set of rules that favours the invader over the occupant, make it unlawful for the occupant to own land, talk their tongue, access the services that the invader takes for granted such as health and education, go to war with all the might of the British Empire behind you against a numerically smaller foe in order to seize land for more invaders to buy from earlier, opportunistic invaders, not the original occupants.
You do all this and expect a good outcome for the original people. Not likely.
How the reckoning will pan out will be interesting.
It will happen and it is up to all of us how it is managed.
It will be uncomfortable for many I suspect but we will come through it a better nation.