The trouble with the NZ Wars
Historians continue to debate the telling of the 19th-century conflict, but Danny Keenan argues that, for Ma¯ori, it was all about land.
The New Zealand Wars are everywhere these days. Perhaps it’s true – every generation writes its history
anew.
But problems remain with the storytelling. For Ma¯ ori, the wars were devastating, as Pa¯ keha¯ historians remind us. It’s a bit like – to coin a phrase – ‘‘the winners reminding the losers how badly they lost’’. Certainly, memories of those tu¯ puna lost in such egregious circumstances do invite a certain cultural circumspection. But that doesn’t mean that Ma¯ ori narratives should be seen as disempowered or inconsequential.
Earlier, Ma¯ ori stories and modes of expressions were integral to the work of Pa¯ keha¯ historians otherwise swayed by contemporary influences.
Writing in the 1920s, James Cowan used Ma¯ ori modes of expression to condemn Ma¯ ori losses. But few were listening, with Gallipoli a significant distraction, as was the advent of Anzac Day in 1920, a new, triumphal national day that erased our colonial past.
During the 1950s, as the British Empire decolonised, Keith Sinclair rued the suffering of Ma¯ ori, pointing to the failure of British humanitarianism which forced Ma¯ ori ‘‘to fight for their existence’’. For Keith Sorrenson, however, the problem was closer to home; the wars constituted ‘‘a conflict for land, and for authority over land’’.
With the Waitangi Tribunal emerging in the 1970s, Tony Simpson excoriated the Wakefields for transporting deception and violence to Ma¯ ori. Alan Ward wrote of a ‘‘crisis of the 1860s’’, with fearful Pa¯ keha¯ determined to subdue Ma¯ ori. Tim Ryan and Bill Parham coined the phrase ‘‘gun-fighter Pa¯ ’’ to describe hapu¯ digging underground to escape the dreadful musket and, later, the Enfield rifle.
Many other notable historians have debated the wars; a prodigious literature covers most aspects of these conflicts.
And Ma¯ ori did suffer. ‘‘Nga¯ Paka¯ nga Whenua o Mua’’ refers to endemic warfare that afflicted papaka¯ inga, going back well before the 1860s. In fact, such expressions reflect the nuanced nature of tribal narratives that follow their own cultural trajectories, conforming to the conventions of the marae, resisting coercion to accommodate dominant Pa¯ keha¯ narratives.
This is why, for example, Ma¯ ori resist the notion, advanced by most Pa¯ keha historians these days, that the wars constituted a bitter and bloody war for sovereignty – by implication, a civil war. This is especially so when historians turn this back on Ma¯ ori by suggesting that, in fact, the wars were really a civil war between the tribes, with the Crown acting as mere bystander.
It is true that, towards the end, Ma¯ ori tragically fought Ma¯ ori. But they did so to serve Crown purposes, not their own. At all stages, the Crown’s interests remained paramount, negating a ‘‘Ma¯ ori civil war’’. And the wars were lost in the Waikato, where the Kingitanga fought against the British Army, not other Ma¯ ori.
As to a ‘‘New Zealand Civil War’’ – Crown against Ma¯ ori – the idea has had some air, but hasn’t been argued
convincingly. Standing on Te Kohia Pa¯ , near Waitara, James Belich declaimed that ‘‘this was the place where the great civil wars of the 1860s began’’. Belich described overlapping realms of colonial sovereignty, taking issue with Ma¯ ori who, like Sorrenson, insisted that land was the issue.
Yet, for Ma¯ ori, land was the issue, because land and sovereignty were the same thing; you can’t have one without the other. Te tino rangatiratanga was anchored by whakapapa into ancient landscapes ‘‘posited as living beings, enhanced by founding tu¯ puna, enshrining ongoing cultural expressions of mana’’, writes Justice Eddie Durie. It was all about the mana of the land which, though subject to egregious dispossession and loss, endured.
Now, however, in these times of political post-Treaty settlements, it seems a good idea to reinforce sovereignty as the primary cause – and the prize – reminding revitalised Ma¯ ori of what was lost, or perhaps what was never theirs.
If sovereignty really matters as the primary cause, then the challenging intellectual case for sovereignty and civil war needs to be argued. But no Pa¯ keha historian has yet made the attempt to ground sovereignty into New Zealand’s historical, literal or figurative organic landscape – at least, not since Cowan. Other historians remain unconvinced, like JGA Pocock who, writing in 1965, argued that, unlike the Crown, Ma¯ ori did not constitute a single civil polity.
Historians need to do more than merely posit sovereignty as an overarching cause with no grounding, existing somewhere out there, in the process dismissing Ma¯ ori counter-narratives framed by the sustaining land, forests, rivers and other resources – rooted in cultural millennia – which, as it so happened, were taken from Ma¯ ori with such violence and, yes, causing immeasurable suffering.
Land was the issue, because land and sovereignty were the same thing; you can’t have one without the other.
Dr Danny Keenan (Te A¯ tiawa) is author of Te Whiti O Rongomai and the Resistance of Parihaka (Huia, 2015).