Stories needed to make our history compelling
‘New Zealand history is boring,’’ says my daughter. I suck in sharply. At 13, she knows everything, but this untruth needs fixing up fast. I consider my options: enforced library book reading, curated YouTube clips, a family field trip to Parihaka.
Then she reminds me. By year 8, she has endured no fewer than four classroom forays into a single New Zealand historical event – the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi – which now comprises the bulk of her idea of ‘‘New Zealand history’’.
Comparing what I’ve learned about New Zealand history with my daughter’s notion of it, I see a troubling gap.
Now that teaching our own country’s history will be made compulsory in New Zealand schools and kura from 2022, we need to get cracking on making our varied histories understood and interesting.
It takes stories, good ones and in lots of shapes and sizes, to capture the imaginations of children learning their own histories.
I am a child of America’s 1970s history education, before feminist, indigenous and AfricanAmerican historians helped us broaden the white patriarchal version of America’s past. As problematic as the narrow renditions of history that I was taught turned out to be, my history education was certainly full of vivid stories that stuck with me through the years.
The Boston Tea Party was the culmination of many years of political resentment between Britain and its American colonies. But it was the image of men, some dressed up in Native American costumes, protesting by heaving unfairly-taxed chests of tea into the harbour that marked my 7-year-old mind. This story was a concise, digestible historical event that illustrated quite simply an empowered colony’s desire to separate from its motherland just before the American Revolution.
I probably wasn’t the only American kid who didn’t really understand the meaning of the words ‘‘no taxation without representation’’ when I first learned them in early primary school. But the phrase’s slightly poetic rhythm stayed with me throughout my schooling until it was time, years later, to figure out what those long words meant. The terms became real to me when I wrestled with the concept of balancing responsibilities and rights in political systems in Civics class in high school.
There were songs too. About Davey Crockett and Johnny Appleseed and slave songs from the mysterious network of Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad, which ushered tens of thousands of slaves into freedom before and during the Civil War. Such stories gave shape to my understanding of the vast and diverse country that I grew up in.
These anecdotes may not be perfect in their interpretations of historical milestones taught in the US, but they show the importance of creating terms, narrative arcs, and ideas that connect us with a lively past that is worth remembering.
Decades after my formal education ended, I stood on Banks Peninsula looking down into Akaroa Harbour, where I heard about the story of Te Rauparaha’s extraordinary revenge attack on Nga¯ i Tahu in 1830. The northern chief’s subversive alliance with a British trader, the ship that hid over a hundred warriors like a Kiwi Trojan Horse, the canoes slipping into the night to raid the settlement . . . it all makes for incredible history that shows the challenging forces at play in 19th-century New Zealand. It was Te Rauparaha’s haka, after all, that has become the most popular haka in the entire world, Ka Mate. Why aren’t these stories better known?
The 1951 waterfront dispute, the internationally ground-breaking suffrage movement, and the mass migration of Pacific peoples all need storytellers to bring these formative national events into the light of a busy classroom.
There are so many stories to uncover and debates to have! Will we tell the terrible story of the Parihaka attack from the Government’s side too? Which of our many substantive migrant populations will be featured in-depth in the curriculum? How was it that southern Africa and New Zealand, colonised by the British in roughly the same era of history, created such dramatically different political systems and how will we teach this?
Graeme Ball, head of NZ’s History Teachers Association, assures us that ‘‘that’s what history is about’’ and that raising concerns about historical ideas are an important part of the process of writing it. Writing our history stories into the national curriculum, he warns, will and should involve differing perspectives and challenges to our current understandings.
Writers, musicians, poets, and teachers, take to your keyboards and start narrating the colourful stories of Aotearoa. Bring us vivid images and colourful storylines that will form the basis of our shared understanding of a complex past that extends far beyond, well, the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.
It’s your time to make history.
It takes stories, good ones and in lots of shapes and sizes, to capture the imaginations of children learning their own histories.