Confronting our history is not about creating discord, but rather about binding us together as a nation
Photograph: Fiona Goodall/Getty ImagesPhotograph: Fiona Goodall/Getty Imagestroops on the Gallipoli peninsula on 25 April 1915, has long been a day for many New Zealanders to reflect on their country’s involvement in wars. But until recently the wars commemorated were exclusively foreign ones, not those fought closer to home, on Aotearoa’s own shores.
In recent years that has begun to change, as many non-Māori also come to learn about and acknowledge the 19th-centuryfought between the crown and various Māori communities between 1843 and 1872 – defining conflicts for land and sovereignty whose consequences continue to be felt today in multiple ways.
How Pākehā New Zealanders have engaged with this “difficult” history has undergone radical transformation since the last shots were fired. In the early 20th century a burst of nostalgia for the pioneering period saw the New Zealand wars reframed as chivalrous and heroic conflicts between two worthy foes. In this mythologised version of the wars, mutual respect forged on the battlefield sowed the seeds for future harmony.
By the 1970s more forceful Māori voices, combined with powerful revisionist accounts of this history, had all but discredited the dominant Pākehā interpretation of the past. It was no longer acceptable to celebrate the New Zealand wars. The problem was that no new narrative of the wars emerged, or at least none that gained widespread Pākehā acceptance, and so we were left with a kind of uncomfortable silence.
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