History as curriculum;history as politics

Abstract

This article examines a particular incident in the Waikato wars, 1863–4 and its relevance to the newly mandated New Zealand History curriculum. The new curriculum will for the first time make the teaching of local history compulsory in years 1–10. I examine the wide variety of submissions about the content of this curriculum. As the Royal Society’s Expert Advisory Panel (2021, p. 20) responded, there is a recognition ‘that History can hurt’. It is an opportunity to reject earlier stories of imperial nation-building and support the recovery of subjected, often unheard, voices from the community. I examine two perspectives of an ‘incident’ at Rangiaowhia, first from an historian’s perspective, then, a rearticulated narrative of hapū, Te Apakura. I also examine two local retellings, where the indigenous perspectives are given voice. Unless the silence is broken, countries’ past will be unaddressed and native peoples injuriously affected.

History as curriculum: history as policy

In 1990, a community committee, granted funding to put towards ‘celebrations’ of the 150 years since the signing of The Treaty of Waitangi, decided to write a local history. One of its authors was quoted as crying as she wrote about an incident in Rangiaowhia a century before. In the Waikato Times, she mentioned how upsetting she found that incident and the history of ‘the church that burned us’ (Babington, 1991: p. 1). There were several fierce reactions to this piece. One was written by a local historian, a teachers’ college lecturer in social studies, who accused the authors of poor research. Another was a call from a local Anglican priest for a meeting. The publication may have to be withheld, he threatened. The church would not accept such accusations.

While much of the 1990 commemorations across the country were bland occasions, where people celebrated the ‘bicultural nature’ of the nation’s makeup, strong feelings were stirred in Waikato. One of the reactions was from a local Māori who wrote in response to the social studies lecturer’s letter to the editor, putting a raw, personal and telling tale of bayonetting, murder and mayhem experienced by local hapū at Rangiaowhia. I detail this below. Yet, in the Twenty-first Century Waikato, New Zealand, such emotions remain raw. I have seen adults with tears in their eyes, when talking of the incident. Local hap ū have named their local tertiary campus Te Apakura after the people who left the land to escape imperial troops. A building on the main Hamilton City campus is named Rangiaowhia. The pain remains very real; the emotions ever present.

A genealogy of history as curriculum

In the second decade of the 21st century a movement both within the country and across much of the Western world, articulated the need to hear the little local histories. The silence about the harm of other periods remains a present problem. Unless the silence is broken, countries continue unaddressed and injuriously affected. The Labour Coalition Government (2017–20) instituted a policy of teaching local history in both primary and secondary schools, encouraging teachers and their students to examine their pasts. Launching the community consultation on the policy, the Minister of Education said ‘learners across New Zealand will explore the stories that are unique to us. In Te Tai Tokerau ... learning about the battle that took place in Ruapekapeka during the Northern Wars in the 1800s. In Waikato ... learning about the invasion of Waikato’ (Hipkins, 2021, paras. 4–5). Chris Hipkins stated the following:

I have heard the call for immediate change in the area of New Zealand’s histories. I propose that The New Zealand Curriculum and Te Marautanga o Aotearoa are updated to make explicit the expectation that New Zealand’s histories are part of the local curriculum in all schools and kura. (Hipkins, 2019, para 6).

Previously, New Zealand history curricula had been largely left to the school and its local community. Little New Zealand history was taught in the curriculum; any taught tended to tell the imperial story. Although the 1877 Education Act listed history as a core subject, a conscience rider was added to appease Catholics: ‘no child shall be compelled to be present at the teaching of history whose parents or guardians object thereto’. (para 84:1) In oral Māori history, local, specific histories rumbled below the surface, were kept alive in telling each generation, often as waiata. As the experiences of the local 1990 committee showed, for churches, and many of the settler-citizens, there was a collective ‘silence’.

New Zealand had made education compulsory at the turn of the 20th century, but it was the implementation of changes in the 1930s and 1940s suggested by the Attmore Report that brought in a common, core and free secondary curriculum for all. A school inspector was quoted as noting in 1904 that the teaching of history was less than ideal ‘I do not place much value on it except as a memory exercise, and much prefer treating it by reading lessons from some Historical Reader’ (as cited in Patrick, 2011: p. 195). Rachel Patrick noted that a ‘preface to one of the earliest series of textbooks to be published in New Zealand, The Southern Cross Readers (c.1890), claimed that a lack of local knowledge formed an educational handicap for New Zealand school children’ (p. 197). Some of this, she argued, was offset by the introduction of the School Journal, by National Education newsletters and the impetus that the 1940 centennial offered for schools to collect local histories. Whitcombe and Tombs published a series of books such as Our Nation’s Story: A Course of British History for standards 3–6 from the 1920s to the 1940s and Our Country: A Brief Survey of New Zealand History and Civics (Expert Advisory Panel, 2021: p. 23).

The Education Minister of the time, Rex Mason, supported the 1944 Thomas Report and in 1946 a Syllabus of Social Studies in History and Geography was gazetted. Each school was given the W. H. Reed (1945) publication The Story of New Zealand. Social studies in the post-World War 2 era, if it mentioned the Dominion, largely referred to a British Outpost of which both Māori and Pākehā were justifiably proud.

Patrick (2011) noted the role of history as both a colonising and a pedagogical tool. Many teachers struggled to teach local history, because of the ‘silence’. In one example, a Wanganui Native School teacher, J. S. Isbister, struggled to offer ‘“Stories from Local History — Founding of the Town or District” and “Tales of the Maoris; Local Maori Legends” because of a lack of local information’ (p. 202). The emergence of local history journals gave some background to the regions, but many of these had conscious writers writing ‘real history’ – imperial history – with few Māori voices (Stuart, 1986). Prior to the 1980s, Tony Ballantyne (2010), discussing the writing of history at tertiary level, noted that the ‘colonial’ figured as a kind of national pre-history. It was the slightly awkward and embarrassing prelude that set the stage for the real story, the emergence of distinctive national political and literary traditions and the consolidation of an independent national identity. (p. 3)

The publication of books such as Keith Sinclair's (1961) The Origin of the Maori Wars, The Parihaka Story (1955) by Dick Scott, followed by Ask that Mountain (1975) together with James Belich’s The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (1980) and I Shall Not Die: Titokowaru’s War (1989) provided history teachers with some local, if only North Island material. ¹ Ballantyne (2010) asserted that

James Belich’s New Zealand Wars was particularly important as it not only reread the military history of the wars, but it stressed the ways in which colonial and imperial interpretations of the conflict minimized Maori military capacity in order to shore up the cultural foundations of the colonial enterprise. (p. 3)

Ballantyne and Patrick both see the Waikato University historian Peter Gibbons as re-articulating colonising processes. ² ‘Gibbons stressed that colonization was an ongoing process that molded and delimited the possibilities of the nation-building process into the late twentieth century’ (Ballantyne, 2010: p. 5). He, they asserted, noted the place of writing ‘dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt’:

Writing in and about New Zealand was henceforth involved in the process of colonization, in the implementation of European power, in the description and justification of the European presence as normative, and in the simultaneous implicit or explicit production of the indigenous peoples as alien or marginal. (Ballantyne, 2010: p. 5, p. 5)

While the teaching of history settled into a calm pragmatic space in the post-war period, where the curriculum could be addressed in ways the teacher chose, outside the school, the war continued in discourse, in text. The discourse determined who can speak and what can be said or not said; the confessional of colonisation is enacted. As historians wrote about the colonising process imposed on the indigenes, the effects of the ‘unspoken warfare’ were reinscribed so those in the history classrooms absorbed this discourse. History teaching, indeed, became a story of economic progress, as each generation learned of the first refrigerated ship Dunedin taking lamb from the colonial periphery to the imperial centre. Students learned that exports honed the country’s competitive advantages. From the 1990s, when each teacher, under Tomorrow’s Schools, could teach non-prescriptive curricula, some will have taught of the economic flourishing of fertile lands, producing milk, honey, lamb and beef exports.

‘Belonging’ in the 21st Century has vastly different connotations to those accepted in the 20th. In Waikato, in 1990, the 150th anniversary of the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, a land developer gifted a statue to the city of Hamilton. This portrayed a nuclear Pākehā family, surrounded by ruminants, cow and sheep, together with their working dog; a clear presentation of these peoples using the (confiscated) land ‘productively’. Ballantyne (2010) argued that emergent historical thinking saw colonisation ‘reimagined as fundamentally a cultural project, rather than primarily a set of economic or political asymmetries’ (p. 8). Yet images such as Bob Jones’ farming family would suggest there were spaces where the economic discourse continued.

Belonging was also central to similar moves across the Western world. In Tulsa, United States of America, (Black) State Representative Don Ross (2001), talking of the Tulsa ‘riots’, began with lyrics from the Rogers and Hammerstein show Oklahoma: ‘We know we belong to this land. And the land we belong to is grand, and when we say, ay yippy yi ki yea, We’re only saying, you’re doing fine Oklahoma. Oklahoma OK’ (p. iv). And much of the debate about history has been about ‘belonging’. Is such power a ‘right’ which can be possessed as ‘a commodity’?

Emergent schema; new discourses

Interviewed in the Education Gazette in 2021, Nēpia Mahuika (Ngāti Porou) said ‘your story begins with what you see around you immediately in your day-to-day life and that includes Māori and iwi landmarks and histories’ (Education Gazette Editors, 2021; ‘Connecting with History’, para. 5). But envisioning differs, through a glass darkly, as discourses change. ‘genealogies are kept and practiced as performed, living narratives. This marriage of biography and narrative is crucial to Indigenous uses and conceptions of genealogical knowledge that is “as much about the present and the future as it is about the past”’ (Chang, 2016, p. 76)’ (Mahuika and Kukutai, 2021: p. 2, p. 2).

In October 1991, Hugh Barr wrote to the Waikato Times

Sir, I have not had an opportunity to read the newly published ‘Tainui me te Tiriti’ … If your report is accurate I may not bother. Your reporter relates how the author was moved to tears over an incident at Rangiaowhia. ‘When Bishop Selwyn and General Cameron told the women and children to take shelter in a local church and then proceeded to burn it down’. I am not sure whether such a nonsensical statement is the result of poor research or whether it is a deliberate misrepresentation of fact.

Barr asserted that the church was burned in the late 1880s, long after Cameron had returned to England and Bishop Selwyn was long dead. A week later, a co-author of the present paper was handed a three-page letter – which was never sent to the editor of Waikato Times. This letter tells of an oral tradition of Te Apakura hapū:

About forty people stayed in the church to pray. Some weren’t able to move about easily, but most could have escaped if they had left with us. The soldiers came shouting and shooting through our kainga, burning our raupo whare. Our church was the biggest whare of all, made of raupo like the rest but with a cross on top as a tekoteko. Perhaps the soldiers didn’t know it was a church when they set it alight. …

This account of Rangiaowhia was given to her chosen moko by an eyewitness, then a girl of about ten … it wasn’t until about 1936, realising she had only a few years left, that she recalled these painful details … It is but one strand of a powerful tradition of the Tainui… Oral history too is confused at times, that is the nature of the beast, But surely it deserves more respect than to be labelled ‘nonsensical’ or ‘deliberate misrepresentation of fact’ (M. Burt, personal correspondence, October 1991).

A range of versions became possible as over the next three decades, Māori representation increased in parliament. In 1993, New Zealand had voted to replace the First Past the Post political system, with Mixed Member Proportional representation. One of the early legislative measures was the Waikato Tainui Raupatu Agreement, 1994, whereby some Crown lands were returned to the iwi. As black history in the United States of America continued to be pivotal to the American identity, so the imperial wars and their aftermath proved in New Zealand.

New Zealand is not alone in speaking power to subjugated, little histories from the peripheries, and the targets, objects and fields of application have worked through a range of denying, dismissing, rejecting and burying any ideas that challenged the dominant ideas of civil assimilation. Yet traces remain, to be unearthed, re-explored, articulated anew. Anne Stoler (2017), while reviewing three revisionary genealogies, made a bold claim

even more striking to those of us who have imagined that wildlife refuges, national parks, and national monuments bear unsullied histories, we might look again ... at the relationship between eugenicist concerns and the protected ‘heritage’ that ‘nature’ is mobilized to represent for the nation and race. The story is one of occlusions from the start: as in Israel, where national parks have covered over and wiped out the evidences of Palestinian homesteads and gardens, just as native American land has been requisitioned for protected national parks. (p. 5)

Stoler’s words are not unlike those of Gibbons (2002), in that colonisation is seen to be ongoing, affecting not only bodies but also landscapes and minds, while ‘scholars now think that issues of raupatu/confiscation, land alienation and land acquisition are dead and gone, “just history”, so to speak’ (p. 15). It would be hard to teach histories of national parks Te Urewera and Tongariro without reference to Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki.

In the second decade of the 21st century, contestations of memorials escalated across the Western world with the removal for safe keeping of US confederate statues in the South while in Britain, statues of slave trader Edward Colston and others were toppled as part of the Black Lives Matter struggles (2020). In Canada, a statue of Egerton Ryerson, who instigated a system whereby Indigenous children were taken from their families, was pulled down (2021). In the Waikato, the statue of imperial soldier Hamilton was removed after it had been defaced (Lawrence, 2020). In each case, debate in the media was led by Indigenous elders, such as Bobby Cameron, kaumatua Timi Maipi or Senator Don Ross, voicing the violence of colonisation on their peoples.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, a hundred years after a deliberate burning of black homes and lynching of black people, there remains resistance to addressing history. The 2001 Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 suggested reparations. Ross said ‘at 15 I heard the story and leapt to my feet “Greenwood was never burned. Ain’t no 300 people dead. We’re too old for fairy tales”’ (p. v). Danney Goble (2001 p. 4) a report author, referred to the 50-year silence: ‘it was largely forgotten. Eventually it became largely unknown’ (p. 4). The lynching, the burning, the loss of life and property can never be quantified, Goble said. Teachers in their classes found no knowledge or memory of the events: ‘as the years passed and the riot grew ever more distant, a mindset developed which held that the riot was one part of the city’s past that might best be forgotten altogether’ (Franklin and Ellsworth, 2001: p. 27). When President Joe Biden visited Tulsa for the 100th anniversary, few outside the state knew of the 1921 ‘riot’. ‘Just because history is silent it doesn’t mean that it did not take place. While darkness can hide much, it erases nothing’ (Walters, 2021).

As the New Zealand Labour Government moved to instigate a national history curriculum (2019), almost identical claims were made about stripping bare the violence. But it was a new generation calling for the teaching of national history.

In 2014, a class from Otorohanga College went on a school trip to the site of an attack at Rangiaowhia during the New Zealand Wars. This opened the eyes of students Leah Bell, Waimarama Anderson and classmates, who took a petition to Parliament requesting a national day of commemoration for the New Zealand Wars …[aiming] to raise awareness of the New Zealand Wars and to introduce the history into the national curriculum. In 2016, it was announced that October 28 would be the New Zealand Wars commemoration day. (Education Gazette Editors, 2021, ‘Māori Stories and Perspectives’, para. 1)

The next section sets out responses to the Ministry of Education’s February 2021 Draft for Aotearoa New Zealand’s Histories in Years 1–10 (from now on referred to as Draft 2021). I use examples of field trips, teaching methods and alternative voices to set out the struggles between the ‘binary’ groupings. The emergence of oppositions and perceived threats are central to the discourse of policy.

Tactics, techniques and instruments of struggle

Democracy and its others–History as progress to pluralism

The Association of Consumers and Taxpayer (ACT) supported ‘schools being able to interpret New Zealand history through the experiences of local communities’ (ACT, 2021, para one but had concerns about the Draft 2021). The Draft ‘is a highly political document. It makes a number of questionable assumptions and claims’ and ‘contains significant gaps’, for example that ‘the welfare state has created dependence on government’. It neglects, ACT continued, ‘elements of our society that are untouched by colonisation. While students need to learn about colonisation, the claim that it continues to influence all aspects of our society is depressing and wrong’. Their submission denied the following

claim that power has been the primary driver of our history, leaving out the likes of creativity, technology, and the growth of civil liberties, creates a narrative of oppressors and oppressed. Such a narrative is likely to overemphasise the role of the state and underemphasise the importance of individual agency. It is deeply misleading.’ (ACT, 2021: p. 2)

National’s submission was drafted by Member of Parliament Paul Goldsmith, National’s Education Spokesman, himself an historian. We do, he said, ‘have serious concerns’. Draft 2021 was, he argued ‘a recipe for boredom’ while teaching ‘Māori history, colonisation and the effects of power in our country, year in year out, will elicit only groans by years 6 or 7 unless the teacher is a miracle worker’. He recommended the following:

That there is an explicit expectation that histories from other countries and eras are taught as well as New Zealand. [Further content should explore the] steady extension of the reach of governments into our lives, from our bank accounts to our bedrooms, for better or worse – or the emergence of a truly national identity independent from Britain – or the need for Kiwis to make a living far from markets, with entrepreneurism and innovation jostling with the ever-present fear of being shut out by protectionist big countries – or the desire to defend the freedoms we have inherited and painstakingly developed from the threats of fascism and communism – or the impact of waves of immigration from a variety of cultures into what has become a melting pot. (Goldsmith, 2021: p. 2, p. 2)

• ‘Dial back the sweeping statements’ he concluded.

Purity and impurity–history as leeching

An expert group, Expert Advisory Panel, was convened by the Royal Society Te Apārangi in March 2020 to provide an independent source of expertise to the Ministry of Education on the development of a core curriculum. In part, the expert panel agreed with the submissions that ‘[m]uch diversity has been lost in the attempt to reduce the curriculum into a compact document’. The ‘movement of peoples, ideas, technologies and institutions across national territories and boundaries’ needed adequate coverage (Expert Advisory Panel, 2021: p. 10).

In an age of fake news and fake history, students should be able to not only know that histories can come from contested frames of reference but also be able to test alternative narratives on the basis of the evidence they use and the conclusions they draw from them. It is vital that students are introduced to the richness and strangeness of the past and that they have the chance to explore it, learn how to use different types of evidence and how to build arguments and express those in writing or verbally. (Expert Advisory Panel, 2021: p. 14).

The Draft 2021 was instrumental in its approach and often lacked clarity. Rather, the panel recommended ’developing student skills as enquirers and investigators’. There also needed to be ‘More attention ... given to the skills used by historians to assess the value of evidence’ (p. 21). After noting significant gaps and emphases, they concluded ‘It also allows children and young people to engage with some of New Zealand’s difficult histories’ (p. 21). How people ‘navigated the constraints and opportunities of their times, and the meaning we make in the present about those who are both linked to us yet distanced by time, should lie at the heart of a powerful curriculum’ (p. 21). It appears that, as under the 1877 Education Act, where ideas about history diverged, so do they today. History remains a textual site of struggle. There are perpetual, contemporary tensions between types of discourse.

Unsettling, making strange: Some examples

Recently, Tainui have worked with the Historic Places Trust to revisit the site of a major battle, that of the 1863 Rangiriri engagement between imperial troops and Tainui. The Māori trenches are visible, but only several metres deep. Pou have been erected–tewhatewha line the entrance, a waha open on to the site, with Kingi Tāwhiao’s whakataukī, then carved resemblances of fighters arise from the riverbanks to the peak. Very recently, Kingi Tūheitia dug the first turf to re-open the trenches. It is envisaged that the trenches will be restored to the original five-metre depth.

The Expert Advisory Panel (2021) observed that

the most significant pieces of legislation, the New Zealand Settlements Act and the Suppression of Rebellion Act, were passed in 1863 and the Native Land Acts of 1862 and 1863 were passed during rather than after the New Zealand Wars. (p. 19)

The draft curriculum mentions the Taranaki and Waikato wars, with Rangiaowhia and Ōrākau as examples under this topic. One of the overlooked yet central issues is that Ngāti Apakura had flourishing fields and crops with which they supplied the capital, Auckland. There were numerous flour mills in the Rangiaowhia and Ōrākau area. It was a direct hit at the centre of Tainui’s economic base, which was followed up with the raupatu of these same lands.

[A] Ngāti Wairere representative said 1863 was a nefarious time in history for Waikato-Tainui and all its iwi and hāpu (sic). A lot of mamae (pain) has been felt since then, he said. The relationship that Ngāti Wairere has built with various schools since 2020 came about through government legislation. (Hope, 2021, para 6)

Under the proposed history curriculum, schools and teachers will be supported to consult with tangata whenua as to the telling of local histories. They will need to be aware of both ‘belonging’ and ‘wellbeing’ (Bateman, 2021).

A church pilgrimage: New eyes

In April 2021 Archbishop Emeritus, Sir David Moxon led a group from St Stephen’s Church, Tamahere, on a pilgrimage to sites of significance in the church’s history in the Waikato area (Forde, 2021). The group visited the site of the early Christian mission in Alexandra/Pirongia on the remains of an imperial redoubt, and the Pirongia Museum. They next headed to Te Awamutu where the group was addressed by Kāwhia te Murāhi, a member of Rewi Manga Maniopoto’s whānau, who explained the previously ‘subjugated knowledge’ of the Waikato 1863 wars. Rewi’s name was biblical (a transliteration of Levi), and he was brought up in knowledge of both cultures. Te Murāhi made links with Rewi’s knowledge of the Pekapeka block and Waitara purchases, which drew Waikato hapū into battles in Taranaki and later the pacifist resistances of Parihaka. He talked of the burning of women and children in Rangiaowhia after specific promises of sanctuary for Te Apakura women and children had been given by Anglican Bishop Selwyn. Among oral histories held by his hapū, this has been known as ‘the church that burnt us’. He spoke too of the battle of Ōrakau 6 weeks later, in April 1863, where Rewi, with Tūhoe supporters, faced General Cameron and his imperial troops.

Bishop Moxon and the Reverend Julie Guest took the party to St John’s Anglican Church which had been built in 1854, and later to St Paul’s Church in Rangiaowhia, built in 1856. St John’s had the garrison flag furled, as an artifact. Both churches had memorials to the imperial soldiers who had died, while marble soldiers’ headstones were adjacent to the church. Earlier ‘memorials to those on both sides who died during the fighting … were erected around the interior walls — only those in the baptistry have survived’.

Bishop Moxon used artifacts to engage his audience at the various sites of the pilgrimage. Reverend Benjamin Ashwell opened the first Waikato mission station and school in 1835. ‘By 1843 morning and evening services were being held in 30 [Waikato] villages’. He passed around the inkwell that Ashwell had used ‘to write his sermons’. Talking of the initial schools, Moxon noted that Ashwell had used the Māori translation of St Luke’s Gospel to teach literacy. Pupil teachers were sent out to teach the other pupils, such as in Peria School, near Matamata. Moxon had a packet of mustard seed which was referred to in Luke 8: 4–8:

as he sowed, some fell on the path and was trampled on Some fell on the rock; and ... it withered for lack of moisture. Some fell among thorns, [which] choked it. Some fell into good soil, and when it grew, it produced a hundredfold.

The early scholars, Moxon said, would have been familiar with this reference.

Throughout the pilgrimage, he carried the bishop’s staff and King Korokī’s tokotoko as symbolic artifacts that drew on the tradition of the church as shepherding its flock and the tradition of the Kingitanga of Tainui. In St Paul’s, he read kaumatua Tom Roa’s newly published history, Ka Aowhia Te Rangi, about the burning of the raupo Whare Karakia where 250 souls perished at Rangiaowhia. This was available as a gift to all who had joined the pilgrimage. Moxon talked about atonement of this ‘local crucifixion’ and how it could lead to new beginnings. As a concluding act, he offered to anoint the palms of any member of the pilgrimage with scented myrrh oil. He mixed information about the sites visited, with the sharing of artifacts to illustrate the message materially. In the church, he talked of the plan to make the subjugated, Māori history more evident.

A school field trip: New visions

A second example of local explorations is of an educational visit to Rangiaowhia by a school group, with support from the education officer from the Te Awamutu Museum (MacDonald and Kidman, 2021). The introduction of ‘difficult histories at sites of colonial violence is accompanied by the uncanny; intellectual, emotional and embodied experiences that are uncomfortable and frightening, yet stimulating and inspiring, to generate new ways of considering settler-Indigenous relations’ (p.1).

Any teaching at present on our history is undertaken by only a few, with no consistency of content, rarely covering the entire history of the wars between 1846 and 1872. There is an assumption, ‘that aside from small groups of vocal Māori malcontents, contemporary settler-Indigenous relations are uniformly harmonious’ (2021, p. 2). Liane MacDonald and Joanne Kidman (2021) ‘explore how colonial era conflict can be portrayed, pedagogically, during school field trips to sites of violence where massacres of Indigenous people have taken place’ (p. 2). Their purpose is to use writing as a ‘subversive activity’ and to confront the historical amnesia, and resistances, especially in agricultural areas. They write that ‘Field trips that forefront historical colonial violence can progress the process of decolonization by uncovering how settler colonialism, colonial identities and other mechanisms of colonial control are maintained and reproduced relative to land’ (p. 3). In fact, it was these field trips that led to the Ōtorohanga College pupils’ petition to teach New Zealand history as curriculum subject.

While they were at the museum, the educational officer, ‘Sarah’, showed a PowerPoint of the Waikato Wars, and encouraged students’ debate their existing knowledge. She showed the class a range of artifacts, a gun tin and musket, a bible, a sword and handcuffs. Their links to individuals were explicit: the handcuffs once restrained Tainui chief Te Waharoa’s mother. Students were encouraged to touch, take photos and discuss their impressions of these items. At the museum, despite the intimacy of the displays, there remained an ‘emotional and embodied comfort that sustain [ed] a temporal divide between the students and the past’ (p. 7).

After arriving at Rangiaowhia, they first visited the site of an early church. All that remains is a graveyard, a rebuilt waha and a ‘Pou of Remembrance’, a large, striking, carved wooden post that was erected by members of Ngāti Apakura in 2014 to communicate their narrative of the invasion of the village of Rangiaowhia. The story is relayed on the pou through symbols that are read from the top to the bottom. The image at the top is a white Bishop’s hat. Christianity was strong in the region and Bishop Selwyn was an important community figure (p. 8).

Then they enter St Paul’s church.

Sarah declares that the stories we will hear are ‘from the colonial European perspective, and they are stories from the Māori [Ngāti Apakura] perspective which are the stories you don’t always hear and they might be the ones that challenge you a little bit’. One perspective, she continues, came from the Imperial soldier’s perspective: ‘a church inside the village of Rangiaowhia full of women, children and the elderly, was burned down by a fire that had spread from a neighbouring whare (house)’ (p. 9).

She told the story of an Indigenous family that only survived by submerging themselves in the river for hours and breathing through reeds. She next took them to the site where, before 1863, fields of grain, potatoes, fruit trees and other crops had grown. The Ngāti Apakura people supplied milled grain and ferried produce to Auckland. She named the incidents as our ‘shameful history’, where ‘Māori tribes were defending their lands, the whole area was decimated. “Was it a massacre, or was it a battle?”’ (p. 11) she asked the students. These local histories of the present began to find voice.

There has ... probably been an ideology of education, an ideology of the monarchy, an ideology of parliamentary democracy etc.; but basically I do not believe that what has taken place can be said to be ideological. It is both much more and much less than ideology. It is the production of effective instruments for the formation and methods of observation, techniques of registration, procedures for investing accumulation of knowledge, investigation and research, apparatuses of control. (Foucault, 1980: p. 102, p. 102)

Will historical observation, research techniques, investigations support changed discourses, allow eyes to see Māori landscapes?

Policy as text, policy as discourse?

In both the examples above, there was a critical use of artifacts to introduce the participants to their subject of study. By handling, touching and discussing the artifacts, participants could recall key messages and incidents. The Royal Society’s Expert Advisory Panel (2021) has noted that the proposed ‘curriculum leaves much for schools to develop, especially in regard to the rohe/local contexts’ (p. 2) and that local, voluntary museums lack artifacts. The Panel’s (2021) submission made the point that 19th century government policy was behind the confiscation of land, appropriating it from collective ownership, and redistributing it to individuals. Land was ‘acquired through some form of legal process’ (p. 19).

It is now government policy that NZ history will be taught in schools. History as policy has its dangers, with the requirements to be vigilant about the ways in which cultural safety is maintained.

In putting the curriculum into action in schools, care will need to be taken to recognise that History can hurt. The discovery of events in the past, and connections with people and places, can impinge directly on current lives. With site visits to waahi tapu, for example, provision should be made to ensure the cultural safety of Māori students especially through adherence to appropriate protocols. (Expert Advisory Panel, 2021: p. 20)

The present debate about history demonstrates that much will continue to be contested. Māori have been aware of this. Local iwi and hapū have instigated partnerships with schools on the content of local history. Together with academic historians, they have presented professional development to teachers. ‘Breaking silence around these histories … is a powerful thing to do’, principal Richard Crawford said (Taylor, 2021). Several agencies have developed audio-visual resources, such as RNZ’s (n.d.a) New Zealand Wars and The Aotearoa History Show (RNZ, n.d.b). Others, like St Stephen’s Tamahere, have undertaken pilgrimages (Forde, 2021; Moxon, n.d.); others again are writing as subversive activity. Statues as materiality are being repositioned as loaded artifacts, objects of study, within the context of erecting or removing them from public spaces (Lawrence, 2020; Younge, 2021).

History as curriculum will begin with new mindsets where the familiar is made strange, the accepted framework of truth is contested, the imperial descends and many local histories emerge as New Zealanders come to know themselves. Our futures depend on newly envisioned narratives and genealogies of the present.

Thanks to three anonymous reviewers and to Dr Georgina Stewart and Dr Peter Gibbons for feedback and discussions on an earlier version.

Māori Glossary

Hapū Wider family grouping

Iwi Tribal grouping,

Kura Māori school

Pou Carved post marking significant place or boundary.

Pou kai Tainui ceremony of remembrance and debate

Raupatu Confiscation

Pou Significant carved posts, signifying an important site

Tewhatewha Large bladed, long handled club

Whare House

Whare Karakia Church