It was with a vested interest then, that I went to watch the movie Ka Whawhai Tonu Mātou, which is a dramatisation of that famous battle.
It is never a good idea to let a feature film fully define a historic event because they are trying to tell a story, in a very limited time frame, and to entertain.
However, it was great to see a Māori story in the Māori language with speakers expressing themselves in Māori ways.
I have only visited the site of the battle twice, the second time to show my daughter the remains of the pa.
Something we noticed was how the road was built right through the middle of the pā as an act of domination, not just over the people, but domination over the land.
One of the driving forces of the war was the expression of British domination based on the myth of the British being a superior race. They had formed a belief that they were inherently racially superior because they had superior technology, were guided by God and had a written law.
In 1863, The Times of London wrote a piece that was reported widely in New Zealand newspapers in the weeks leading up to the major battles in the Waikato war.
"We can never stop the growth of a British colony, or reconcile with that growth the claims of a barbarous population to the lordship of the land ... The New Zealander may be assimilated, or exterminated, or civilised off the land, but he will certainly never hold that land ... [in the face of] ... a stronger and superior race."
The myth of those of British stock being a superior race still lingers and rears its head in some of the overreaction we see today over the use of the Māori language or Māori wanting greater influence over social outcomes and the environment.
Another British myth that still holds sway was adapted in the early 20th century from Darwin’s ideas of the survival of the fittest. A couple of amateur anthropologists had concocted a myth that a probably Melanesian race had lived in New Zealand before Māori and were called Maruiwi or Moriori before Māori destroyed them.
In fact, both were/are Polynesian. Moriori are the people who settled Rēkohu (Chatham Islands) directly from Polynesia and Maruiwi was an early Māori ancestor who most Māori can show descent from.
Māori have traditions of numerous waves of settlement over decades. To dismiss them as not being the same people is like saying today’s immigrants from London can’t be British because the actual British came to New Zealand in the 19th century.
The false history of Māori conquerors taking New Zealand from other peoples suited the narrative the settlers and their descendants contrived.
They could then justify British conquering Māori, because they were following our rules. (So they weren’t bringing western civilisation after all.)
Recently I was telling a Pākehā relative how, that week, I had seen the Rangiriri battlefield in Waikato. His response was "well didn’t Māori do that to the Moriori?".
I was surprised because he is intelligent and I thought collectively we had moved on from these made-up myths.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Dr Deane Galbraith from the University of Otago surveyed over 1000 people on whether they believed New Zealand was settled by non-Polynesians before the arrival of Māori.
His survey showed that 39% of New Zealanders believe that the Polynesian ancestors of the Māori were not here first. Most of these believed the Moriori myth, but some even claim that it was white people that got here first.
This has been disproved through archaeology and genetics, which all tally with the Māori voyaging traditions that show no evidence of arrivals before the Polynesian ancestors of Māori.
Conspiracy theorists might argue that archaeologists and geneticists are hiding information because it might challenge the status quo. This, of course, is absolute nonsense and shows that these people do not understand how academia works.
Academics gain status, promotion and funding through finding new knowledge and publishing it to add to our understanding.
Academics are rewarded for finding something new or different and if there was real evidence that there were pre-Polynesian populations in New Zealand, you wouldn’t be able to shut them up.
It is the kind of discovery academic careers are built on.
The problem with myths is that they don’t operate in the world of evidence as they have moved into the realm of belief. The problem with beliefs is that they occupy a similar space to religion and we all know how difficult that can be to change.
— Dr Anaru Eketone is an associate professor in the University of Otago’s social and community work programme.
