About the lecture:

Keith Sinclair once wrote that Māori were “peripheral” to the making of New Zealand national identity in the first half of the 20th century. But New Zealand history is not a simplistic story of national progress, and for Iwi is a relatively brief and recent chapter in a much longer and ongoing history of local Indigenous peoples. The nation-making “discursive constructions” of New Zealand history are part of our own “history wars” here that some think happened only in Australia and North America. Māori have battled for a long time to have our nuanced pasts included in gatekept national curricula and a discipline that displaced our kōrero as “prehistory” and unreliable. For too long, non-Māori historians continue to cannibalise Indigenous pasts here with no ethics or tikanga in a horrid practice noted by Māori scholars across generations. Te Pouhere Kōrero, established in 1992, was partly driven by a strong desire to reclaim and tell our stories on our own terms, but we have battled racism every step of the way.

Aotearoa New Zealand history has been, and still is, a racist gatekept community that still often tokenises and uses Iwi and Māori peoples and experts with little care given to appropriate Indigenous representation, tikanga or collaboration. New Zealand’s “grand-narrative” history in many ways is still a colonial imperialist story of “becoming” that continues to be tone deaf to the ongoing abuses of colonisation in the field of “New Zealand” history now. What have historians in Aotearoa actually learnt about national history and that relationship to Iwi and Māori pasts since Sinclair? This reflection considers the strained relationships between Māori and non-Māori when it comes to History on these shores, and what we might do about it today.

Keith Sinclair Public Lecture