Historical Revisionism in New Zealand: Always Winter and Never Christmas

Abstract

The control of historical interpretation by emergent and ruling elites is a common political strategy used to secure the ideological dominance required to maintain political power and privileged access to economic resources. The struggles over national narratives are often hard-fought, as Yoshiko Nozaki observes, in her (2005) analysis of the Japanese textbook controversy over ‘comfort women’ in the Asia-Pacific War (1931–34) (p. 217). The historical revisionism that has accompanied culturalist politics is a contemporary version of the politics of history that Nozaki describes. As groups draw on the past to provide the raw material for the new politics, the new interpretation may pay scant regard to the historical facts, as events and details not required in these new ‘narratives’ are edited out or even altered in the retelling. This chapter uses the example of New Zealand’s new historiography to document the process by which historical material is used to serve that nation’s culturalist ideology. It focuses primarily on the way in which history has been rewritten to present a new way of understanding contemporary Maori socio-economic inequalities. In the new ‘narrative’, the nineteenth-century European government is accused of deliberately adopting strategies to ensure the decline of the Maori population, a decline which enabled detribalisation and land alienation for settler ownership and development.

The move from poverty to wealth is, in a social sense, an advance in material well-being. It is not adequately captured in statistics of gross national product, national income, or real wages. Death has always been the ultimate threat, and the move from poverty to wealth is first of all a move away from death. Its first indicators are statistics on life expectancy, death rates and infant mortality. Famine and hunger are next on the list; again the move from famine and hunger as indicated statistically by a declining incidence of malnutrition and its related diseases. Plague is the next of the ancient afflictions, and it may be taken as symbolic of all fatal and disabling diseases; the move away from them is another move from poverty to wealth. Poverty tends to be associated with illiteracy: superstition and a life lived within an extremely narrow setting. (Rosenberg and Birdzell, 1986, pp. 3–4)