Quote of the Day: On the problem with the Treaty industry’s “quasi-judicial inquiry” into NZ’s colonial past

 

“But this is by no means a history of ‘fatal impact,’ in which European contact and colonisation lead unremittingly to the destruction of an indigeneous people that was throughout the innocent victim of European aggression and manipulation …
    “[My] emphasis on (bilateral) ‘outcomes’ rather than (unilateral) ‘impacts’ leads to a “dual agency’ view of settlement history – ‘Maori and Europeans sharing the initiative in developments and, by implication, responsibility for them.’ This perspective fits uncomfortably into the adversarial framework of Treaty claims history, to which admissions of joint initiative and responsibility are anathema pro facto.
    “Such quasi-judicial inquiry into our colonial past threatens to reduce it to a world of binary opposites: Pakeha were villains; Maori were victims. Colonisation was bad; indigneous society was good. Pakeha were devious; Maori were honourable. Maori were destroyed; Pakeha flourished.
    “By implication [then in the way history is now told], Maori became passive and Pakeha active participants in the encounter situation. Maori ‘agancy’ is acknowledged only in terms of political resistance, its exercise in economics ignored in the rush to blame the Crown for the material losses of Maori.
    “Although anthropologists have brought valuable cultural perspectivesto the inquiry,they have also widened gaps by reinforcing notions of the ‘other,’ making cultural dissonance between Maori and Europeans inevitable .. [and] have tended to reinforce notilns of frozen culture.
    “Giselle Byrnes articulates the concerns of many when she writes: ‘… treaty claims history is tending to invert colonialist paradigms of hegemony and reinvent old binarism’s.”
~ quoted from Paul Monin’s 2006 book Hauraki Contested, 1769-1875

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