Michael Belgrave On Charting NZ's 'Wonderful History' In New Book Becoming Aotearoa

Sunday, 3 November 2024, 8:57 pm
Article: RNZ

Racialised debates following the March 2019 mosque massacre spurred historian Michael Belgrave to write Becoming Aotearoa - our first major national history volume in 20 years.

At the time, people tried to pass off New Zealand history as simply a story about white supremacy, Belgrave tells RNZ's Saturday Morning, when the truth was far more complicated.

'We have an extraordinarily interesting, absorbing and I think, a wonderful history to get enmeshed in. It's not a happy history all the time. It's not a nasty history all the time, either."

In Becoming Aotearoa, Belgrave does not cover Māori history prior to the arrival of Europeans - a job he says was done by the "wonderful" 2014 book Tangata Whenua.

Instead, the Massey University professor explores Aotearoa's complicated evolution as a globalised country where two peoples - tangata whenua and migrants - together built an open, liberal society based on sometimes frayed social contracts.

Arguments today about the state's relationship with Māori leaders and citizens are largely the same as those put forward by Christian missionaries in the 1830s who pushed for a sovereign Māori nation-state with its own national law system and parliament, Belgrave says.

After 1840, when English settlers started arriving courtesy of The New Zealand Company which had promised them employment and sold them land, the idea of Māori sovereignty "came crumbling down".

What really sets New Zealand's history apart from similar colonial settler societies in the United States or United Kingdom, he says, was the unique strengths of Māori people, especially their capacity to both resist and adapt to change.

"Māori have always gone to the law. At the end of the New Zealand Wars, what did Māori want? An inquiry to show that the Crown was in the wrong."

Since Te Tiriti o Waitangi was signed in 1840, New Zealand governments were required to display "a sort of moral compass, however faded or difficult it might be" when it comes to the treatment of Māori, Belgrave says.

"Governments all through that period have had to, at some point or rather, explain what they're doing is beneficial to Māori ... That need to justify what they're doing has been with us since 1840."

At 650 pages long, there's "a hang of a lot of powerful white men" in Becoming Aotearoa, Belgrave says, which was unavoidable because leaders like George Grey, Richard Seddon and Michael Joseph Savage had such a strong influence on New Zealand's development.

Yet what led him to add the word 'becoming' to his book title was the transformative cultural impact of Māori over the last 40 years - primarily, he says, due to the economic empowerment of iwi through Treaty settlements and strong land-owning trusts.

Ngāi Tahu's imprint on post-earthquake Christchurch, compared to the '80s when the local iwi was "almost completely invisible", is evidence of this, he says.

"Māori have always insisted that they're there and done so in ways that are more expressive and more deliberate and effective than in other settler colonial societies where indigenous people have been much smaller in numbers."

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