Whether you're Scots or Maori, dwelling on the past won't put food on the table tomorrow.
Like many New Zealanders boasting a Scottish heritage, I maintain a keen interest in political events north of the English border.
Not because I think of myself as a Scottish Kiwi - I don't. After seven generations in New Zealand the family link seems tenuous. For me, donning the kilt is just an occasional fashion statement, not an expression of any yearning to explore my cultural roots.
No, my interest is driven by the similarities between political events in Scotland and at home.
Claims for some form of Maori sovereignty are sure to be aired in the byelection battle for Te Tai Tokerau, and the other Maori seats in the election proper.
It's tempting, then, to cast an eye at events in Scotland, where fighting talk of independence is also in the air. For the first time since its Parliament opened in 1999, the nationalists have gained a majority and leader Alex Salmond has promised a referendum on secession within four years.
This momentous occasion was predicted three years earlier when the Scottish National Party won a once-safe Labour seat in a byelection. "This victory is not just a political earthquake, it is off the Richter scale," said new MP John Mason. "The tremors are being felt all the way to Westminster ... [and] tonight we have removed the dead hand of Labour control."
Ignore the accent and it's not much of a stretch to imagine a Maori or Mana Party MP making much the same speech, particularly the bit about Labour's hold on political power being banished forever.
But the Maori Party's success hints at a political paradigm shift that was never apparent when New Zealand First took the seats from Labour. November's election will give a clearer indication of Labour's, and Mana's, status in Maoridom.
Both Maori and Scots political groups trade on a sense of tribal injustice: that the perfidious Pakeha or Sassenach, respectively, has committed and continues to commit a crime against an entire people.
On both sides of the world, this sense of grievance is often based on myth-making. It was not the English who brought about the Acts of Union in 1707, which joined the kingdoms of England and Scotland, but the actions of Scotland's elite, who squandered the national fortune on a scarcely believable venture into Panama.
The English Crown offered the elite their money back, plus interest, the deed was done, and has been resented ever since.
Myth-making also features large in Maori political aspiration. But Pakeha are not, as Hone Harawira has it, a bunch of mother*******, all bent on raping a people and their assets; the vast majority support a political process that has seen a return of assets, redress for past misdeeds and the creation of a Maori economy that will transform this country.
Certainly it's hard to listen to Harawira and his proud assertion of a golden pre-Pakeha age and not be reminded of Scottish author Andrew O'Hagan's summation of his nation's grievance: There is "a part of the culture that craves nobility and responds to peddled rumours of past glories as if they were not time-drunk myths but latent promises".
To exercise real power, says O'Hagan, the nationalists first have to persuade the Scots that they are a people, then that they are getting a bad deal. And doesn't that sound remarkably like the strategy adopted by many Maori politicians?
But the fact there are only seven Maori seats out of 120 reflects an inability to persuade the 18 per cent of the population of Maori descent that electing Mana or Maori will improve their lot. In itself, it won't.
Iwi businesses, however, will change the face of Maoridom, and New Zealand, as they create wealth and share it among their constituency. Of course that means looking to the future, not gazing fondly into the past.
