Sometimes, history can reveal itself as having a rough face - the sort which no amount of post-mortem polishing can ever quite smooth out. When confronted with a truly gruesome historical visage, the inclination of many people is to avert their gaze, in the hope something unseen becomes unknown, and
Paul Moon: The past must be remembered - for us all
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Tuhoe at the Mataatua Marae in 1905, with Te Whenuanui at front left. Photo / Alexander Turnbull Library
Starvation was not a side-effect of the wars of the era. Rather, it had become one of the Crown's weapons of choice. This was even when most of the Tuhoe population had been so pummelled into submission that they offered practically no resistance to Crown incursions.
The result was a people ethnically cleansed from many of their traditional territories and facing being wiped out altogether. But what do you do when you are caught in the middle of such hellish circumstances? One answer is contained in the poignant accounts that have survived of some elderly Maori from the affected areas. As they were among the most vulnerable to starvation, many would walk off to a chilly, damp crag to die, so as not to burden the rest of whanau or hapu. Well into the 20th century, farmers clearing scrub would occasionally come across the skeletal remains of these people - a mute testament to the Crown's earlier savagery.
Yet, this history has slipped from view, and so understandably, there are howls of bewilderment when it resurfaces, unannounced, like someone rude intrusion on our cosy perceptions of the past. There are also doubts even as to the veracity of such accounts. "Surely", people reason, "if it was so terrible, we would have been told about it?"
How do we account for this selective ignorance of our past? Jabbing the finger of blame at the education system for this and other blind spots in our historical vision is the reflex reaction, but in this case, it also happens to be fully justified. Most probably this appeal will be dismissed as anachronistic in modern New Zealand schooling.
Edward Gibbon's misanthropic assertion that history is "little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind", seems to have been displaced in our present schooling system by an inverse formulation, in which history has become little more than an inventory of anecdotes and social cant, compartmentalised for ease of assessment, and sanitised lest anyone be offended. At the very least, we owe it to the victims of history - our own ones especially - to do so much more.
Paul Moon is a professor of history at AUT University and the author of several books on New Zealand history.
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