Members of the Giingan Yiiliway Girrwaa people from Gumbaynggirr country, Australia, join the Waitangi Day festivities. Photo / Tania Whyte
Members of the Giingan Yiiliway Girrwaa people from Gumbaynggirr country, Australia, join the Waitangi Day festivities. Photo / Tania Whyte
OPINION:
New Zealand had its annual discussion on colonisation and the Treaty of Waitangi, with more seemingly written on it than ever before.
What I noticed this year is that it is not just New Zealand discussing its colonial past. Each year, the controversy grows in Australia over its nationalday commemorating the arrival of the first fleet of convict ships in 1778. Many Aboriginal groups are referring to it as “invasion day”, to the extent that some employers gave its workers the option of working on Australia Day and taking another day’s holiday in lieu.
Associate Professor Anaru Eketone.
Another hot topic in Australia is the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum, a proposal that would allow indigenous Australians to have input into the government policies that affect them.
It was reported on February 6 (possibly by coincidence) that the Australian Prime Minister was calling for bipartisan support for a referendum to approve it later in the year.
In the same week on the other side of the Pacific, indigenous people in Canada were in court because the government had reneged on its 1850 treaties to pay annual compensation for the exploitation of mining and forestry resources on their land. The Ontario government’s position is that it owes indigenous people nothing because of the money it had spent on resource extraction, building mines, forestry and building roads and railways throughout the province. The court case will undoubtedly take years to settle, but it does make you wonder about the process of colonisation and where it all went wrong.
These three nations are all Commonwealth countries mentioned in an interesting book I am reading at the moment called The English as a Colonising Nation. It was a textbook for New Zealand and Australian schools written in 1903 by James Hight, a history lecturer at what is now the University of Canterbury.
For many, racism is equated with hate, and so it is for extremists like the American Ku Klux Klan or the German Nazi party, says the author. Photo / File
Hight considered Britain “the most progressive and just of modern nations” and “to her and no other should be committed the fate of the lower races of mankind”. He outlines why the British “are especially fitted by nature to be a colonising nation” including half a page of qualities he claims are present in the national character, such as steady of nerve, persevering, unflinching and of sturdy character.
While later in the book he speaks of his admiration for Māori, there is embedded in his arguments this deeply held idea of English superiority.
It is this British belief in their racial superiority that sometimes led to devastating consequences and is without question racist. For many, racism is equated with hate, and so it is for extremists like the American Ku Klux Klan or the German Nazi party.
However, racism and prejudice can often be as innocuous as a general feeling of pride and superiority — this idea that belonging to one group makes you inherently better than those belonging to a different group.
Most British settlers did not hate Māori, they just considered us inferior. In their minds, the existence of a great empire, Shakespeare and technological superiority was the same as racial and cultural superiority. It can explain why terrible things could be done in the cause of colonisation at the same time as claiming they wanted to do good.
The instructions from the British government to those forming the Treaty of Waitangi explicitly expect that “the price to be paid to the natives will bear an exceedingly small proportion to the price for which the same lands will be resold by the government to the settlers. Nor is there any real injustice in this inequality.”
If you can define a group as inferior, you can justify all manner of injustices against them because you can convince yourself you are doing them a favour, whether they want that favour or not.
If Māori culture, and therefore Māori values, are considered inferior then the settlers and their descendants are encouraged to ignore them. The traditions of communal land ownership, views of the environment and expectations of respect, honour and reciprocity are hindrances to progress and can be marginalised.
As we have seen in some resistance to greater Māori involvement in New Zealand society, there are still those who consider Māori values and language as coming from a primitive Stone Age culture with nothing to offer the modern world, where the only acceptable way forward for Māori is to be indistinguishable from Pākehā.
Across the commonwealth, indigenous rights could always be pushed aside because, in the end, the coloniser would convince themselves of the myth that the perceived benefits of civilisation would balance the ledger. This has led to the other myth that Māori, and other indigenous peoples, need to therefore be grateful because we were given the elements of modernisation.
In fact, we always had to pay for them, often many times over.
