John Roughan: Judgmental history helps no one

COMMENT

Odd how we don't fully appreciate people until their deaths. Michael King's writing of history always seemed to me pleasant, not powerful. It is only now I realise how valuable that is. It is a contrast, to my mind, with the work of that other popular historian of the television age, James Belich.

Belich appears to have greater academic standing and I daresay has done more original work. But to read his books is to be struck by the judgmentalism of modern history.

Their tone changes from respect to near-contempt almost every time the story moves from Maori to Pakeha. The attitude was evident also in Belich's television series on the colonial wars.

My abiding memory of that programme is a moment in his description of the arrest of Te Rauparaha. Recounting how the old warrior was taken from Kapiti, the professor dropped his voice and delivered the climax of his tale with almost unutterable disgust.

One of the arresting officers, he said, seized the chief's testicles. You had to wonder how much more horror he could possibly have summoned had he been inclined to describe the fate of Te Rauparaha's captives not too many years before.

True history is rarely a simple story of heroes and villains. It is about recognisable human beings, well-meaning for the most part, responding as any of us might in their time in their predicament.

Michael King saw the subject in those terms. He wrote about both Maori and Pakeha with an affection that is lacking in the one-sided work of contemporaries.

Last week I blamed the Waitangi Tribunal for the loaded history we are getting these days. My accusation that claimants' accounts, mostly oral, were not being sufficiently contested by the Crown brought a fair denial from the tribunal chairman, Chief Judge J.V. Williams, among others this week.

In a published letter, Judge Williams said: "All evidence, whether primary documentary source material or Maori oral evidence, is tested for consistency, coherence and corroboration before it is accepted."

I stand corrected, although this forensic style of history may be the real problem.

Judge Williams continued: "Waitangi Tribunal inquiries differ from orthodox academic history in one important way; ours is a legal process ... it [history] must be weighted then judged."

Some well-qualified historians have criticised the Waitangi Tribunal's approach over the years - W.H. Oliver, Alan Ward at one stage, Michael Bassett, who is a member of the tribunal although he seldom gets cases to hear.

Oliver is particularly interesting. In an essay contributed to a collection entitled "Histories, Power and Loss" edited by Andrew Sharp and Paul McHugh (Bridget Williams Books, 2001), he says the tribunal's reports "exemplify an instrumental but - because never explicitly avowed - elusive way of writing and using history".

From a close study of two documents, the Taranaki Report, 1996, and the Muriwhenua Land Report, 1997, Oliver suggests the tribunal's method, although it may not be aware of it, is to assess events against a retrospective utopia. In order to find the Crown had failed to fulfil its treaty undertakings, the tribunal has to assume it was possible to fulfil them.

And it is not talking just about ensuring that land was knowingly sold, for example; the tribunal uses broader principles, such as whether the sale was fair.

It is less interested in what was possible in the colony, and in the norms and values of that time, than in applying timeless standards of government or law.

Law is timeless by nature. It pretends to lay down principles for all time. History is quite different.

The Waitangi exercise is a legal process, as Judge Williams says. It needs to hold history to account against consistent principles.

Oliver concludes that it tries to do so by applying an idealised future - a utopia - to the past.

That is no way to arrive at a genuine understanding of history. But Oliver finds the tribunal's utopia is not even consistent in the cases he studied.

"In the Muriwhenua report the emphasis falls on Crown failures and errors in not pursuing policies of a broadly economic kind. This implies a need for a fairly activist state.

"The Taranaki report emphasises as the fundamental failure of the Crown its refusal to recognise aboriginal autonomy ... This, by contrast, proposes a minimalist state with little to do in connection with Maori except to leave them alone."

The paradox in the obligations of the Crown to protect Maori welfare and respect tribal autonomy, is a promising recipe for future Waitangi claims.

The country is constantly told, for example, that the way Tainui chooses to spend its treaty settlement is not public business. Yet if it is squandered, the tribunal's construction of history means the next generation of Tainui may bring a claim that the Crown failed to ensure that the tribe was properly equipped to receive the settlement.

The Waitangi exercise is not, to my mind, a truth and reconciliation commission. It is a device, one of several, designed to improve the position of Maori in this society.

It doesn't matter how many "full and final" settlements are made along the way, if it works in the end it will be worthwhile.

But the judgmental history it is generating is not balanced knowledge. It is unlikely to stand the test of time, although Michael King's work may endure better than the rest.