The Breaking Views blog is administered by the New Zealand Centre for Political Research at NZCPR.com. The views expressed are those of the author alone.
This false history would have us believe the tribes were a united nation, did no wrong and built scientific institutions. They want us to believe they almost rescued the moa from extinction and certainly never ate one, but English settlers recorded the truth of stone-age Maori life.
The myth making or simply poorly researched history still continues to be published.
It was the said Ms Charters who had the privilege of delivering the Bruce Jesson Memorial Lecture on 27 September 2022, having chaired the working group that produced the 2019 report “He Puapua”!
She is also director of the so-called “Aotearoa New Zealand Centre for Indigenous Peoples and the Law."
H’m! All that sounds interesting. We’d better have a good look at the report of that lecture.
Thus we have Joanna Kidman, professor of Maori Education at Victoria University of Wellington, a prolific author with a PhD in sociology from Australian National University. Her photograph in ‘stuff’ for 15 May 2022 accompanies an article which identifies her as “Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Raukawa”! There is no mention of the other most clearly obvious and evidently European components of her heritage. Well, why should this be? Can we really be expected to take seriously the personal identification of anybody so glaringly out of kilter with the whole truth, no matter what academic distinctions she happens to have?
Its latest unadulterated nonsense, published over the
heading “New Research Shows Maori Travelled to the Antarctic at least 1000
Years Before Europeans”, showed no such thing.
The so-called “research” by a conservation biologist Priscilla Wehi, was based on oral history mythology and the rest was speculation. One of her colleagues, a Dr Billy van Uitregt added by way of attempted further explanation, “Oral tradition brought richness to the conversation”; precisely what conversation about what, he didn’t say.
It was reported in Stuff for 3rd April 2021 that Leah Bell spoke at a Fairfield College Assembly a few days earlier to commemorate the battle at Orakau Pa 157 years ago. Well, well, anything wrong in that? Yes actually there is - quite a lot!
Leah Bell, it may be recalled, first had her mind poisoned by a teacher – or the teacher’s spouse – when a student at Otorohanga College. She mounted a petition based on a false version of New Zealand’s history and presented it to Nanaia Mahuta at Parliament. So she has something of a record as a political activist. It is reported that she is a “Research Consultant” for Vincent O’Malley, author of dubious accounts of New Zealand history, notably about the events at Rangiaowhia during some Waikato tribes’ Kingite Rebellion, wrongly termed a “New Zealand War”.[1],[2]
As reported, the account stated that “Leah Bell won't forget the tears rolling down the elders’ cheeks as they stood at the green fields of Rangiaowhia. ‘We felt the immense grief and mamae there ... at the lack of justice given, the lack of apology for an atrocity where innocent women, children and elderly people were murdered’.”
“[O]n February 21, 1864, British forces unexpectedly attacked the flourishing agricultural centre of Rangiaowhia – burning homes and churches, killing women, children and elderly people.”
What is utterly appalling about this account is that there was never, simply never, any atrocity committed at Rangiaowhia by British forces.
In your “Conversations” column for 18 February 2021, you state that “in an age of misinformation online and social media noise” .. “learning our history ... teaches us to think critically”. Yet you repeat one of the grossest lies which have ever been perpetrated about the history of New Zealand. Yes, you repeat one of the most frequently chanted lies with which our history is sullied: that “Colonel Nixon was famous for razing unfortified Rangiaowhia while men, women and children burnt in their church.” Not a word of this is true.
