Michael Belgrave is Professor Emeritus of History at Massey University. He was research manager of the Waitangi Tribunal and has continued to work on Treaty of Waitangi research and settlements. published widely on Treaty and Māori history. His 2017 Dancing with the King, an exploration of diplomacy and peace-making in the decades between the Waikato War and the opening of the King Country, was shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and won the Ernest Scott Prize. He has worked in advisory groups supporting the implementation of the new national history curriculum. Michael talks to NZ Booklovers.
At the start of this book you tell the reader about the urge you felt to write some sort of a history in the immediate wake of the mosque shooting in Christchurch. What drove that impulse?
I felt that there was a need for historians to provide a better context for understating white supremacy in New Zealand’s history, since although Māori faced burdensome barriers to equality, the primary challenge was not so much exclusion as the forces of assimilation and inclusion. Māori engagement with modernity and resistance to assimilation needed to be a leading part of the story.
You also, at the outset, make a strong case for the value of national histories, despite their being no longer fashionable. Could you summarise that case here?
Aotearoa New Zealand has been one of the most stable and, if we go back to 1840, one oldest national states around. There are so many stories to be told about this country’s history, but providing a framework for understanding Aotearoa New Zealand as a country must be one of them. Without a national perspective it is difficult to see how all these other stories relate to each other.
Your chapter on the events at Waitangi in 1840 traverses some new territory. How so?
Until now most interpretations of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi have been influenced by Ruth Ross’s 1972 argument that the translation of the English draft of the Treaty of Waitangi was so poorly done that the Treaty could not have been understood as the British intended, if anything confirming rather than extinguishing Māori sovereignty. In this chapter I show that Māori participants were articulate and well informed and had made their minds up even before Henry Williams produced the Māori text. The Māori advocates for the governor saw it as a sacred compact, confirming a relationship between rangatira and the Crown.
George Grey. Sum him up for us.
There are so many contradictions. He lies effectively and strategically, is manipulative and autocratic, and he is responsible for more Māori land loss than all other governors and premiers combined. Despite all this, he enjoyed being part of the Māori world, had the respect of many rangatira and promoted Māori equality without cultural assimilation. He would most likely see the current Māori economic and cultural revival as a vindication of his confidence in Māori futures.
The Liberal government of 1891 to 1912. Our most important?
Yes, at least until 1985. The Liberals finally brought together the structure and the objectives of a centralised nation state, laying the foundation for the political and social culture of the country until well after the Second World War.
We might like to think that our history reveals that there is something exceptional about this country. Do you resist that conclusion or embrace it?
If the notion of New Zealand exceptionalism feeds some smug sense of superiority, I whole-heartedly resist it. But I can still hope that Aotearoa New Zealand will continue to show its preference for the rule of law and the liberal institutions idealised at Waitangi and in Wakefield’s scheme for colonisation.
For all these years from 1840, becoming Aotearoa is the story of two peoples. How would you now describe that story?
The history of New Zealand since 1840s is history of two peoples engaging with each other on one land. It is the story of how Māori refused to go away, to be relegated to the past and or to an inferior present. Māori persistence and resilience have been often influenced by the same appeal to rights and liberal constitutional values as those of non-Māori even when those rights and values have been used as forces of assimilation. Māori have sought economic and social equality with non-Māori but on Māori terms.
Darkest moment in our history?
No question, the wars of the 1860s and the land grab that accompanied them. We have had wars aplenty, from the musket wars to Afghanistan. They have all taken a toll on those unlucky enough to be drawn into them or to suffer their consequences, but the wars of the 1860s were home grown and could be blamed on no one else.
Most memorable individual from our nineteenth century history?
Hard to go past Grey, but if we do it has to be Seddon. These are strangely conventional choices. Other possibilities are Tāwhiao and Rewi Maniapoto, and Henry and Marianne Williams. But of those who were unknown to me before this book began – although far from unknown to others – it would be Bridget Goodwin, Biddy the miner.
And from our twentieth?
There is a humanity to Michael Joseph Savage that makes him hard to ignore, but Tahupōtiki Wiremu Rātana’s transformational religious and political mission was a phenomenal achievement from the forty-year-old ploughman.
Massey University Press
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