Fatal Contact: With the arrival of Captain James Cook on this day in October 1769, the islands of what would become New Zealand ceased to be the preserve of Polynesian navigators and settlers and became a part of both the world’s map and the world’s history.
THE MAORI NATIONALIST assault upon the historical meaning
and reputation of Captain James Cook is entirely understandable. With his
arrival in October 1769 these islands ceased to be the preserve of Polynesian
navigators and settlers and became a part of both the world’s map and the
world’s history. It is this sudden and irreversible transformation that
presents such a formidable obstacle to the Maori nationalist cause. Its
proselytisers know that once Cook’s map of New Zealand was added to the global
stock of human knowledge, the world of the Maori was doomed. Small wonder that the outspoken Maori
nationalist, Dr Arama Rata, recently described Cook’s ship, the Endeavour,
as “a death ship”, and characterised his arrival as an “invasion”.
Maori nationalism is not, however, about mourning the loss
of the pre-European world that Cook’s arrival made inevitable. It’s partisans
are not so reactionary as to suppose that the restoration of the status quo
ante is either possible or desirable. No matter how loudly they might
lament the loss of life that accompanied the first encounters between Maori and
Pakeha, they are well aware that no Maori would thank them for magically
uplifting their children from twenty-first century New Zealand and dropping
them into eighteenth century Aotearoa. No, what Maori nationalism seeks is a
reversal of political fortunes: the creation of an Aotearoa-New Zealand
in which Pakeha will no longer call the shots.
A radical revision of New Zealand and, indeed, of global
history, is crucial to achieving this political reversal. The cultural and
scientific achievements of the European peoples, especially their dramatic
expansion into, and eventual subjugation of, practically every other
significant land mass on the planet, must be re-cast as an horrific tale of
murder, rape and theft - undertaken by that global human scourge which Dr Rata
calls “white people”. Only when the general perception of European civilisation
has become one of technological prowess unmitigated by compassion or restraint,
and the colonisation process is presented as uniquely oppressive and
destructive of land and people, will the nationalist cause enter its next and
most important phase – that of radical constitutional transformation.
When it comes to effecting that transformation, a surprising
amount of faith has been vested by Maori nationalists in demographic change.
Surprising, because in their hopes of overtaking the Pakeha population at some
point in the reasonably near future, the nationalists are showing a confusing
degree of confidence that the rapacious colonisers will simply stand back and
allow the balance of democratic power to shift irrevocably in favour of the tangata
whenua. That this is most unlikely to happen is demonstrated by the fact
that, for the last 30 years, the “White Settler Government” has presided over
an immigration regime which saw the “Asian” population rise from fewer than 5
percent of the population to 15 percent – a figure rivalling that of Maori New Zealanders.
Was it purely a matter of chance that this rapid reshaping
of New Zealand’s demographic structure coincided with the flowering of the
“Maori Renaissance”? Or, is it evidence that the Maori population will never be
permitted to rise to a level where the dominance of European political and
economic models is threatened? Have Maori nationalists not noted the change in
the official terminology used to describe New Zealand society: from
“bicultural” to “multicultural”? The determination of the New Zealand state to
integrate its domestic economic institutions ever more inextricably in the
global economy renders the Maori nationalist project ever more problematic.
From the nationalists’ perspective, the only hopeful aspect
to the present situation is the enormously high level of historical ignorance
in the New Zealand population – especially in the young. Forty years of failure
to present a coherent historical narrative to successive generations of
students has left young New Zealanders prey to the anachronistic blame-gaming
of Maori nationalists. Descriptions of Cook as a “colonialist” and, even more
risibly, a “white supremacist”, have been swallowed whole by those Pakeha
disposed to range themselves against the negative effects of racism and colonisation
on contemporary Maori. If Maori nationalist historians can seize control of the
new, soon-to-be-compulsory, history curriculum, then the necessary ideological
preparations can be made for a radical constitutional transformation. Only thus
can the historic reversal of Maori fortunes, which began on the day the Endeavour
arrived off the New Zealand coast 250 years ago, be overturned.
But only if the “White Settler State” is a great deal less
determined to maintain its power and privilege than the Maori nationalists
have, so far, been willing to admit.
This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Tuesday, 8 October 2019.
