Fragments from a Contested Past: Remembrance, Denial and New Zealand History
About this ebook
History has rarely felt more topical or relevant as, all across the globe, nations have begun to debate who, how and what they choose to remember and forget. In this BWB Text addressing ‘difficult histories’, a team of five researchers, several from iwi invaded or attacked during the nineteenth-century New Zealand Wars, reflect on these questions of memory and loss locally.
Combining first-hand fieldnotes from their journeys to sites of conflict and contestation with innovative archival and oral research exploring the gaps and silences in the ways we engage with the past, this group investigates how these events are remembered – or not – and how this has shaped the modern New Zealand nation.
About the author
Joanna Kidman (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Raukawa) is Professor of Māori education at Victoria University of Wellington. Her research focuses on the politics of indigeneity, Māori youth and settler-colonial nationhood. She has worked extensively in Māori communities impacted by the New Zealand Wars and looked into how these conflicts have shaped tribal and national memory, identity and history.
Vincent O’Malley is a founding partner of HistoryWorks, a group of historians specialising in Treaty of Waitangi research. He is the author of a number of books on New Zealand history including The Meeting Place: Māori and Pākehā Encounters, 1642–1840 (Auckland University Press, 2012), which was shortlisted in the general non-fiction section at the New Zealand Post Book Awards in 2013, and Beyond the Imperial Frontier: The Contest for Colonial New Zealand (Bridget Williams Books, 2014).
Dr O'Malley's landmark book on the Waikato War, The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800-2000, was published to acclaim in 2016. Spanning nearly two centuries from first contact through to settlement and apology, this remarkable and best-selling history focuses on the human impact of the war in the Waikato, its origins and aftermath.
It was followed in 2019 by The New Zealand Wars/Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa, another best-seller that provides a highly accessible introduction to the causes, events and consequences of the New Zealand Wars.
With Professor Joanna Kidman, he is co-Principal Investigator on the Marsden Fund project ‘He Taonga te Wareware? Remembering and Forgetting Difficult Histories in Aotearoa/New Zealand’, a three-year study into how the nineteenth century New Zealand Wars have helped shape memory, identity and history.
Liana MacDonald (Ngāti Kuia, Rangitāne o Wairau, Ngāti Koata) is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education, Victoria University of Wellington. She is interested in how racism, whiteness, and settler colonialism manifest in national institutions. Her current research explores possibilities for decolonial transformation in schools, particularly through land education.
Tom Roa (Ngāti Maniapoto, Waikato) is a Tainui leader and Ahonuku / Associate Professor in the University of Waikato’s Faculty of Māori and Indigenous Studies and is a familiar figure on marae throughout Tainui and the country. He is a member of the Waitangi Tribunal and Heritage New Zealand’s Māori Heritage Council and was chair of Ngā Pae o Maumahara, helping to coordinate many of the activities commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Waikato invasion in 2013–14. He has held many prominent leadership roles within Waikato-Tainui and Ngāti Maniapoto, and as a pre-eminent tribal historian and kaumātua of Ngāti Apakura has been heavily involved in efforts to commemorate the February 1864 attack on the settlement of Rangiaowhia.
Keziah Wallis (Kāi Tahu) is a social anthropologist whose previous work has focused on the ways that religion, culture and gender intersect in the production of connectedness in contemporary Myanmar. Her work involves the integration of experiential, feminist and Indigenous anthropological methodologies in the pursuit of a decolonised understanding of how communities establish sense of self-identity and belonging. She is an assistant professor in the School of Culture, Media, and Society at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia.
